Feedback on the Customer Traffic Boost Effect of Service Firms in version 10.0

[David]

We would like to seek your feedback on the Customer Traffic Boost Effect of Service Firms in version 10.0.

Please vote in the poll and let us know how much it should be adjusted if you think the effect is too strong or too weak.

The effect is explained in https://www.capitalismlab.com/service-firms/ (please scroll down the article to see the section Customer Traffic Boost Effect)

Customer Traffic Boost Effect
Another characteristic of service companies is the ability to increase local customer traffic. With this, you can increase customer traffic in a shopping area by opening more restaurants there.

Each product class for service firms is pre-defined with a constant value specifying how much customer traffic boost it can bring to the local area. For example, the product class Pizza will attract more customers than the product class Telecom Products.

You can see this Customer Traffic Boost value by hovering the mouse over the icon highlighted in the below screenshot. If you do not see this icon, it means that none of the product classes served by the firm are attractive to people.

[Stylesjl]

Another characteristic of service companies is the ability to increase local customer traffic. With this, you can increase customer traffic in a shopping area by opening more restaurants there.

Each product class for service firms is pre-defined with a constant value specifying how much customer traffic boost it can bring to the local area. For example, the product class Pizza will attract more customers than the product class Telecom Products.

Here are some of my thoughts on customer traffic:

Let's look at this with a few scenarios and see if the boosting mechanics makes sense:
Scenario 1: Service/Retail firms built in the middle of nowhere

If you open 1 firm you get a traffic rating of 9 (or 10). This seems reasonable as even in the middle of nowhere there will be occasional travellers looking for a bite to eat.

Generally speaking this rule applies to all firms, service and retail.

My recommendation on this is that certain firms should drive less traffic in unpopulated areas than others. I can imagine a Fast Food Joint or Convenience Store getting more business in a relatively unpopulated area than say, a Furniture Store. But currently the game regards these equally. On the other hand maybe that is the wrong approach - the traffic might be the same but are people less inclined to buy furniture in general due to the product class? If that is the case it may be better to keep as is.

If you build more firms, the traffic is boosted slightly. Again this makes sense for service firms, I think people would be slightly more likely to turn up at a place which contains a pizza/fast food/cake/coffee shop but not by very much as it it still sparsely populated. I would recommend a change here that a lack of diversity should be penalised a bit more. Currently I can open 8 or so Pizza Joints and boost traffic to 13 or 14 but there should be some limits as to how much more attractive a place is if it only has the same thing.

In addition if you build a mall in the middle of nowhere and pack it full of firms the same thing applies above - not much traffic unless you pack it full of a variety of stores selling a wide range of goods. Again that is pretty realistic, nobody wants to visit a shopping mall in the middle of nowhere unless there is a diversity of goods being sold there, in which case it can indeed become quite popular.

Scenario 2: Service/Retail firms built near other buildings
This is a bit tricky to evaluate as there are lots of different nearby firms to retail/food service industries that have different effects on traffic.

I will try to break these down into the following categories:

Apartments
Commercial Buildings
Government Buildings (Civic and Sports)
Factories/Farms/Warehouses/Mines
Other - Software/R&D/Media/Internet/Import/Export/Telecom/Bank/Insurance

On their own none of these above will boost customer traffic very much (as it should be). The effects rather come from the agglomeration of these firms in the same area.

Apartments - boosts traffic, not by very much. Note that the traffic boost does not seem to change based on how many people are occupying it. An empty apartment can give the same boost as a non-empty one.

Commercial Buildings - Similar to apartment buildings but the boost is slightly bigger I think.

Note in both cases testing could be a bit tricky as every time I building something a bunch of houses spring up in the nearby area, these houses make no contribution to housing supply but they do seem to affect customer traffic.

Government Buildings (Civic and Sports)
Government buildings make quite a large contribution to traffic. Lots of government buildings together can make quite an impact. I am not sure but after doing a bit of testing I have concluded that the impact on traffic does not seem to be dependant on the building in question. A big hospital or university seems to have the same effect as the City Hall or Grade School on nearby traffic (boost up to 30 or 40). Same with sports buildings (except the Stadium, this one does seem to do better in driving traffic).

I may be wrong but I tried numerous times and there does not appear to be any clear advantage in any of the buildings (note my earlier remark about houses appearing, this makes a proper experiment difficult).

Note: Tennis Courts seem borderline exploitative in how they can boost traffic as they are very small and cheap but boost as much as most other buildings, however this is partly mitigated by the fact that the effect does not appear to stack (i.e put lots of them in the same area and the traffic boost does not really occur, so maybe tone the tennis court boost down a little bit but otherwise leave it alone).

I think the impact of government buildings should be roughly graded on expense/size of the building (probably not fully realistic but it should help to give a slight gameplay incentive to not just spam cheap government buildings). It should also boost traffic if there is a diversity of government buildings. Stacking a bunch of Grade Schools together should not boost traffic as much as adding a Police Station, Grade School, High School, etc nearby.

Factories/Farms/Warehouses/Mines
Mines/Oil Wells/Lumber Camps - no effect on traffic (no houses). Should provide slight boost.
Factories/Farms- no effect on traffic.
Warehouses - no effect on traffic.

Note that Factories, Farms and Warehouses can all cause houses to appear near them. These boost traffic but not the firms themselves (houses do not always appear around these firms either, I don't know why).

Other - Software/R&D/Media/Internet/Import/Export/Telecom

Export/Import Company, Internet Company, Software, R&D, Telecom - no effect on traffic (but can spawn houses)
Media - TV/Radio/Newspaper - medium sized boost. Reasonably sized.
Bank/Insurance headquarters - big traffic boost, like a government building. Reasonable.
Bank/Insurance Branches - Very small boost on their own, reasonable as they not used as often as other firms. However I suggest having the bank branches give a slightly better traffic boost than insurance (people visit banks more than insurance firms).

Scenario 3: Service/Retail firms built near each other and other buildings
In general it is the combination of all of the above that drives traffic.

To max out traffic you should lots of:

Nearby Government Buildings.
Apartments/Commercial Buildings

I will use this attached save game as an example:

Boost.zip

(3.86 MiB) Downloaded 2 times

If you load this you will see that there are 3 packed malls with basically every shop/service type in the game.

This one has a traffic rating of over 300+

MallBoost.png (316.76 KiB) Viewed 38 times

MallTraffic.png (212.07 KiB) Viewed 38 times

Why? Baseline traffic is 157 and the rest are mall boosts from a good product/service diversity.

Why is the baseline traffic so high? Look at the surroundings - lots and lots of civic buildings (though weirdly enough, if I move the civic buildings away, the traffic level is unchanged, I suspect that is a bug). The advantages of having these so close by stack for a mall.

Let's try an experiment. I built an empty mall in the middle of nowhere and surrounded it with civic buildings:

MallExperiment.png (426.74 KiB) Viewed 38 times

Civic Buildings provide a big advantage - I have the traffic up to 60 now (totally empty mall).

MallEmpty.png (208.59 KiB) Viewed 38 times

On it's own that's not enough. But now let's just fill it up one third of the way

MallOneThird.png (91.92 KiB) Viewed 38 times

That's a pretty big traffic boost!

TrafficBoost.png (208.36 KiB) Viewed 38 times

I suggest perhaps capping the malls's traffic boost or at least reducing it at the very high end.

--
Sorry about the rambling. Main points are:

- In low traffic/sparsely populated areas food service firms or food retail stores should have more traffic than other stores such as Computers, Furniture, etc
- There should be a traffic bonus for diversity or penalty for a lack of it. This already exists within malls, it should also happen outside malls.
- Civic Buildings have a big impact on traffic, this traffic boost should be based on the expense/size of the civic building.
- The houses that appear around buildings seem to boost the traffic but their appearance is strange and inconsistent. Perhaps I am missing something obvious.
- Bank branches should boost traffic slightly more than insurance branches.
- There seems to be a bug with malls baseline traffic not decreasing even as nearby buildings are moved away.
- Malls should have a cap or at least the boost should not allow very high values such as over 300+, the current values seem excessive.

[David]

Hi Stylesjl, thank you for the comprehensive testing.

In the new version 10.0.11, the following will be changed based on your suggestions:

Decreased traffic boosting effect of Tennis Courts, Soccer Fields and Golf Courses by 66% to reflect their costs (their unit cost per tiles are about 1/3 of that of Stadiums).

The traffic boosting effects of bank buildings have been adjusted to be greater than those of insurance buildings.

The traffic boosting effect of individual houses has been reduced.

When you have moved a firm, the traffic of its original location will be updated.

The average product/service rating in shopping malls is capped to 100. With this change, the overall rating of the best shopping mall in your savegame reduced from 338 to 290.

BTW, the programmer told me that apartments and commercial buildings take into account their occupancy rates for their traffic boosting effects in the current version.