School options
Realistic Population 2 extends the mod's operations to optionally cover elementary and high schools. This enables school student capacities to be based on real-world figures, and/or be scaled up to balance gameplay.
School student capacities are calculated the same way as the capacities of other buildings, using the physical size of the building model and applying population and floor calculation packs.
Some additional configuration options are also available for schools, accessable via the mod's options panel.
If this option is selected, the mod's school capacity calculations will be enabled. Disable this option to restore base game behavior.
Select this option to scale school employment, purchase costs, and maintenance costs in accordance with the base game's schools. For example, an elementary school with twice the student count as the base game's elementary school will have almost twice the jobs and cost almost twice as much (a small scaling figure is applied to represent economies of scale).
There are two scaling options that can be applied to each school category (elementary schools and high schools), based on the different models provided in the base game and the Green Cities DLC. Elementary school scaling can be set to match either the Elementary School (base game) or to the Community School (Green Cities DLC), and high school scaling can be set to match either the High School (base game) or the Institute of Creative Arts (Green Cities DLC).
The scaling figures to use by default can be overriden on a per-building basis using the individual building settings.
When this option is disabled, school employment and cost figures will revert to the defaults for each school building asset.
Realistically-calculated student populations based on physical model size is a good starting point. Unfortunately, it may not be quite enough for game purposes, due to two factors:
- The game's lifecycle calculations: all children from ages 0 to 4.3 attend elementary schools, and then all teens from ages 4.3 to 12.9 attend high schools. These are different proportions to most real-world education systems, and consequently some adjustments might be needed to real-world school capacities to better fit the requirements of the game.
- Many school models for the game are smaller than their real-world counterparts. This is especially true of the base game's included models (the basic Elementary School and High School models are tiny compared to their real-world counterparts, barely bigger than a large house), but also includes many workshop models (unfortunately, many asset creators deliberately downscale their models from real size, a downscaling factor of 1.5 being the most common). This means that the physical sizes of schools in the game can be smaller than strict scale suggests. To help compensate for these factors, the mod provides the ability to apply a set multiplier to the mod's realistically-caculated student capacity figures.
A multiplier value of 1 means that the realistically-calculated student capacity figures will be used as-is. A multiplier figure of 3 will mean that the realistically-calculated student capacity figures will be multiplied by 3, and so on.