I have recently bought Tropico 4 and I am enjoying playing it. However I seem to have a problem filling positions at my work places. When I first build a cannery for example it will fill with workers. But after several years the workers start leaving. I have tried putting the wages up to full, about 50 and changing the work mode to 'easy does it'. I have tried hiring forign experts from abroad but they leave as well after several months. This it true for many of my buildings including furniture factories and power plants. The eneducated workers seem quite happy earning 10 wages and the positions stay filled, on the farms etc. Please help.




Keldan Quaph

Enlarge your population until you have a few unemployed. If you don't have unemployment it means that some of your buildings have not enough workers!

The workers are probably moving to a similarly paid job with a higher job satisfaction (I believe factories have very low satisfaction without the upgrades)
also workers generally seem to spread out so rather than having 6 farmers on one farm, and none on the other they'd move so there are 3 on each farm
If you look in the almanac under economy, it shows you how many unfilled job positions there are (and unemployed) try and get this down by getting more people in.

Be sure that the teachers are content in the high school. If necessary block your palace guards in the beginning. It's a great way to get 4 extra workers in a factory, and you can send them back to the palace once the factory begins filling up. The women workers will move to the high school as long as the job satisfaction is greater. You can hire additional workers to fill those first few slots in the factory if you desire. Now get up an immigration office. This is a good time to bring 100 Chinese workers on board but that's up to you. All you need to do now is not build too many high school jobs until you have the previous ones filled. Otherwise they'll keep jumping around. The trick is not to build more jobs than the school can cover in the foreseeable future. Don't forget that the schools only train for jobs that currently need to be filled. They will not educate people for jobs that don't yet exist. That's what you need to watch out for. It takes a bit for them to pump out graduates. I rarely have more than one high school because I rarely need that many high school jobs being trained at one time.

I have tried with a high school and a college, but with similar ressults. I have also tried with a immigration office set to skilled workers policy and the open doors policy. Please can you help.

(16-04-2012 04:18 PM)Keldan Quaph Wrote:  I have tried with a high school and a college, but with similar ressults. I have also tried with a immigration office set to skilled workers policy and the open doors policy. Please can you help.

Can you give us a screenshot of the info panel from one of those factories?

As the other presidentes mentioned, the factory jobs are some of the worst on the island so your workers jump to anything better that comes up (I think that Lumber Factory is the worst job on the island, judging by base job quality). Every time you build a church, you'll lose 4 factory workers. An immigration office will cost you 3, every guard station will cost you 3, etc etc. They'll also jump into every open slot at a college if there are college jobs available.

The other thing you can do, of course, is see where they go while playing the game. You said you have no problems filling a cannery early on, why not pause the game and tag all those workers? Then when they leave you can check where they went.

Having the high school salary to 20 will encourage more teachers. Also have the immigration office to "open doors". And also have the "social security" edict enabled. Once the high school is full of students they will slowly graduated and populate all your high school educated buildings. Default wise, public safety buildings like police/fire stations have 13 job satisfaction while factories have 10.

My hunch tells me you're overexpanding - building too many highschool/college grad staffed buildings too quickly for your educational system to catch up. You can encourage immigration or increase salaries for teachers/professors as suggested above. Also consider building more highschools/colleges next to a TV station set to "Learning With Larry" mode, issue the literacy edict, or build an academy of science set to "educational standards" to crank out graduates. Grade schools on the "spelling bee" work mode supposedly help too.

After I build my first factory, I like to fill it with foreign specialists. I edict Humanitarian Aid as soon as possible. Once I get enough money to build a Ministry, I hire a Foreign Affairs minister for USSR Development Aid and an Economy Minister for Building Permit. I build a dock for more imports then about 5 or so Tenements, a Church and a Clinic set to Obstetrics to keep the people just happy enough to stop becoming rebels. After that, my priority is maximizing population growth and education speed. I hire a full staff of ministers (set to Council of Ministers), build an Immigration Office set to Skilled Workers (and increase their wages), build a High School (and increase their wages higher than the Immigration Office), build a College (and increase their wages), build a Weather Station set to Always Sunny (and decrease their wages to default College pay) and finally I edict Learning Program and Contraception Ban. Many of my workers will quit working at the factory for other jobs, so I wait to expand (except for basic needs such as housing, healthcare, religion and food) until it fills back up again. Usually I'll build another factory and two more docks, then to maximize my productivity and education speed, I edict US Development Aid, build a Power Plant set to Natural Gas and build a TV Station set to Learning with Larry that covers both my industrial section and my education section. After all of this, my workers will learn their skills as fast as possible and graduate as quickly as possible. I also always take the rank 5 trait Scholarly which further increases their skill and education speed by 30%.

Also in early stages, it helps to have El Presidente regularly visit your High School to boost teaching speed.