Hearse malfunction?

[_Joe___]

Like a few other posters here, my 50K pop city has a bunch of dead people in various buildings. I read about possible workarounds like 'spamming crematoriums / cemeteries' and 'better managing death waves' but the issue I discovered seemed to focus on the hearses themselves.

I followed one on its route about my city and noticed two main issues. One, it passed many dead people to get to particular targets. At this point I need them to be more efficient - to go door to door and clean up their respective neighborhoods. Secondly, and admittedly less of an issue, they park poorly and block traffic. I'm also not thrilled that they stack dead people like firewood in a vehicle that can't really support that kind of volume but at this rate I'm willing to hire death buses to pack 'em in 50 at a time. But really, the main thing is their routing is crazy inefficient and I don't think it's appropriate to attempt to solve this problem by adding a bunch more inefficient entities to the mix. Thoughts?

[Hades]

The hearse route is a distraction... I think you are knee-jerk responding to imbalanced long term capacity planning. The trick is to have the right number of cemetaries and crems all the time, emptying out the cemetaries when they are full (cos they are cheaper than crems) but having the minimal number of crems needed to keep the body cycling.

[_Joe___]

There's no doubt the city wasn't designed to effectively process the dead. The problem I'm having has to do with playing catchup without overstocking particular entities, be they cemeteries or crematoriums. But it's not as if I ignored these aspects, the death meter never entered the red. As such, statistically, the placed assets should've handled the number of bodies in question. My death processing rate is green and the city is of moderate health. I just have a glut of dead bodies, and I discovered the hearse inefficiency while following their routes while examining why.

Hearse routing defies logic and isn't efficiently done, regardless. In a management game that rewards efficient design, I felt like my hearses should behave in a sensible manner. I don't understand why they pass a dozen dead people to reach X destination, just to re-pass the same dozen people to get to Y destination. I need these bodies burnt and in urns on mantles, pronto.

It also doesn't make a ton of sense to empty a cemetery. Where do those bodies go?

[B✪✪tsy]

It's because hearses have no range and priority system. They randomly pick up the dead in the city instead of the direct range of the crematorium. So haf the time they will drive all the way to the other end of your city and ignoring dead bodies that are close by. It's a bit of a broken feature imo.

[MarkJohnson]

Like storm said, the hearses are a distraction. The issue is your layout vs enough collection.

They pass dead on the street because they are assigned to other hearses in the game.

Try to get all crematoriums. The cemeteries will hog hearses to empty cemeteries into crematoriums. I use cemeteries as emergency collection and have them off until I get out of balance and turn them on again while I figure out where my issues lie.

and yes, the hearses are stupid and aren't fixed on purpose. This is a game and you need to lean the game mechanics. I know it's annoying, but that's the way simulators game. You can install mods to override the issue but then it just makes the game way too easy and ends up with no game to it any more and just turns into a mapmaker with no consequences to mis-building your city.

but don't let my opinion stop you from playing your game your way. Just technically hearses work as designed.

[B✪✪tsy]

Originally posted by rmjohnson144:

Just technically hearses work as designed.

No, it's a contradicting game mechanic. On one hand services (such as crematoriums) provide happyness to the direct area of where they are placed, yet the crematorium does not work with a range system, it functions map/city wide... so it's a bit of a fake mechanic as it has no effect on the direct range of the crematorium, thus there is no reason that it sould provide happyness in the direct area of a crematorium.

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by B00tsy:

Originally posted by rmjohnson144:

Just technically hearses work as designed.

No, it's a contradicting game mechanic. On one hand services (such as crematoriums) provide happyness to the direct area of where they are placed, yet the crematorium does not work with a range system, it functions map/city wide... so it's a bit of a fake mechanic as it has no effect on the direct range of the crematorium, thus there is no reason that it sould provide happyness in the direct area of a crematorium.

I'm not sure what you mean. It works as intended. The whole happiness system works similarly. Schools provide happiness in the green zone when you plop it, but it will draw students across the map. They don't get happiness, but they educated. Same with death, they don't get happiness, but they serviced.

Ity may not be perfect, but it definitely works as intended.