TL; DR
A quick digest if you have no time for details. You will miss the surprise at the end, though ;)
Rules : Initial population survives in a stasis (no needs, frozen stats) state until “awaken”.
Being able to interact with a building or construction site awakens them.
It has to be connected by road of footpath and at walking distance.
It has to have available spots (work/consumer/worker coming on foot).
Power, statues aura, connection to water and waste water networks have no effect.
Providing water directly by truck seems to have an effect (to be confirmed).
A pop settling in a dormant town becomes dormant again (to be confirmed).
How to activate a town with no loss : Upgrade and add roads, pathways, electricity, water, heat and waste water networks, citizens won't budge.
Pause and place at least the most vital buildings : a shop and a bus stop*.
Remove all workers outside CO, then unpause.
Assign your COs and let them start construction.
Stop constructions before completion for each building**.
Activation : When ready, reopen all workers slots. The pops will build everything and start activating.
Run food supply and bus lines to functioning activated towns, heating plants, etc.
Profit from free chad workers!
* Kindergarten, sports field and bars are close second. You will need more (hospital, police station, school...) if it is your first city.
** Alternatively, tick notify on completion and pause the game as soon as the notification pops up. Remove all the work slots before carrying on. Reopen them to activate.
Introduction
Greetings Comrades,
Doing stuff by yourself as much as possible, i.e. relying as little as possible on autobuild and foreign resources, is a natural part of the fun of the game. The apparent success of the realistic game mode is a clear indication of that. Not relying on immigrants you magically summon with money at anytime seems to be a natural continuation of this trend. It also is more challenging on higher difficulties and often requires more creativity for that reason. Additionally, using churches and houses pushes you to cover more of the map, rather than building everything in a corner.
There is surprisingly not much available on the topic, though, and I’ve read a lot of misconceptions shared around. I reckon that this lack of documentation on the topic makes people way less prone on trying populated maps out (like I was, initially), due to the fear of doing things wrong, failing and ending up frustrated. That is why this guide exists.
Its aim is to determine the rules under which the “sleeping population” awakes and starts having needs and eventually dying or fleeing if you don’t fill them fast. It reminds you of the dormancy mechanisms, then list the rules themselves and finally gives some ideas of strategies I tried myself to activate a town as smoothly as possible. All is relevant for version 0.8.8 in realistic difficulty. The main principles should remain the same at all difficulty levels, although the consequences of making mistakes will take longer to happen. Do not hesitate to point out mistakes or inaccuracies, I will be glad to correct what needs to be.
Dormancy And Pop Activation Principles
First, some info on the “dormant” state of the initial population :
Initial population in the dormant state will not react to needs, although some are written on their cards and the card of their home. They will keep a high happiness (around 70%), health, satiety, etc, until awaken.
They seem to die at a very, very low rate over time. They do not give birth, so there is a chance the population may die out after a very long time of you do nothing, although I never tested that.
Epidemics do not seem to affect them.
They heat themselves during winter in the initial houses, at the cost of producing pollution (unsure if it affects health).
What “awakens” the dormant people :
The general rule is that they get activated by any direct interaction (work, filling a need, leisure) with a building they would have access to.
Bus stops do count as a building people will interact with, even with no bus line setup, since they wait there for jobs and needs filling regardless.
Buildings not connected to the same road and footpath network as the houses have no effect, whatever the distance (see below).
Buildings further than the walk distance from the house have no effect.
Buildings that do not require a direct interaction have no effect (statues, power substations, construction offices, etc).
However, any build site that does accept workers walking to the site will trigger an interaction and awaken them.
This applies to build site of buildings that don't trigger direct interactions when built.
Sites that never allow local workers walking to them will not. These include roads, footpaths, diverse pipes and cables and all these infrastructures. These can be placed and built safely.
If you decrease the number of workers allowed to walk to site to zero, you deactivate this effect. You thus can place building sites while the game is paused, reduce this slider to zero and then resume safely.
If you place a build site or building with available jobs or visiting slots, only a limited amount of people will activate at first, under the limit of the available slots (for example, a build site with 20 walking workers will only activate 20 people for their first work shift, then 20 additional people, etc). This means that buildings (/build sites) with more open slots will fully activate a town way faster than smaller ones.
Other mechanics :
City nametags do not matter. You can build in the city area, add and remove nametags, it has no effect on dormancy.
Receiving power to their house do not activate people.
The same seems to be the case with waste water and water connection through the tank buildings.
However, it seems that receiving water to their house via truck does wake them up, although further testing is required.
If one of your town is full and a citizen reaches 21, he or she will want to settle somewhere else, which could be in a dormant city. If this happens, he/she will become dormant. (See Mudkest's comment for details. I had an instance where a citizen with high crime rate seemingly activated the building he moved to in a dormant town, resulting on the death of its inhabitants, so they may keep their stats upon moving, but that's to be confirmed.)
Examples Of Strategies To Awaken A Town Smoothly
On the highest difficulty settings, it is about impossible to start building a town with its inhabitants without them dying or fleeing before any shop gets built. So here are three ways I tested (there are probably more) of preparing a town for its awakening.
0. Connecting to a need-filling hubSo I haven’t tried that, but I reckon it could be feasible, although very unreliably. The idea is to build a (temporary) hub with shops and the like outside of walking range and to run a bus line between it and the town to trigger it.
Pro : You are not at risk of activating anyone.
Cons : You are limited by your bus throughput, both for passenger and for workers that would work in the service buildings, so I deem it quite dangerous.
Note that, regardless of the strategy you choose, a way to ease the transition is to start a bus route to an already settled town as soon as you trigger the process, to allow the most urgent needs to be fulfilled despite some friction at the beginning.
1. From afarBringing workers and resources using the outside road (here, dirt, at the top), so as to not connect to the main road, where the houses are.
Pros : Not being bothered lowering worker access to building sites.
Cons : Not really nice looking; cannot build buildings on the main road; looks very ugly for anything but the smallest settlements; trigger is road constructions, so timing is uneasy.
2. EncirclementCutting all accesses to the town before setting the buildings.
Pros : More liberty regarding building on the main roads; still no workers on foot issue.
Cons : Only allows building on the outer part of the town; trigger is road constructions, so timing is uneasy.
3. Stopping building sites before completionPut the buildings wherever you want them on pause. Remove all access to workers on foot. Stop the construction right before completion. Trigger by letting workers walk to the build sites again and resuming constructions.
I have read that it is also possible to pause the game as soon as the building finishes (using the notification) and remove all slots from the building straight away.
Pros : Build everything neatly; no need to remove and rebuild roads; trigger by allowing people to finish buildings ensures it all finishes simultaneously.
Cons : Requires constant vigilance to not accidentally let a building finish; removing all walking work slots is tedious.
Conclusion
Now you know how to handle that scary seemingly hypersensitive dormant population! You don’t fear their reactions to what you build and know what awaits you in prepopulated maps. Now go ahead and give love to all these awesome maps with settlements! The now vanilla Slovak people awaits!
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926621716
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