B.E.P. at its worst

[bhar]

This goes in the "ignorance is bliss" file.

We've all heard of the Brain Eating Plague, the disease where all the teamsters and dock workers wander around the island like stupid little children with no purpose or direction.  Well, on one island I was working on, I built my fortune up to $3.5 million.  I thought I was well off, so, I spent a decade building houses and working on my infrastructure.  I had a HUGE jewelry industry, and I was doing quite well.  When I looked back at my money counter, I had lost almost all of my fortune in a decade!!  I quickly looked around to see the problem, and, a year later, I saw my (only) dock.  It had an amazing output store of 367.3.  It would have risen much higher, but I stopped it promptly by building a new dock.

If anyone has more ridiculous stories of the Brain Eating Plauge, I would like to hear them.

[General PinochetNut]

I was in a similar situation except the industries were mostly rum and a little fine jewlery and a mix of the rest. The dock output was something like 120. To make it worse my distilary had a store of 39 spiced rum units. I had to build 3 new teamster offices and change my immigration setting to open-door from skilled- worker.

[Mr.P]

You know what it was bhar, once the dock had 100 output store the dockworkers couldn't get past the huge pile of goods and deliver them to the ships!!

I have to take my hat off to you though. Whilst it is a lesson in inefficiency and B.E.P, you must have smiled with some degree of pride. Come on, admit it!

[bhar]

Yes, I must admit, once I realized my mouth had dropped open, I felt some form of pride in my work.  I decided immediately to post my record wanderings into previously unexplored realms of inefficiency.    I thought about seeing how far it would go before I went bankrupt, but I thought better of it.  In hindsight, I probably should have let it go.

[Coconut Kid]

...  We've all heard of the Brain Eating Plague, the disease where all the teamsters and dock workers wander around the island like stupid little children with no purpose or direction.  ...  I quickly looked around to see the problem, and, a year later, I saw my (only) dock.  It had an amazing output store of 367.3.  ...

One piece of needed information is left out. How many Freighters were waiting in line to be loaded by the wandering Dockworkers? The assumption is that there were actually five employed Dockworkers. The issue is a possible 'one-off' glitch in the generation of Freighters.

There is no such thing as Brain Eating Plague. It is a myth based on a cute idea of an early player who really did not understand the life cycle of Tropicans.

The knowledge gap (which the developers could have filled) is that all five needs MUST be met. Food and Sleep\Rest are obvious because they are life threatening. The other three needs have DEFAULT routines when the need can not be met in the ordinary way by visiting an appropriate service building. The health care need default subtracts a year (up to five total) from the person's life span. The entertainment and religion needs defaults send the persons on long "walk-abouts" as substitutes for proper refreshment of the needs meters. So the player who does not provide sufficient numbers of slots in appropriate buildings to refresh needs is 'punished' by wandering workers.

Usually the Dockworkers are provided with the poorest housing (perhaps at a distance) which suits the player's attitude about their low social class. That means they take a longer period of time to recharge their rest\sleep need than if they had good housing next to the Port.

Typically all Dockworkers enter a job assignment at nearly the same time, so they tend to exhaust their various needs meters at about the same time. That can mean that the Port is left with no one "at work" for years at a time. The player blames a myth about bad game design rather than trying to understand what is actually happening in the game world.