Criminals!!

[EastFacingRaven]

I am having the strangest issue since the E2.0 patch. I decided to start afresh with a new city. All was going fine, until I inspected the police view. I had a crazy number of criminals in my city. This continued to rise until it was just completely ridiculous. I had 5,100 population, with over 2,000 criminals, so around 40% of my population!

I started again, watching the police window as soon as it became available. When I first unlocked police I had zero criminals. Within a few months it was well over 10% again and relentlessly climbing.
I verified my game files in Steam, and started AGAIN, this time a new map. But the same is happening again. I'm only at 49 criminals so far (pop 4.1k), but it's rising very fast. I already know where it's heading!

In all 3 playthroughs, I've got welfare up to around 95%. Taxes are all 10%, everyone has everything they need. But they still turn to crime in their droves! Also my police stations show as having around 100 criminals in custody in their 25 cells. I have hundreds sentenced - According the the game hints, these naughty folk should be shipped off to an external prison somewhere., but they don't go anywhere (I took a loan and built my own prison in my 2nd run, but that had no effect either).

Please tell me somebody else is having this issue, as it's driving me nuts! I'm actually really enjoying Economy 2.0, but I'm about ready to forget about this game for another few months as this one issue is attacking my sanity!

[icedude94]

I had the same thing. I had some high unemployment because of the bug with offices downsizing their workforce. When cims have their wealth go wretched, they have a high chance of becoming criminals.

I started taxing industrial zones more and I cut taxes for all residential and even subsidized educated and below. This won't make people stop being robbers and but it will slow the creation of new criminals to give time for your jails and prisons to process and convert them back into normal citizens.

And I have yet to build a welfare building.

I also noticed cims in low density residential have a much harder time building wealth than cims in medium density, probably because rents are still pretty high. Try zoning smaller low density residential homes or just keeping cims in medium density.

[ViraCorp]

So funny, when I saw the title of this topic post, I thought it was a reference to paradox and colossal order, not actual gameplay, lol

[EastFacingRaven]

Originally posted by ViraCorp:

So funny, when I saw the title of this topic post, I thought it was a reference to paradox and colossal order, not actual gameplay, lol

LMAO! Nah, like most people, I am longing for the game to be perfect, but I'm not jumping on that bandwagon of hate.
Nobody really knows what goes on between CO and PDX. They have a small dev team. EA have committed far worse crimes of late, multiple times per year in fact!!

[EastFacingRaven]

Originally posted by icedude94:

I had the same thing. I had some high unemployment because of the bug with offices downsizing their workforce. When cims have their wealth go wretched, they have a high chance of becoming criminals.

I started taxing industrial zones more and I cut taxes for all residential and even subsidized educated and below. This won't make people stop being robbers and but it will slow the creation of new criminals to give time for your jails and prisons to process and convert them back into normal citizens.

And I have yet to build a welfare building.

I also noticed cims in low density residential have a much harder time building wealth than cims in medium density, probably because rents are still pretty high. Try zoning smaller low density residential homes or just keeping cims in medium density.

Hmmm. But 2k criminals in 5lk pop? I was just reading about somebody else having the same issue (Found someone!!), and they let it ride and have 12k criminals in 10k pop. It makes no sense at all. Also, in the happiness summary I have a plus for Wealth. But every game hour, my criminal population climbs exponentially by about 25%.

If forced, I'm sure 9/10 people would rather live in a box in a shop doorway than become a robber. Or they move "away" (aka back to their parents house! lol).

[ViraCorp]

Originally posted by EastFacingRaven:

Originally posted by ViraCorp:

So funny, when I saw the title of this topic post, I thought it was a reference to paradox and colossal order, not actual gameplay, lol

LMAO! Nah, like most people, I am longing for the game to be perfect, but I'm not jumping on that bandwagon of hate.
Nobody really knows what goes on between CO and PDX. They have a small dev team. EA have committed far worse crimes of late, multiple times per year in fact!!

Definitely a good point about the relationship between paradox and CO. Who knows what paradox is making them do. And I will say, I used to be the biggest paradox supporter, and I loved everything, can’t stand them anymore.

As far as having a small developer team, there’s studios out there now that are smaller, but still managed to make much better business decisions and put out better quality work which leads me to believe paradox may be more of the issue.

[EastFacingRaven]

Originally posted by ViraCorp:

...which leads me to believe paradox may be more of the issue.

Yeah, that's kinda my point. We can speculate forever but we'll never know. Hell, half the CO team probably don't even know!

I will never push hate like that though, else you're pretty much asking PDX to pull the plug. And then what? It's a KSP2 situation. I was excited for that game and am devastated it's been shut down. I don't want the same thing here.

[icedude94]

Originally posted by EastFacingRaven:

Hmmm. But 2k criminals in 5lk pop? I was just reading about somebody else having the same issue (Found someone!!), and they let it ride and have 12k criminals in 10k pop. It makes no sense at all. Also, in the happiness summary I have a plus for Wealth. But every game hour, my criminal population climbs exponentially by about 25%.

Check the wealth info overlay and not the happiness summary for wealth. The average is skewed heavily by cims living in urban density.

Homeless cims don't count as part of your city's population and that could be where your criminals are.

Originally posted by EastFacingRaven:

If forced, I'm sure 9/10 people would rather live in a box in a shop doorway than become a robber. Or they move "away" (aka back to their parents house! lol).

Most criminals are not actually poor nor are they doing crime out of desperation. You don't steal expensive handbags or jewelry and smash up the business and destroy the livelihoods of others out of desperation.

A desperate man will walk into a bank and attempt to rob them of a single dollar and then he'll wait for the police to arrive so he can be arrested, taken to jail, and given food and medical treatment.

The hard reality is that most crime is done by people who are looking for an easy way to get rich or because they enjoy committing crime and harming others.

[martinolund]

Yep same thing for me. Massive amounts of homeless criminals.

[EastFacingRaven]

Originally posted by icedude94:

The hard reality is that most crime is done by people who are looking for an easy way to get rich or because they enjoy committing crime and harming others.

Yeah, that's what I mean - if wretched wealth was the reason that wouldn't result in such an insane crime wave. Most would just leave, which is what the patch notes said, no?

But yeah, I'll check on the wealth info. Still an hour to go on the reinstall...

[KingPizza]

I just made a post about the same issue. 10k population with over 6k criminals. Unemployment at 0.6% and no industry/office demand. Here is the info I've gathered so far:

-Homeless cims count towards criminal stats, but not population stats.
-The more "wretched" wealth residential exists, the more criminals you'll have.
-Low density residential, at least in my time playing 2.0, always has "wretched" wealth.
-Office zones will eventually bug out and employee only 5 employees, affecting workplaces.
-Medium and High density residential always had good wealth.
-The welfare office made no difference in low density wealth.
-Police headquarters, prison, and CIB did not reduce crime.

I'm not qualified to say whether or not there is a bug at play here, but it's clear something either isn't right, or there isn't enough clarity on what affects residential wealth. I'm going to start a map and use no low density residential and see what happens.

[srinibung3]

Originally posted by EastFacingRaven:

I am having the strangest issue since the E2.0 patch. I decided to start afresh with a new city. All was going fine, until I inspected the police view. I had a crazy number of criminals in my city. This continued to rise until it was just completely ridiculous. I had 5,100 population, with over 2,000 criminals, so around 40% of my population!

I started again, watching the police window as soon as it became available. When I first unlocked police I had zero criminals. Within a few months it was well over 10% again and relentlessly climbing.
I verified my game files in Steam, and started AGAIN, this time a new map. But the same is happening again. I'm only at 49 criminals so far (pop 4.1k), but it's rising very fast. I already know where it's heading!

In all 3 playthroughs, I've got welfare up to around 95%. Taxes are all 10%, everyone has everything they need. But they still turn to crime in their droves! Also my police stations show as having around 100 criminals in custody in their 25 cells. I have hundreds sentenced - According the the game hints, these naughty folk should be shipped off to an external prison somewhere., but they don't go anywhere (I took a loan and built my own prison in my 2nd run, but that had no effect either).

Please tell me somebody else is having this issue, as it's driving me nuts! I'm actually really enjoying Economy 2.0, but I'm about ready to forget about this game for another few months as this one issue is attacking my sanity!

Have you build schoolsss and university? The add on well being building can help on the crime rate.And I created a big square of plot industry area to solve the jobs problem.

[superPROy9]

Got all the same issues, not sure if there's anything to solve this issue as I've got a welfare office and all that, but about 560 criminals in a town of 1700 people, nothing I do like lowering the rent seems to help at all. I think the only thing we can do is wait till they fix this.

[IronBadger]

There's a bug when a building is demolished, the people who were inside of it are placed on the sidewalk in front of where the building used to be and they're showing as "homeless" and they are stuck, not moving at all. I'm getting this in my cities. Thousands of sims are stuck in these groups and they jam up the population, job, unemployment, and crime numbers, and mess up demand.

[Catastrophic Mechanical Failure]

Originally posted by IronBadger:

There's a bug when a building is demolished, the people who were inside of it are placed on the sidewalk in front of where the building used to be and they're showing as "homeless" and they are stuck, not moving at all. I'm getting this in my cities. Thousands of sims are stuck in these groups and they jam up the population, job, unemployment, and crime numbers, and mess up demand.

I'm having the exact same issue, tons of available housing of all types and they are mostly not poor. Not even forcing them to move via demolishing the road they are on does anything, they just move to the nearest pavement and keep standing there. It's a shame too, because i was really enjoying economy 2.0 up until this became an issue in my city as well.

[zaltocleotl[Banned@Paradox]]

When a jail fills up...
delete it.
Same with prisons.
Let them fill up then delete them.
I assume the 'convicts' will rehab and return peacefully society.