death rate

[HQ]

what is going on with the deaths? i'm fairly new to the game but for some reason people keep dying. any tips?

[Cahos Rahne Veloza]

Do a search on the forum search bar for "Deathwaves". That'll sort you out.

[me22ca]

Overbuild cemeteries. They provide happiness, and are pretty cheap.

(The UI for how many of them you need in the game is really bad, since it doesn't predict how many you'll need in future, so it'll often say you're fine when you're really not.)

[Spector]

The tooltips on the buildings where they die give a reason for death.

Probably polluted water in your case.

[athlitias]

If you mean "death wave" (many same time) then build / place residential zones slowly.
Check the number of the new comers (bottom middle right) and make sure they do not exceed approximately 200 per week.
Otherwise if you want to build fast.. i think you need to use a specific mod (it is about age manipulation - search the discussions and you 'll find it) so that many settlers do not die at the same time.

[John]

Originally posted by Jim Lahey:

what is going on with the deaths? i'm fairly new to the game but for some reason people keep dying. any tips?

People keep dying because that’s what they have been designed to do.
The game was originally designed giving everyone in the city a 6 – 6 ½ year life span. I have heard that with the SH update that life span has been extended to something around 10 years. Not a long time to live I grant you but it’s a game and not just any game it’s cities skylines.
What this means is that at best everyone living in your city today will die at some point in time over the next ten (game) years. A person who is 65 today will dye sooner. A baby born today will dye later. Come hell or high water however both will dye or leave the city sometime in the next ten years. As a purely logical point of fact this means if you add 10 people to your city at any given time on the average one of them should dye every game year. Add 20 people and it go to two deaths per year. Add another 20 ten minutes from now and you’re looking at 4 deaths per year. Add a thousand people the next day and it jumps to 14 people dying every year.
Now 14 people dying every year really doesn’t sound all that bad if that’s all there were to it. But….
According to the manual “game time” passes at the rate of 1 game week every 1 real time minute. That means that using the example we have above we’re now looking at 14 deaths every 52 real-time minutes.
Now the game has a built in limit of 1.04 million citizens. So if you build a city (which is easier than you may think) with a population of 1,040,000 citizens you’re probably looking at around 104,000 deaths at least every 52 minutes or 2,000 every minute or 33 deaths every single second of real-time play.

So,
Why are people dying?
Because, in the game and or real life, that’s what they have been designed to do.

Any tips?
Ya, RUN LIKE HELL!

Now think about this; How may ambulances do you recon you're going to need to send all the way across the map and back at the break-neck speed of maybe two or three u per second to be able to pick up and deliver a full load of bodies to the processing center at the rate of 3 per second every second. Is it any wander that designed as it is the death care service so often fails?

And we haven't even begone to deal with the "death waves" mentioned in earlier comments or fix all those bad roads the vanillas want to tell about.

[M.S.Referee]

That's super simple way. To control "Death Wave" and "Death Rate" with this mod, just chnaged 'Lifecycle' option. large value more close to reallife, so set in 3-5 is the best choice.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563&searchtext=

[Spector]

Originally posted by doc mod:

Now the game has a built in limit of 1.04 million citizens. So if you build a city (which is easier than you may think) with a population of 1,040,000 citizens you’re probably looking at around 104,000 deaths at least every 52 minutes or 2,000 every minute or 33 deaths every single second of real-time play.

That is the math. But with Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.5.3 things are a bit different at 1.04 million population:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464554039

[John]

Originally posted by Spector:

That is the math. But with Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.5.3 things are a bit different at 1.04 million population:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464554039

The numbers offered were meant to be an expansion of the explanation being presented and not an absolute. But yes I agree that the whole thing gets a bit spastic the closer you get to 1.04.
At that point the game is going through a transition from a growing city to one that must now attempt to maintain a relatively static population while still dealing with the death of such citizens that continue to reach the inevitable end of their otherwise Rebalanced Lifecycle.
I am a bit unclear about the purpose of your comment, but if it was meant to promote the use of LR I have no reason to doubt your word.
It has been a long time back that I last went for the 1.04 or have had any reason to be concerned about Lifecycles in general. In fact most of my projects now days still show 0 population at retirement.
In any case; On the rare occasion that I do build a city I have already taken deliberate steps necessary to employ an out-side contractor to manage my city's services so while I'm sure that garbage is still created and people likely still pass away from time to time I almost never hear about it.

[Markus Reese]

Dont need a mod to deal with death waves. Large residential builds can start a death Resonance, but are not the reason they occur.

I say death resonance because what happens is the ages actually sync up because of reasons out side the area zoned.

One reason is traffic. A zone has a spurt off deaths in a local area, so death care from outside that zone tries to head there, using lots of time and being in traffic. What results is deaths in their zone start happening, and deathcare from elsewhere head into that zone. Eventually you will find deathcare not in their zone of operation but crossing the entire city, resulting in citywide death waves.

Second cause, somewhat related to first is a poor mix of light and dense residential. Your population is a resource. Incoming pops are all an uneducated set age. You want to produce your own population. This means the overall lifespan of your citizens will be longer, and such lower rate of deaths.

The reason the mix is important is the game mechanics run a family unit in simulation, not just individuals. The light and dense factor into this for more than just number of peeps. Light residential is where families try to move with kids, grow old and die. Kids once young adults want to move out of a home and into an apartment.

So dense residential promotes the game creating family units, and light residential promotes creation of new youth.

This connects to traffic issues because it means most deaths also are occuring in the homes. Light residential tends to have less traffic issues, meaning deathcare also can get around faster. Because kids move out, if the building abandons because of delay in response, you dont have a large number of people who left. This results in a large number of people all same age moving in because lack of light residential means a lack of young citizens with a range of ages to move in.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1114833305

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1114833345

Above is what happens when low family unit availability, see the resonance in graph? I wasnt building at all for last few spikes. That is the resonance causing whole city to sync.

Below is another city where I have light residential enough for a consistent birth rate. You see spikes where I built large new family units, but deaths consistently stay reasonably smooth because the birth rates stratify my zones.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1974744026

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1974744007

[Ellye]

Originally posted by M.S.Referee:

That's super simple way. To control "Death Wave" and "Death Rate" with this mod, just chnaged 'Lifecycle' option. large value more close to reallife, so set in 3-5 is the best choice.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563&searchtext=

Yup, I don't think Cities Skylines is even playable without that mod (and a few others).

More than half of the praise that C:S gets should go to the modding community instead.

[Markus Reese]

Originally posted by Ellye:

Originally posted by M.S.Referee:

That's super simple way. To control "Death Wave" and "Death Rate" with this mod, just chnaged 'Lifecycle' option. large value more close to reallife, so set in 3-5 is the best choice.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563&searchtext=

Yup, I don't think Cities Skylines is even playable without that mod (and a few others).

More than half of the praise that C:S gets should go to the modding community instead.

It absolutely is playable, just the issue is C:S is rampant with misunderstanding of mechanics and instead just assume it is a game because there is a mod that fixes it.

That mod is only essential if you do not properly utilize both types of residential or expand poorly. Relying on incoming residence vs properly supporting the population life cycle is fault of player, not game.

Like most "essential" mods. It is because players not trying to play how they think it should work so use brute force to bypass basic design essentials.

You can make massive and fully stable, realistic looking with centralized zoning, nine tiles and problem free with pure vanilla tools.

[Ellye]

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

It is because players not trying to play how they think it should work.

When a game is in the simulation genre, players tend to expect that things behave in a certain way, based on how real life works.

Of course, no one should expect a perfect representation of real life (it would, among other things, be boring as hell with all the limitations and slowness and etc); but I think it's perfectly fair to expect, for an example of a different issue also fixed with mods, that cars should not be able to appear and disappear out of thin air.

Expecting that people arriving at a city will have different ages, instead of everyone being the same age inside each age group, is a perfectly fair expectation too.

When a simulation game fails to deliver on too many of those expectations, it is failing as a simulation.

Unmoded Cities:Skylines is a fine toy to build pretty cities, but it's not even a decent game, much less a good one. Heck, Cities XL with it's millions of bugs would be a better game. But thankfully C:S is highly moddable and lots of people did lots of great work on it.

[Markus Reese]

It does simulate well, but it isnt an exact city simulator and never was marketed as one. Its scale isnt realistic and the cycle isnt realistic. It is all compressed within reason because it is a simulation game.

Because it doesnt simulate in the way you specifically want it or isnt realistic enough doesnt make it bad. Nor does it make any mod necessary. It makes it a tool to make one aspect more realistic, but city scale and population density means that it will never be realistic. It can have realism representation in aspects at best.

Hence when I call out when some says something is "essential" because the death waves are caused by player misunderstanding of game mechanics, not because of any flaw in game. If somebody wants more realism, that is different. But how many people actually follow one persons life cycle? Dying once every 5 years or every 50 years. All it changes is the number of city services.

Are all aspects of the game scale modded as well for realism? Population densities? Costs? Building sizes? Or is it selective realism for convenience? Regardless, mod essential because deathwaves, is incorrect because deathwaves only require proper supporting of citizen life cycle via ensuring proper residential zoning for proper family cycle.

Unmodded is an amazing game, if you look past incorrect myths and misunderstandings on how the game works. And most complaints are solely due to persons not understanding the mechanics, with the mods essentially bypassing it to make it easier, or brute forcing AI making the game heavy micromanagement with said mod vs city design. Looking at peeps who think gotta use traffic manager to have efficient flow.

[OneJasonBradly]

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

+1
:)

[Tsubame ⭐]

Deathcare is the hands down the least realistic "city managing" - as implemented - and most annoying aspect of the game, and on PC the very first thing I have the privilege to disable when playing:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=803074771