How many police co-workers do I need?

16? I've played through it many times and I've never seen 16 show up.

There's usually just the captain, 6-7 cops and one lab person.

I meant I have 16 sims in the police career, not at the station. So in theory the game should have more than enough sims to choose from when I sens my own cops to work. But it still uses townies and that's why I think that my police sims have the wrong rank or the wrong skills.

Edit: I rephrased my initial post, hopefully now my question makes more sense.

In my rotational game, I have around 3-4 Sims in the police career and I have rarely seen one of my other police officers at the station when I follow one of my Sims to work in the station. I only see townies fill up the rest of the contingent. One time, when I was playing my officer (he is in the lower rungs of the detective career) my Chief of Police (a Sim of mine that is at the top of the detective career) was working at the station.

Yes, my chief is pretty dependable, too. But the rest switch in and out often. Two of my played cops are a married couple and when they both appear as npcs at the station (it happens), they autonomously flirt and hug, it's very adorable!

"EnkiSchmidt;c-17387922" wrote:
I meant I have 16 sims in the police career, not at the station. So in theory the game should have more than enough sims to choose from when I sens my own cops to work. But it still uses townies and that's why I think that my police sims have the wrong rank or the wrong skills.

Edit: I rephrased my initial post, hopefully now my question makes more sense.

That makes more sense. It depends on how many are in the career. I'm assuming it's similar to the scientist career. In that one, the game randomly picks from a number of them from the total pool to show up at work on any given day. For the scientist career, it's 4. If you've added more to the career, it should choose from them as well. For example: If I have 10 in the career, (five of my own and five generated by the game) it'll randomly choose 4 from that total pool of 10 and have them show up at work.

I do it all the time in science. I pick 3 or 4 townies like Bella Goth, Lily Feng, some of my own townies, and put them in the career. The game also generates some of their own. When my sim goes to work, sometimes I get my choices, sometimes the game's generated ones.

One thing, if you used the cheat commands to add them to the career, the game won't use them for some reason. I always have to like play Bella Goth for a minute, quit her job, have her join the science career manually and she'll work then.

It works for the science career, I never tried it with the detective career.

You sure it's random? The game always picks sims in the highest career level for the role of chief, that's why I assumed there'd be requirements for the other roles, too. Something like "Receptionist - choose from all sims in career level 2-4 and Charisma 2" (hypothetically).

Interesting observation about the cheats, I'll keep that in mind for future recruits!

Well, that's how it is for the scientist career. And they DID both come out in the same pack. Scientist career doesn't have ranks though. You're likely right about the Chief role.

I tried looking into the game's tuning code, looks like there are 10 positions for NPCs for the detective career. I didn't see anything regarding staffing like the scientist career has so the detective career might be handling staffing differently than the scientist career. I wonder why. It shouldn't be any different.

I thought that the police chief assignment was random, after all the game gave me Don Lothario at one time - no skills no high level in anything. I don't like having people in the save save in the police or scientist careers.

Hm, that's bad news. Looks like I'll have to continue to weed out the townies then.

Thank you everyone for answering!

In my game Vlad is apparently the Chief of Police or so he told me when I asked him about his career lol.