(my) Recent Experience re: Death Waves

[Cropper]

Brace yourself.


I think I agree with you.

Knowing a mechanic and playing to avoid its effects is no reason for it not to be looked at and changed to allow for different playing styles.

I actual said maybe it should be looked at before.

I also think Tourism needs to be revisited and attaching building types to districts and not map types, but that's a separate argument


EDIT: BTW, if you want a bit of a laugh try this post https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...acceptable-and-the-game-is-unplayable.858163/

Lol that is ridiculous thead and it did indeed give me a laugh. I have no time for people like that but it did give me a nice smile.

Trust me I am no whiner but I will also speak up when I think the game could be better. I have said from day one that this game is good out of the box and has the potential to be great. But I firmly believe we have to be vocal in the issues to ensure CO knows about them and will decide whether to fix them.

There are plenty of threads telling CO how wonderful they are, they don't need another one from me even though I agree.

But bad design (notice I didn't say bugs ) needs to be fixed or else modded.

Personally I think the major issue is that there is a large percentage of people who just want a simple city design game while others like me want a much bigger challenge. This will be difficult for CO to accomplish making both sides happy, and so far they have made it fairly clear they have made the game they want to play and don't really want it to be much more difficult.

I will probably have to be happy with mods making the game suit my tastes , because I'm not sure CO agrees with those many of us that the game is too simplistic in it's basic engine.

 

[SpikeNotMike]

I've got a theory...

What if when you try to get rid the death-waves by spreading the DEATH point of the cims? It will do nothing but make the death-wave curve/peak rounder! The wave is still there. Because when the cims move in they get children with let's say 30 years. The children when they grow up too, etc. It means after they got children they die with 70-80 years in an almost constant rhythm of 30 years.

So what if when the BIRTH in a family is spreaded, like beween 20-40 years or so: The death wave will get more and more flat with each wave.




This all grew in my head during a sleepless night yesterday (without coffee!)

 

[Cropper]

Cropper seems to be very confused about the definition of a bug. Not every problem in a game is a bug, but also it not being a bug doesn't mean it isn't a problem. Cropper needs to learn this distinction. This particular issue is an emergent behavior, in itself a perfectly legitimate result of the simulation (a phenomenon that could happen in real life under the right circumstances). It needs some tweaking to help improve gameplay, because as it is, it adds very little of interest while being very destructive to the enjoyment of the game.

Of course I understand it, I'm not a moron. My point is that you are taking the view that all these issues are by design and there are no bugs. How do you know that? Do you have the code and know that CO made a perfect game the first time out? Ridiculous. Bugs are normal, and should be called out so that CO can then look into them. If they determine it's not a bug but a feature that they like then no problem. Tell us and we will live with mods since we don't agree.

Either way we have a responsibilty to point them out, not get into semantic wars about bugs or not bugs which doesn't add any usefulness to this thread.

 

[Cropper]

I've got a theory...

What if when you try to get rid the death-waves by spreading the DEATH point of the cims? It will do nothing but make the death-wave curve/peak rounder! The wave is still there. Because when the cims move in they get children with let's say 30 years. The children when they grow up too, etc. It means after they got children they die with 70-80 years in an almost constant rhythm of 30 years.

So what if when the BIRTH in a family is spreaded, like beween 20-40 years or so: The death wave will get more and more flat with each wave.




This all grew in my head during a sleepless night yesterday (without coffee!)

My take on it was to have people move into new houses in different neighborhoods more often. In real life when entire suburbs are created all at once, the people who move in are of different ages and then they move into other neighborhoods thus diversifying neighborhoods naturally. You never see death waves in suburbs because they have a mixed age group with people moving a few times in their lifespans thus varying the age distribution of neighborhoods naturally.

A major part of the issue here is that these cims don't live very long (just a few years) which gives them very little time to move into other neighborhoods and houses before they die. I think they will need to have cims live a longer lifespan to combat this issue.

 

[Lord Canterbury]

After losing 13,000 plus from my mini metropolis of 30,000 I thought that I had recovered. I had to the point of getting back to 33,000 but now it seems that my other half of the city is about to die....


http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450167880


reminds me of that film Logan's Run, my inhabitants must have just turned thirty - lol.

Thanks for posting Vimes, would you please be able to upload a save game and post here. Or could anyone else do so for that matter? Or could you post a screenshot of your population graph and a combined birth/death graph?

If this is actually due to a births then deaths then your 17,000 person death wave should have 17,000 birth wave two years earlier, followed by zero births for two years.

I suspect it is more likely due to not managing traffic/sewerage/zoning/healthcare efficiently.

 

[SpikeNotMike]

A major part of the issue here is that these cims don't live very long (just a few years) which gives them very little time to move into other neighborhoods and houses before they die. I think they will need to have cims live a longer lifespan to combat this issue.

There are a few mods for that and i tried one (don't remember which one it was - something with double lifespan) and hoped to "heal" this city from the waves. I thought a few cycles of death waves after the city doesn't need the mod anymore because i read somewhere that the death point is a bit spreaded, so it would be spreaded more with this mod.

I WAS SO WRONG !!!

After the waves with mod and then without the mod nothing has changed. So i build a new one. Slow zoning. A few moments before new wave new zoning. Now it works.
But the question is how long...

 

[Doctor Machete]

I remember reading that the author (Soda) had noted that in the AI scripts for the control of the hearses there is a typo (he assumes) which causes lots of issues with the default AI when looking (IIRC) much much too far and wide beyond their intended range. This coupled with other changes he has made has improved my dead collection immensely.

Sorry I didn’t see this message before and jumped to your next message. Of course this would be a bug if vehicles are going much farther than suppose to and is still not fixed.

*shakes head* .... honestly i give up, you are too stubborn for me. ok how's this? It's broken or crappy AI. That better? There are no bugs in this perfect game. Now can we get back to the point instead of this pointless debate about the definition of a bug which is adding nothing to the fact that this stuff needs to be fixed, CO is aware they need to be fixed, and we are waiting for the fix.

Don’t run!, I’m not again with the bug meaning issue

I’m not saying that CS have no problems, is far from perfect. And no doubt this is an issue but at least thanks to modders is not so much anymore. It should be tweaked sooner or later in the base game, but for example I would prefer CO to solve other issues before this, like the crappy menus, loading times and the many limits the game impose.

Personally I think the major issue is that there is a large percentage of people who just want a simple city design game while others like me want a much bigger challenge. This will be difficult for CO to accomplish making both sides happy, and so far they have made it fairly clear they have made the game they want to play and don't really want it to be much more difficult.

I played my last sim city game more than 20 years ago, so I wouldn’t have played a hardcore CSL as the first city builder game since then. But maybe in a couple years I’ll be in the same position as you, just not now.

What if when you try to get rid the death-waves by spreading the DEATH point of the cims? It will do nothing but make the death-wave curve/peak rounder! The wave is still there. Because when the cims move in they get children with let's say 30 years. The children when they grow up too, etc. It means after they got children they die with 70-80 years in an almost constant rhythm of 30 years.

There is a mod for realistic death rates, factoring things like wealth, health care and so on. But not sure about installing it, because of interdependence with education and economy. And with hearse AI mod is not necessary so I’ve not tried it.

 

[Imsvale]

Of course I understand it, I'm not a moron. My point is that you are taking the view that all these issues are by design and there are no bugs.

Absolutely not, massive straw man. You're not being very convincing for someone who's not a moron. Please make it easier for me to be nice here. Besides, in a simulation this complex, very little is exactly by design. You get all sorts of emergent behaviors and unintentional side-effects, and you tweak the parameters to get as close as possible to where you want to be. That's what needs to be done here, and there are no bugs involved in this phenomenon (well, there might be something in the hearse AI).

As for beating a dead horse, I'm not the one with close to one-third of the posts in this thread, going on and on about how this is a bug.

-------

Now, for those of you having big problems:
1) Heavy zoning makes it worse/more likely to happen.
2) Traffic issues make it worse (hearse AI is stupid, so when you get a death spike, they freak out).
3) When many people die, many new people eventually come to your city. These will also die pretty much at the same time. Try to spread out the influx of new people (hint: . Look at your population curve, and try to make it smoother (less spikey).
4) What makes this problem really bad is when people also start abandoning your city (from too many dead people) at the same time as people are dying. Once they all come back (which they do), it's a replacement for all the people that died plus all the people that left. These will be the people dying in one of the later cycles. That's how this problem multiplies once the death spikes are more than your hearses can handle in a reasonable timeframe.
5) If you do your part to make people die not at the same time, by having them not all move in at the same time, your life as mayor will become easier.

CO's job here is to make the death waves less likely to appear, and easier to fix if and when they do. Better hearse AI means they can handle the death spikes better, but the player still has to do their part to calm the spikes down. To some extent, the potential for death waves will always be there. A reality of city planning just as much as traffic jams. I can only hope that CO find it in their power to improve the various traffic AIs, because they do have issues, and possibly even some bugs. That with some tweaking of ages should take care of most death waves that crop up like whack-a-moles.

 

[ThrilledCim]

I just don't understand why they coded it in a way that everyone has to die on the same age. How hard can it be to change this?

As far I've seen from the statistics, it really seems that the CIMs dies and birth on the same moments and that's what's causing the issue. The game doesn't simulate the real life properly.

And that`s the crux of the problem. Once they fix this clear flaw in the design, the death waves which shouldn`t happen in the first place should virtually disappear as in real life you don`t see massive people die all at the same time.

And at the same time, they need to have people visit hospitals more often when they are sick before dying. The healthcare clinics and hospitals usages are so low it`s ridiculous. It seems everybody is all healthy and then all of sudden they all die spontaneously without reason all at the same time. I don`t know whether this is an oversight by the game designers or this is done on purpose to dumb down the simulation engine for simplicity sake.

It`s so frustrating to play this game where people are not enjoying your city at all and all you do all day, instead of managing and building your city, you are just carting off the dead from all over the place.

 

[DazKaz]

I have experienced these death waves but assumed they were part of the difficulty curve of learning the game.

After a few experiments, I discovered that the reason I was getting them was because instead of zoning little residential areas as time in the game ticked on, I was pausing the game to construct very large ones.
This had the effect of a huge influx of young families moving into the same area at relatively the same time.
Consequently they would then age and die at about the same time, crating these death waves.

To counter the problem I started placing creameries in the centre of these zones and reducing the medical budget to about 75% to reduce the cost of them. A few of them I would even turn off completely if I was tight on money, which to be honest after the first hour of playing the game was never really an issue.
This presents a bit of a problem in that it also reduces the range of the hospitals, but this also never seemed to be much of a problem, as I just built a few more of them as I want along.
Also the no smoking policy can be helpful if your happiness is not an issue.

As soon as a death wave started to strike, I ramped up the health budget to 150%, turn on any cemeteries of crematoriums that were off and the proplem would soon disappear, then I was able to reduce the healthcare budget and turn off a few of the cemeteries again.

I have not read the whole thread, so don't know if this has already been mentioned or not?
Hopefully someone found it useful.

 

[Zed68]

Heven't tried it enough yet (or it actually works and I will see no real deathwave anymore...)

But this mod "Randomize Age Cims Move in" : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571655171 seems to be the answer

 

[JimmiG]

As ridiculous as you insisting it is definitively a "Bug"

Let's make it a little clearer for you as you obviously misread my post

1. I said it appears that the Devs don't seem to believe it is a bug. What I believe is that it's a designed mechanic of the game that may need tweaking. If my belief is correct then it most definately is not a "Bug" as you call it.

2. Some people have experienced them, personally I haven't, or at least I haven't noticed it. I speculated on reasons why I hadn't. At worst I see a few "Dead waiting for pick up icons, that rapidly disappear as the hearses service them.

Well yeah, the deaths had to add something noticeable to the gameplay, otherwise there would have been no reason to include those game mechanics in the first place. I wonder if the same people who are complaining about "death waves" are also calling the game a "city painter" and saying it's too easy...

I've personally never experienced a death wave in any city in my 291 hours of playing. Sure I've had red death icons over some buildings (sometimes quite a few) but never the kind of game-breaking, city-killing mass deaths that some people seem to experience. At worst, I had to bump the health/deathcare budget to 150% for a few minutes.

 

[ThrilledCim]

I have experienced these death waves but assumed they were part of the difficulty curve of learning the game.

After a few experiments, I discovered that the reason I was getting them was because instead of zoning little residential areas as time in the game ticked on, I was pausing the game to construct very large ones.
This had the effect of a huge influx of young families moving into the same area at relatively the same time.
Consequently they would then age and die at about the same time, crating these death waves.

To counter the problem I started placing creameries in the centre of these zones and reducing the medical budget to about 75% to reduce the cost of them. A few of them I would even turn off completely if I was tight on money, which to be honest after the first hour of playing the game was never really an issue.
This presents a bit of a problem in that it also reduces the range of the hospitals, but this also never seemed to be much of a problem, as I just built a few more of them as I want along.
Also the no smoking policy can be helpful if your happiness is not an issue.

As soon as a death wave started to strike, I ramped up the health budget to 150%, turn on any cemeteries of crematoriums that were off and the proplem would soon disappear, then I was able to reduce the healthcare budget and turn off a few of the cemeteries again.

I have not read the whole thread, so don't know if this has already been mentioned or not?
Hopefully someone found it useful.

Heven't tried it enough yet (or it actually works and I will see no real deathwave anymore...)

But this mod "Randomize Age Cims Move in" : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571655171 seems to be the answer

I use the "Randomized Age Cims" Mod in my game. It doesn't help much. It might have still helped but the difference is not that significant. I still get massive deathwaves every 1 hour. All the cims die across my city and all the buildings get abandoned and all my hearses are dispatched at all times and they are never fast enough to pick up all the corpses.

The slow-expanding of residential zones work-around helps as I have seen being suggested in several forum posts across the Internet but it still negates or addresses the root cause that causes this deathwave problem and it IS a problem and NOT some kind of game mechanic designed to make the game more challenging. Deathwave is a result of design flaw; it is caused by all the Cims dying at exactly the same time when they hit a certain age which is unrealistic and wrong. It doesn't happen in real life so WHY should it be in a game that is supposed to simulate real life? It does NOT make sense. You don't just die out of no reason at all just because you reached certain age. And city governments irl don't just zone a tiny little bit area at a time and wait and then zone a little bit and then wait; no, they zone whole blocks at a time and people just move in.

And the placement of crematories, I am sorry it's stupid and ridiculous to have to force players to place them in every single corner of the street in downtown prime real estate areas. And it's even more ludicrous that crematories would raise the happiness of the surrounding Cims. I am sorry I don't think people would be much happier sleeping, working, dining and watching my children playing right beside some facilities burning dead bodies 24/7 and neither is 99.999% of the general people so again WHY would a game that's designed to simulated real-life behaviour of people all of sudden feel happy just because they are beside crematories? This is obviously a cop-out for an obvious design flaw in the death rate game mechanic that the devs are probably aware but just don't want to spend more resources to address.

Overall it's a cool game but just like many simulation games, it still restricts players to play according to the many limitations and design mechanics of the dev., instead of allowing players the free rein of playing however they want. In this aspect, I find Cities in Motions 2 is lot more flexible in allowing different player style and choice even though it's not moddable.

 

[DazKaz]

I think what you have to bear in mind is the game is not a representation of real life, its a very crude abstraction.

The happiness is probably not to represent a cemetery or crematorium being built next door, but to represent a facility in the local area that will take care of those dear to you, that have passed away, rather than having them rotting in your living room.
The cemeteries and crematoriums present no noticeable pollution or disruption to those near them in real life. Maybe the immediate neighbours a little, but that would be a very small impact on a very small area hardly worth representing in game. I have customers who's houses back onto church graveyards, and there actually much more attractive than those backing onto other houses.

I personally don't mind the death waves.
I think it adds a little bit of challenge to an otherwise very easy game (actually a bit too easy in my opinion). I kind of look on it as having to keep a reserve in medical resources, to combat disaster or plague, which most real life cities should also be prepared for.
Maybe the Dev's decided to leave it in for this reason, even if it is an un planned side effect of a game mechanic?

 

[ThrilledCim]

I think what you have to bear in mind is the game is not a representation of real life, its a very crude abstraction.

The happiness is probably not to represent a cemetery or crematorium being built next door, but to represent a facility in the local area that will take care of those dear to you, that have passed away, rather than having them rotting in your living room.
The cemeteries and crematoriums present no noticeable pollution or disruption to those near them in real life. Maybe the immediate neighbours a little, but that would be a very small impact on a very small area hardly worth representing in game. I have customers who's houses back onto church graveyards, and there actually much more attractive than those backing onto other houses.

I personally don't mind the death waves.
I think it adds a little bit of challenge to an otherwise very easy game (actually a bit too easy in my opinion). I kind of look on it as having to keep a reserve in medical resources, to combat disaster or plague, which most real life cities should also be prepared for.
Maybe the Dev's decided to leave it in for this reason, even if it is an un planned side effect of a game mechanic?

I don't mind taking care of the dead either; it's something new, a bit morbid but still something interesting BUT it shouldn't take over a game and become a dominant part of it and require a player to spend 90% of its time looking after it. After all the game is called Cities Skyline NOT Cities in Deathcare!! And especially that it's NOT a challenge but a bad design flaws that negatively impacts a game greatly. It's so annoying that you have expanded a city only to see it being abandoned and emptied constantly because some devs decided that everybody has to die instantly just because they reached certain age, no visiting healthcare facilities, no remedies, just instant combustion!

If they REALLY want to make the game challenging, they have so many areas where they can make it to have much more depth for the players to design and go into to manage, healthcare, education, economics, budgeting, transportation and traffic, beautification, just to name a few. No they didn't, they didn't add any depth to any of the areas to allow for player exploration to result in any challenging play; they are just plot and go. And even in deathcare, it's supposed to be just "plot and go" as well it's just because of the immediate uniform mandatory death design flaw that it's presenting some kind of so called "challenge".

This city could've been a more challenging simulation game instead of just a city painter but the dev just didn't choose to and I am NOT going to regard a bad design flaw as some of kind of "challenge". Challenge is supposed to be stimulating and fun; seeing a bunch of skulls and bones on top of a city that you have painstakingly built and designed every single hour because of a stupid dev rule is NOT fun nor is it stimulating.

 

[Michael Matthews]

I don't spend 90% of my time dealing with deathwaves; maybe 0.1%. I do agree it could use some work.

Seems to me the primary problem is that the number of vehicles does not match the crematorium availability stat in the game's GUI. The crematorium just doesn't process the bodies fast enough to meet its supposed capability. To prevent deathwaves, you have to plop more than expected, raise the budget, or plop supplemental cemetaries which have cheaper cost/vehicle.

But if you use cemetaries, you'll need a few extra crematoriums to deal with the cemetaries' emptying mechanic, which results in massive crematorium usage when the cemetary is full, as opposed to balancing its' fill/empty rate by removing corpses to a crematorium over time at a certain rate. Having multiple cemetaries empty simultaneously can also cause deathwaves.

As people have pointed out, if you do not fix the root cause(s) of a deathwave, each subsequent deathwave will be worse (as the population "pendulum" swings wider each time). Perhaps that's why some people find it a huge problem and others don't.

 

[ThrilledCim]

I don't spend 90% of my time dealing with deathwaves; maybe 0.1%. I do agree it could use some work.

Seems to me the primary problem is that the number of vehicles does not match the crematorium availability stat in the game's GUI. The crematorium just doesn't process the bodies fast enough to meet its supposed capability. To prevent deathwaves, you have to plop more than expected, raise the budget, or plop supplemental cemetaries which have cheaper cost/vehicle.

But if you use cemetaries, you'll need a few extra crematoriums to deal with the cemetaries' emptying mechanic, which results in massive crematorium usage when the cemetary is full, as opposed to balancing its' fill/empty rate by removing corpses to a crematorium over time at a certain rate. Having multiple cemetaries empty simultaneously can also cause deathwaves.

As people have pointed out, if you do not fix the root cause(s) of a deathwave, each subsequent deathwave will be worse (as the population "pendulum" swings wider each time). Perhaps that's why some people find it a huge problem and others don't.

The root cause of the problem of this deathwave is just ONE: Faulty design flaw of mandatory instant death of cims upon reaching a certain age without tying into any possible mitigation factors such as healthcare accessibility, education level, wealth, fire coverage, crime rate just to name a few. It's not with the cemeteries or crematories.

The availability and/or capacity of crematories and cemeteries are just supplemental issues that could enhance or reduce the impact of deathwaves but it doesn't resolve the root cause of it. I have NO cemeteries so I don't have to deal with the emptying issue and I have all the crematories with more than enough capacity to handle all the dead bodies in the city and I actually have two mods, one improved hearse AI mod that supposedly improve the efficiency on dispatching of the hearses and another mod that increases the no. of hearses at each crematory and neither of them help with the deathwaves. Every single hour, half of my cities' buildings get abandoned because of corpses piling up everywhere and I have all traffic going in and out the city fine. At each deathwave which happens roughly every single hour, all of the hearses in all of the crematories go all out collecting dead bodies and it's still not enough.

So to solve this deathwave issue is NOT with cemeteries or crematories; it's with fixing this fundamental design flaw of cookie-cutting instant death which is ridiculous. Until somebody creates a mod to resolve this design flaw effectively or until the dev cares enough to correct this flaw in the next patch or updates, we are going to be stuck with this deathwave which is a major game killer.

 

[DazKaz]

I don't have anything like the problems your are experiencing ThrilledCim.

My main city has a population of 240k and is completely vanilla (achievements enabled) with no mods and about a half dozen custom assets.
Maybe the problem gets worse as the population rises higher that this?
This screenshot is with the healthcare budget at 100% so I still have capacity to increase it if I was to see the first signs of a death wave.

Can you give some details about the city you are experiencing the problems with?

 

[ThrilledCim]

City Population: 40K+
Healthcare/Deathcare budget: 100%
Healthcare coverage: 66% with Capacity: 500
Deathcare: 4 crematories with 30 hearses each with total capacity: 2000 (mod)

Had Deathwaves ever since the beginning and never wavered and I just increased more and more deathcare facilities and still no improvement. This game is so flawed. Anyway I have stopped playing until this problem gets fixed. No point building a city when everything is going to be just abandoned every hour and most of the time when there is no deathwaves, no cims ever move in and my zoned Residential just lay there undeveloped and Commercials keep abandoning because there is not enough customers and I have keep zoning Offices. By the time when I zoned enough Offices or when the game finally decides so, the cims finally start to move into residential zones, deathwaves starts and Commercials and Residentials start to get abandoned again because of the dead bodies not being collected fast enough even though all of my hearses are out non-stop. And then once the deathwave finishes, no cims want to move in again and the cycle just repeats itself.

One of the most ridiculous and under-developed city simulation games I have ever played and I played city simulation games for 20+ years starting with Simcity 2000. Besides this deathwave "challenge", the game is really just a "plot and go" city painter with no depth or interdependency with any of the infrastructures. Looks like another "pump and dump" game by CO with graphics copied from Simcity 2015. They were just smart enough to include a Sandbox mode with no insistence on region play so they are able to make lots of money with people buying the game in droves.

 

[DazKaz]

Don't get despondent mate, I'll help you work through it.

All we need to do is break the cycle.

Place some Cemeteries' near the Crematoriums to act as a sponge during a death wave.
These are cheap and can be set to empty into the Crematorium once the death wave is over.
Once they are empty turn them off to save money if this is a problem.

Make sure your death care is dispersed throughout the city to ensure they don't all get caught in a traffic jam once you turn up the Healthcare budget to combat a death wave.
Your death care should be able to cope with a constant budget of about 75% on tick over, so make sure you place deathcare and healthcare buildings appropriately for this budget, so that you can ramp it up to 150% once a death wave strikes.

Also try to stagger the zoning of your residential zones over time as well as size.

Edit: I have to goto work now. Will be on later tonight.