Education - how does it work?

[Berginyon]

Could someone describe how education works? It seems like you quickly loose the ability to train your people in a timely manner, and how does it work with concurrent people training?

Thanks

[armyjournalist]

As far as I can tell (anyone else out there feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) you put the colonist you want to train in the school and it takes a certain number of turns for the colonist to graduate. You can only train non-specialists (petty criminal, converted native, indentured servant and free colonist).

Once that colonist graduates, you can make that colonist whatever type of specialist you have currently working in that colony. Many specialists take additional money to train (about $500 for most professions) so if you want to make an elder statesman and you don't have the cash when the colonist graduates, you're out of luck.

The more colonists you train, the longer it takes to graduate each colonist. From what I've seen, it doesn't matter if you have more than 1 training at the same time in the same colony; the effect is based off of cumulative number of graduated students across the board.

The dale/snoopy mod (at the top of the forum) reduces the progressive effect of time to train colonists.

Edit: You can train all professions in a schoolhouse, but colleges and universities allow you to train more colonists at the same time and produce more education points per colonist, which helps train colonists faster at later stages of the game (or at least not as much slower).

[Berginyon]

I don't understand this game mechanic at all. It is not realistic and only hurts gameplay as it takes away your ability to train your citizens. I understand that if it didn't increase a university would be very overpowered, but I don't like how it is implemented.

Also, it seems broken. I am running PatchMod, and once I build a University, I can no longer graduate people from school houses. Every time someone graduates it appears to either reset the time to graduate, or else the increase in threshold education needed is more than what the school earned during that time. I had a native in a school house and at one point he had 16 turns to graduate, now 40 something turns later he is up to 48 turns needed.

Maybe a cap on the growth?

[snoopy369]

Hmmm, maybe there's something I didn't do right with that fix ... anyone else seeing this? What version of PatchMod are you running? (For that matter, a savegame would be very helpful)

[armyjournalist]

Hm...I did have two colonists set to graduate on the same turn; one graduated and the other took 3 more turns. I didn't think anything of it, but that might be along the same lines. I'll try to replicate the bug (if it IS a bug) for a save.

[snoopy369]

Actually, that brings up a good point - there're two places this could've come from, one being the shortening I added, and one the code to deal with multiple colonists graduating on the same turn. I'll have to remember to look at both...

[Berginyon]

I was running 1.06.

I'll post a save when I'm at my home computer.

What I think is happening is that a native at a schoolhouse earns 2 education, where as the university can do a normal colonist alot faster. When you add a colonist to a university and the colonist bumps the native in the graduation order, the native resets at the new higher requirement and starts over.

[snoopy369]

Do you mean once you build a university ANYWHERE, you cannot educate in a schoolhouse ANYWHERE?

[Berginyon]

Yes, 2 colonies one with a university, one with a school house. If a new colonist can be added to a university and will graduate before the schoolhouse student, the schoolhouse student will never graduate. Easiest to reproduce with a native/criminal who receives reduced education at the schoolhouse.

[snoopy369]

So you're saying that the uni simply produces educated colonists faster ... I'm not sure that's a bug, though it is understandably annoying. Dale and I will have to think about that one. It's possible a university simply is overpowered, honestly ...

If the education model annoys you, you can go into GlobalDefines.xml in the root XML directory and edit the education increase directly (as I did in the mod) ... don't recall the tag name off the top of my head but it's fairly obvious - just open the file in notepad and search for education, it's one of the few references in there. It is 20 in the original file, 10 in the PatchMod, and a value of 0 would cause it to not step at all. (There are two values - original number of education points needed, and the per-colonist increase.)

[armyjournalist]

Playing patchmod 1.06b, I graduated a colonist at a university in one colony (4 turns grad time). In another colony with a schoolhouse, it added 3 turns to the colonist's graduation time (from 10 to 13). I stopped training in the university and the colonist in the schoolhouse DID graduate.

Next, I put another colonist in the university (grad time 5 turns) while another was in the schoolhouse (original grad time about 15 turns). The university graduate added 5 turns to the schoolhouse (8 turns left to 13 turns left.)

Since a university has a 4x education effect, if you put a colonist in a university while training at a schoolhouse in another colony, the university student will ALWAYS graduate first, unless you have less than 1/4 the turns left to graduate in the schoolhouse than at the university. If you keep on driving up the threshold to graduation by graduating students from the university the student at the schoolhouse might never graduate. Additionally, converts/criminals/indentured servants produce less ed pts so it would affect them even more.

Annoying? Yes. A tad unrealistic? yes. A bug? No. I'd either change the XML to your tastes, or send your dunce student to the university

[Dale]

Yeah I agree with armyjournalist. This isn't a bug, that's how it's supposed to work. Perfect explanation too.

[armyjournalist]

BTW, playing vanilla, I was graduating students from 1 college (not university) and 3 schoolhouses simultaneously without too much of a problem at the schoolhouses (at least until it was taking 60+ turns to graduate from a college, but by then it's pretty much a waste of time to train anybody.)

[Berginyon]

Thanks for the testing army. I had a pipeline of 3 always moving through the university and this increased the threshold faster than any school could graduate, and delayed colleges enough to where they weren't worth building either.

It's working as designed but it's a bad design contributing to flawed gameplay.

If I was redesigning it:

First of all, remove the threshold increase. It's not simulation realistic and it's not a useful game mechanic. Maybe school:12 turns to graduate and only 1 student slot, college:10 turns to graduate 2 slots, university:8 turns and 3 slots. University wouldn't be as overpowered as it is now, but you'd need to reduce the building costs a little to make it worth constructing. The typical strategy would then be to build a university among your farm colonies for mass producing the common worker types, then school/colleges at your specialist colonies.

[armyjournalist]

Yeah, that might work, although it would tilt the gameplay balance away from purchasing units from Europe (for those who fret about that kind of stuff). Although you have to pay for most specialties anyway, so education right now naturally tilts towards purchasing the units instead of training them after a while. Making building the university require a tremendous amount of effort for less of a payoff than it is now, while removing the threshold increase entirely, could balance it better.

Personally, I think COL 1 got the education thing right the first time -- the specialist had to work as a teacher, and you needed a college for craftsmen, etc, and a university if you wanted to train Elder Statesmen. (college was 180 hammers and university took 300 hammers, too!) Of course, once you set up a university with your colony at 100% rebel sentiment, you could make 3 of anything (including veteran soldiers) a turn, which made beating the REF at the end ridiculously easy.