(my) Recent Experience re: Death Waves

[ThrilledCim]

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

All we need to do is break the cycle.



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 building 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.

I did pretty much ALL that. I used to have a cemetery on top of crematoriums, did ZILCH to help with the deathwave problem. It only made it worse because once it gets full, it can't be used and I am all of sudden 10 hearses short. I got rid of it now because I don't need it really. With this new crematorium mod, my total capacity of crematoriums are 2000 like I stated before and that's MORE than enough to handle all the dead corpses of the entire city. Crematoriums are NOT the problem.

And as to placing the crematoriums all over the city right in all of the zones, that's NOT something I am going to do. I am NOT placing crematoriums right in the middle of downtown prime real estate right beside high class condos and offices so people are constantly ingesting fumes from the burning of dead bodies. I come from a culture where we believe that the dead is to be separate from the living so I have all of the crematoriums placed at the far end of the other side of the city and all the hearses have to travel across the city to my "living" zones to pick up the dead instead of having them in every single block of the residential and business areas. That's just eerie and disgusting!! Even though there is no traffic congestion because my city's only got 40K+ population and the hearses travel on highways and 3 lanes+ roads with speed limit of 60 to collect the dead, maybe the distance is the problem but I am NOT compromising on this. I am NOT having the dead mingle with the living.

The game is supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate all styles of city building and not force players to play according to some stupid ideas of the game dev's especially the root cause of this problem is still that the death occurrence is not supposed to be set at a certain age and people just spontaneously die when they reach that age. If they had set the death rate to be in relation to variety of factors and randomized which is what it supposed to be, this problem would NOT happen no matter how far you place the crematoriums. I am NOT compromising my playing styles derived from my beliefs to accommodate some cop-out design flaws. If I don't "win" this game, so be it.

Thanks for your help. Great talking to you and nice city!

 

[DazKaz]

I did pretty much ALL that. I used to have a cemetery on top of crematoriums, did ZILCH to help with the deathwave problem. It only made it worse because once it gets full, it can't be used and I am all of sudden 10 hearses short. I got rid of it now because I don't need it really.

The idea here is to use the cemetery as a sponge to soak up the excess in the deathwave, then when you have it under control you switch the cemetery to empty into the crematorium.
When its empty you can turn it off until the next wave.

With this new crematorium mod, my total capacity of crematoriums are 2000 like I stated before and that's MORE than enough to handle all the dead corpses of the entire city. Crematoriums are NOT the problem.

This mod might be part of your problem, because the extra hurst's it supplies during a deathwave will all come from isolated sources instead of smaller quantities from lots of different locations. This may be responsible for overloading the roads leading from the crematoriums to your most populated places, just when you need them the most.

I come from a culture where we believe that the dead is to be separate from the living so I have all of the crematoriums placed at the far end of the other side of the city and all the hearses have to travel across the city to my "living" zones to pick up the dead instead of having them in every single block of the residential and business areas.

I don't know where you are from so can't comment on your culture in regards to this, but the Dev's come from Europe and I should imagine that the mechanics of this were influenced by their culture rather than trying to cater for every culture on the planet.
They have left religion out of the game, but I would guess that the happiness from cemeteries and crematoriums is also an abstraction of this, rather than building mosques' and churches as everyone wants to give their dead a respectful sending off no matter what their religion. This could partly explain why so many are needed and that they have a limited happiness range and are best built within the community.

I am NOT having the dead mingle with the living.

Have you considered building them into dedicated parks nearby, but not in the middle of the residential areas? How far away from other buildings do they have to be? How far away from buildings is the crematorium in your home city for example?
You could build one of these religious parks/cemeteries/crematoriums nearby your other zones, and link them with dedicated fast access roads, in order to inject them into the middle of your populated areas as fast as possible when needed. Maybe surround them with trees and other nice things so they don't get encroached on later.

Modern crematoriums are very efficient at cremating bodies with very little pollution. They make use of a second very hot combustion chamber that incinerates most toxins. The supper modern ones are controlled by computers to ensure the best combustion and some are even equipped with charcoal filters.
If you were to think of all your crematoriums like this would that help at all?

The game is supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate all styles of city building and not force players to play according to some stupid ideas of the game dev's especially the root cause of this problem is still that the death occurrence is not supposed to be set at a certain age and people just spontaneously die when they reach that age.

Talking of being flexible;
Another way to help yourself is not to look on them as cremetoriums at all, but as places of religious gatherings (churches).
The skulls are not dead bodies waiting for collection but elderly people needing to be picked up to get to church.
The deathwaves are not deathwaves, but special religious events that happen once or twice in a lifetime, that everyone is required to attend.
A bit far fetched I agree, but it is just a game!

Another way of looking at the deathwaves is as natural or manmade disasters, where you need to keep a surplus of facilities in order to plan for these events.
What would your own city do with the dead if a plague or an earthquake was to strike?

If they had set the death rate to be in relation to variety of factors and randomized which is what it supposed to be, this problem would NOT happen no matter how far you place the crematoriums. I am NOT compromising my playing styles derived from my beliefs to accommodate some cop-out design flaws.

It does very much sound like your infrastructure is not efficient enough between where you have zoned your crematoriums and the other side of the map.
Is there anything you can do to increase its speed and efficiency?
A fast ring road to inject the Hurst's into the rear areas of the map quickly?

Thanks for your help. Great talking to you and nice city!

Your welcome.
Hope you manage to get around the problem somehow. Good luck.

 

[ThrilledCim]

The idea here is to use the cemetery as a sponge to soak up the excess in the deathwave, then when you have it under control you switch the cemetery to empty into the crematorium.
When its empty you can turn it off until the next wave.

Yeah but all the excesss in the deathwave are still well within the capacity of the crematories and each crematory have the number of hearses that's equivalent of THREE cemeteries so I am not sure if the cemetery is really needed and besides when I really had the cemetery there, the deathwave didn't get taken care of that much faster.

This mod might be part of your problem, because the extra hurst's it supplies during a deathwave will all come from isolated sources instead of smaller quantities from lots of different locations. This may be responsible for overloading the roads leading from the crematoriums to your most populated places, just when you need them the most.

The roads are NOT congested in anyway and when I didn't have the mod, again the deathwave situation was not better and it is NOT really worse with this mod implemented.

I don't know where you are from so can't comment on your culture in regards to this, but the Dev's come from Europe and I should imagine that the mechanics of this were influenced by their culture rather than trying to cater for every culture on the planet.
They have left religion out of the game, but I would guess that the happiness from cemeteries and crematoriums is also an abstraction of this, rather than building mosques' and churches as everyone wants to give their dead a respectful sending off no matter what their religion. This could partly explain why so many are needed and that they have a limited happiness range and are best built within the community.


Have you considered building them into dedicated parks nearby, but not in the middle of the residential areas? How far away from other buildings do they have to be? How far away from buildings is the crematorium in your home city for example?
You could build one of these religious parks/cemeteries/crematoriums nearby your other zones, and link them with dedicated fast access roads, in order to inject them into the middle of your populated areas as fast as possible when needed. Maybe surround them with trees and other nice things so they don't get encroached on later.

Modern crematoriums are very efficient at cremating bodies with very little pollution. They make use of a second very hot combustion chamber that incinerates most toxins. The supper modern ones are controlled by computers to ensure the best combustion and some are even equipped with charcoal filters.
If you were to think of all your crematoriums like this would that help at all?


Talking of being flexible;
Another way to help yourself is not to look on them as cremetoriums at all, but as places of religious gatherings (churches).
The skulls are not dead bodies waiting for collection but elderly people needing to be picked up to get to church.
The deathwaves are not deathwaves, but special religious events that happen once or twice in a lifetime, that everyone is required to attend.
A bit far fetched I agree, but it is just a game!

Another way of looking at the deathwaves is as natural or manmade disasters, where you need to keep a surplus of facilities in order to plan for these events.
What would your own city do with the dead if a plague or an earthquake was to strike?

First of all, I want to clarify that this belief has NOTHING to do with religion and nor is it religion-based in any way; it's simply a habit that we have in our culture that the dead should be separate from the living because once you are dead, you belong to another realm or another world or whatever and shouldn't be mingled with the living to interfere with the living. And our culture is NOT the only one in the world that believes in that. Although European culture is probably more casual with the dead having more proximity with the living, I still don't see crematories or cemeteries being built in every 2 blocks in downtown prime locations.

And death is really NOT a religious event; it is a biological function, very much the same as excreting bodily waste. Just like you do everything in its proper room and proper place, it's the same as taking care of the dead. You don't have bowel movement on a toilet in the middle of the dining room, WHY would you want to burn dead bodies in the middle of a park where children play?

And besides this deathwave like I said before is really a result of a design flaw of everybody has to spontaneously combust as soon as they reach a certain age. Without this design flaw, deathwave wouldn't happen in the first place or at least would not happen in this severity. I don't expect a game to accommodate every single player's style, thinking or whatnot but the game design needs to make sense. This flawed game mechanic where everybody automatically dies at an arbitrary age regardless of what happens just does NOT make sense and it needs to be corrected. The placing of crematoriums/cemeteries and efficiency of them are just workarounds to deal with this design flaw and is not really the resolution of it.

Once again, thank you for your help. I will just live with the deathwaves if I still choose to play even when it's not fixed.

 

[DazKaz]

There is another option that I haven't tried yet that might work, but it's a bit barbaric

If you click on the info button top left, then on the population info, it will colour code the residential buildings by average age of occupancy.
If the ratio of seniors is about 30% this is getting near the danger zone for a deathwave.
To pre-empt this you can try bulldozing a load of the brown (seniors) housing

If you get the seniors ratio down to about 10% your deathcare facilities should be able to cope without too much difficulty when they all die.
This will have the bonus of a young family moving back in but will obviously need a little time to level back up again, so don't do too many at the same time.
I don't have any suggestions on how you want to role play the justification of this action

 

[Michael Matthews]

And as to placing the crematoriums all over the city right in all of the zones, that's NOT something I am going to do. I am NOT placing crematoriums right in the middle of downtown prime real estate right beside high class condos and offices so people are constantly ingesting fumes from the burning of dead bodies. I come from a culture where we believe that the dead is to be separate from the living so I have all of the crematoriums placed at the far end of the other side of the city and all the hearses have to travel across the city to my "living" zones to pick up the dead instead of having them in every single block of the residential and business areas. That's just eerie and disgusting!! Even though there is no traffic congestion because my city's only got 40K+ population and the hearses travel on highways and 3 lanes+ roads with speed limit of 60 to collect the dead, maybe the distance is the problem but I am NOT compromising on this. I am NOT having the dead mingle with the living.

Frankly, you're forcing a playstyle on the game that directly contradicts what the game is telling you the service buildings were intended to do. The green road coverage display shows you the area the crematoriums are intended to service. Service vehicles will travel outside their area to help out, but that is not their primary function, and the further away they are, the fewer bodies they can pick up over time as each hearse spends more time traveling vs. picking up/dropping off bodies.

If you're having problems with that approach in a 40k city, I can't imagine what it'd be like if you got to 400k.

The only times I can remember having deathwave problems:

• Forgetting to plop crematoriums when expanding the city.
• Traffic.
• Water pumps pulling sewage quite some distance upstream while I was busy with another area of the map.
• Massive residential zoning.

In short, it's always been something I caused, though the last one is probably exacerbated (not caused) by everyone dying at a certain age.

The game is supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate all styles of city building and not force players to play according to some stupid ideas of the game dev's especially the root cause of this problem is still that the death occurrence is not supposed to be set at a certain age and people just spontaneously die when they reach that age. If they had set the death rate to be in relation to variety of factors and randomized which is what it supposed to be, this problem would NOT happen no matter how far you place the crematoriums. I am NOT compromising my playing styles derived from my beliefs to accommodate some cop-out design flaws. If I don't "win" this game, so be it.

I do agree that the age thing is artificial, but sadly so are many other things about the game.

Having a < 100% chance to die, every time the age is incremented past a certain point, seems like an easy fix.

 

[ThrilledCim]

There is another option that I haven't tried yet that might work, but it's a bit barbaric

If you click on the info button top left, then on the population info, it will colour code the residential buildings by average age of occupancy.
If the ratio of seniors is about 30% this is getting near the danger zone for a deathwave.
To pre-empt this you can try bulldozing a load of the brown (seniors) housing

If you get the seniors ratio down to about 10% your deathcare facilities should be able to cope without too much difficulty when they all die.
This will have the bonus of a young family moving back in but will obviously need a little time to level back up again, so don't do too many at the same time.
I don't have any suggestions on how you want to role play the justification of this action

Yup did that too. I would pre-emptively bulldoze those senior residentials like you said and I would also bulldoze all the houses that already had the dead bodies in there to get rid of them before the properties around them start to be abandoned. Did not help much except destroying the population that took so long to accumulate and driving all my economic revenue to negative because many of the houses with the dead bodies still had sizable populations in them like young adults, adults and children. Sometimes it's just ONE senior that just died or about to die and yet I am driving several households of people out of the city by bulldozing the house. And many times the stupid senior decided to die in commercials and public facilities like parks.

And when I bulldoze them all in one shot, the families would move in all in one drove and since the game mechanic dictates that cims of certain age must die spontaneously it would continue to create the next deathwaves because they are all going to die at the same time in about an hour or so.

I am NOT exaggerating when I told you I spend 90% of my game time trying to deal with this deathwave problem. LOL Believe me, I tried EVERYTHING under the sun and nothing worked unless maybe placing crematoriums and cemeteries all over the place in the city right in the middle of prime real estate. Even with that, the deathwaves would still occur it's just that it will disappear faster because all the corpses will be picked up faster. That's why I say it's this overall death mechanic that's the problem; that's the root cause of the deathwave which is NOT supposed to happen in the first place. It's really a bug. CO just doesn't want to recognize it as such because they don't want to spend resources on it to fix it the same way that they didn't want to fix many of the faulty pathfinding issues in Cities in Motions 2.

 

[ThrilledCim]

I do agree that the age thing is artificial, but sadly so are many other things about the game.

Having a < 100% chance to die, every time the age is incremented past a certain point, seems like an easy fix.

I don't mind having artificial things like aging in the game and it is true everything pretty much in the game are artificial. After all it IS a simulation game BUT it has to make sense. And I am NOT asking for <100% chance to die because that's not correct either. Death is supposed to be 100% eventually but just NOT at the SAME TIME for everybody of an arbitrary age, SIMULTANEOUSLY in a cookie-cutting fashion. This is the crux of the problem.

Like I said everything else is secondary even with massive residential zoning. I have NEVER heard of a city simulation game where you have to time and stagger the development of certain zones. It doesn't happen irl (there is NOT one city in the world where when an area is zoned and when developers want to build residential houses, the city government says no, wait wait wait, you can't build yet cuz people are going to move in and they are going to die at the same time) and nor has it ever happened in any city simulation games that I have played over 20+ years. It's just another cop-out to compensate for the ridiculous design flaw.

 

[SpikeNotMike]

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

Have to jump in here. Tested this mod and here are the results:

and


Mod started around year 2044 and works with 1.4.0-f3 !
After that mod have flattened the deathwave i tested the city without it and it works -MY CITY IS HEALED- (sorry for shouting here )

 

[Zed68]

Have to jump in here. Tested this mod and here are the results:

View attachment 165562 and View attachment 165564


Mod started around year 2044 and works with 1.4.0-f3 !
After that mod have flattened the deathwave i tested the city without it and it works -MY CITY IS HEALED- (sorry for shouting here )

Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssss !!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Steve B.]

The only times I can remember having deathwave problems:

• Forgetting to plop crematoriums when expanding the city.
• Traffic.
• Water pumps pulling sewage quite some distance upstream while I was busy with another area of the map.
• Massive residential zoning.

In short, it's always been something I caused, though the last one is probably exacerbated (not caused) by everyone dying at a certain age.

I've got to agree with this. I have not had a "death wave" since the early days of the game when I failed to have good traffic and well distributed death care. None of my present cities (I work on a few at a time) have this problem since I learned to provide death care as rigorously as I provide garbage service. In fact, I believe they are based on the same metric. I do not place crematoria all over the place, but I do use a kind of cheat, the Church with Graveyard, from the workshop. I say it's kind of a cheat because the in-game cemetery, I believe, has fewer grave sites than it should.

Let's face it; the whole deathcare/healthcare system needs to be re-done. I don't think CO is going to do this anytime soon; but it is needed. Hospitals and Clinics are unused in the game. I would prefer a system where people die in the hospital most of the time and instead of cemeteries and crematoria sending out hearses, ambulances would pick up those on the threshold of death or who drop dead in a public place and funeral homes or morticians or whatever you want to call them would pick up the dead at a hospital and transport them to a cemetery or crematorium.

 

[ThrilledCim]

Have to jump in here. Tested this mod and here are the results:

View attachment 165562 and View attachment 165564


Mod started around year 2044 and works with 1.4.0-f3 !
After that mod have flattened the deathwave i tested the city without it and it works -MY CITY IS HEALED- (sorry for shouting here )

Use this mod too. Does NOT make much difference otherwise I wouldn't be here. And I am sorry but I cannot understand your graph. What is it supposed to show?

Thanks.

 

[ThrilledCim]

I've got to agree with this. I have not had a "death wave" since the early days of the game when I failed to have good traffic and well distributed death care. None of my present cities (I work on a few at a time) have this problem since I learned to provide death care as rigorously as I provide garbage service. In fact, I believe they are based on the same metric. I do not place crematoria all over the place, but I do use a kind of cheat, the Church with Graveyard, from the workshop. I say it's kind of a cheat because the in-game cemetery, I believe, has fewer grave sites than it should.

Let's face it; the whole deathcare/healthcare system needs to be re-done. I don't think CO is going to do this anytime soon; but it is needed. Hospitals and Clinics are unused in the game. I would prefer a system where people die in the hospital most of the time and instead of cemeteries and crematoria sending out hearses, ambulances would pick up those on the threshold of death or who drop dead in a public place and funeral homes or morticians or whatever you want to call them would pick up the dead at a hospital and transport them to a cemetery or crematorium.

Agreed. Healthcare is totally not used and of course that's not another design flaw that CO refuses to acknowledge. I agree that people should die in hospitals and clinics most of the time.

 

[Zed68]

Use this mod too. Does NOT make much difference otherwise I wouldn't be here. And I am sorry but I cannot understand your graph. What is it supposed to show?

Thanks.

It shows that the amplitude of the sudden variations in population (a.k.a. death waves) is diminishing once he's using the mod.

BTW of course the effect won't be an immediate elimination of deathwaves, it only affects new Cims in the city.

 

[Steve B.]

Agreed. Healthcare is totally not used and of course that's not another design flaw that CO refuses to acknowledge. I agree that people should die in hospitals and clinics most of the time.

I agree with you, but don't be hard on CO. This is something they should address in the future and I hope they will. Based on the recent patch, where they answered many problems with the game, I hope they will answer this. I truly believe they wish the best for this game and will eventually answer all our concerns.

 

[SpikeNotMike]

Use this mod too. Does NOT make much difference otherwise I wouldn't be here. And I am sorry but I cannot understand your graph. What is it supposed to show?

Thanks.

The lilac curve is for the citizens and the red curve is for the dying people. The mod flattens out the up and downs of the dying people. It was just a test to get rid of the deathwaves that could destroy a city. As you can see in the graph i started the mod in the year 2044 and just let it run. Around year 2052 i stopped.

I KNOW that the deathwaves got worse each wave without this mod (sorry, i have no graph for comparison, because i have to run the game 3-3,5 hours at max speed to see a result.)

It takes patience and a few deathwaves and hours to see that the mod works.


Edit: zed68 was faster. Now i go to bed. Good night

 

[ThrilledCim]

I agree with you, but don't be hard on CO. This is something they should address in the future and I hope they will. Based on the recent patch, where they answered many problems with the game, I hope they will answer this. I truly believe they wish the best for this game and will eventually answer all our concerns.

I hope so because healthcare/deathcare is such an essential part of the game especially deathcare. And also this game mechanic that all cims must spontaneously die as soon as they reach an arbitrary age is just ridiculous!! I have NEVER imagined that a city management/civil engineering game would turn into an undertaker management game for me.