Hello, as you get to larger populations, is the entertainment really that low or are I doing something wrong? haha
I don’t follow an even grid as to the radius in terms of entertainment, spirituality or attractiveness, but, I think there will be an exact number in terms of pubs, libraries or theatres for high population amounts?(I use google traslate)
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It really sucks for big towns, I built my 2k pop town, 5 upgraded theatres
2 library’s and 5 upgraded maypoles and it still jumps between 90% and 80% lol
No idea why it doesn’t calculate it at 100%, that should be more than enough.
My irl village of 3k pop has no maypole and no theatre 
One upgraded theatre and library, plus some maypoles should be enough 
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Libraries require books to provide entertainment, so if they’re perpetually short on books, you might not be consistently getting entertainment from the libraries. Also, all of those things have a minimum number of houses within range to give their full entertainment value. If you built an array of maypoles or theaters all right next to each other for some reason, you won’t get the full effect. T2 theaters need 50 houses devoted to them to get the maximum effect, for example.
I’m currently entertaining almost 750 population with one T2 theater (which you need to build a T1 of to get to the T4 town center anyway) and one T2 festival pole, which is a lot less than I thought I needed from past experience, actually. (unless the entertainment calculation is broken in the current playtest or something?)
I did some more research on my own towns, and I’m very confused now.
Here’s a very dense but populous single-market town. It has one T2 theater (onscreen) and one paved festival pole (offscreen to the right) for 748 people, and it is at 100% entertainment satisfaction:
I was actually trying to figure out when this one would stop having 100% entertainment, partly based on the experience from the next city I’ll show.
Here’s the town center readout for a bigger city I’ve been working on for awhile. At 2212 people, it has approximately 3x the population, and it reports 88% entertainment satisfaction:
What’s confusing here is that this city has four theaters, five festival poles, and four libraries. All of them have their efficiency bars maxed out, and all the libraries are fully stocked. That’s a lot more than three times the entertainment infrastructure of the village a third its size!
(I’m more sanguine about the shortage of spirituality here because the temple is a very clear 1-off contributor, although I’m working hard to find places I can turn one shrine into two or two into three. I remember spirituality eventually being an impossibility was bugreported in the past and was reported to have been fixed.)
Along the way, I discovered that you can’t actually scroll through festival poles, so this does have me wondering whether only the first one of that kind counts. If that’s the case, however, it implies that four libraries and a theater produce less entertainment than two (?!) festival poles. Alternatively, entertainment requirements might scale with number of markets, which would be strange, or it might actually be superlinear, like the OP suggested. Superlinearity would be super weird, but it would be nice to know if that’s the case. (or if it’s that festival poles only work once before becoming functionally a park that stacks with other parks, for that matter!)
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So, I believe that in your current town that 100% entertainment seems right. From my testing, the theatre can provide entertainment for up to 50 residence (if all mansions then that would be 500 population), while a festival pole can provide entertainment for up to 30 residence (if all mansions then that would be up to an additional 300 population) if all residence are in range of both buildings…which i’m assuming based upon the large range of each building type, all your houses are within…thus these two building when taken into consideration can in theory provide all your 748 residences entertainment. I’m thinking that this is how the entertainment percentage is actually being determined (devs correct me if I’m wrong). From what i can tell, entertainment is entertainment and there is no hierarchy between any of the buildings. A residence is considered to be entertained if it is within range of any entertainment building and does falls within the number of housing impacted.
I think (without seeing the layout of your other town) that there are houses that are not in range of any entertainment buildings (usually these are houses in remote areas being used for satellite housing), which if there are enough of them will impact total entertainment percentages (unless they are within range of one of those buildings). These satellite housing also impacts spirituality percentages.
That’s a clever hypothesis, but unfortunately, it is empirically incorrect. Most directly, you were right that I had 80 houses of combined coverage, but it turns out I had 86 houses, and we had been doing fine with that many for a long time. Many of them were T4 houses, however, because I had forgotten that I was putting off building a library while I waited to see where the entertainment limit was without pushing it higher. The next question is whether a library (which would get us to 100 houses) will cover the rest of the way, although if entertainment works the way I think it does, it probably would get us there anyway, because it will add less than 25% more housing cap.
On top of that, I had actually been just short of the limit for an upgraded festival pole and theater. At 762 population, I checked again and discovered that we were now at 98% on entertainment:
Doing some math, 762 * 0.98 = 746.76, which is less than the previously observed metric, but 762 * .99 = 754.38, so the limit is somewhere between those two numbers. 752 is divisible by 8, so if both buildings provide entertainment at the same rate, then that would suggest that they provide 9.4 people of entertainment per house. (There is no guarantee that all entertainment buildings provide entertainment at the same rate per house.)
However, that’s a good point about adding stuff up for the other city:
450 = 200 houses with theaters.
420 = 80 houses with libraries.
5*30 = 150 (or 30 if it’s not working right) houses from festival poles.
Add that up and we have either 310 or 430 houses worth, and we actually have much closer to 250 T5 houses built. The math doesn’t seem to add up, and even if we figure only one festival pole is functional, then we’d be looking at around 2900 population supported with the 9.4 entertainment per building option. I did find a corner where at least things weren’t covered by a library, but it’s also right next to a theater, so lack of coverage still doesn’t quite work as an explanation for why people aren’t entertained enough.
Quick update: Because of population growth, I’d gotten down to 86% by the time I built it, but the new library in the city got us up to 90% entertainment, which is about half as effective as I feel like I should have expected it to be.
Second update: Oddly, in my other game, the library is doing absolutely nothing, and I have no idea why. After all, it seems my entertainment value went up when I built another library in my big city.