How To Fix Death Wave Cycles in Cities Skylines

A very simple way to stop death waves in their tracks.

How to fix the death wave cycle

This a very simple way to stop the dreaded death wave cycle. If you look at the image of my cities population growth, you can clearly see death waves getting stronger and stronger until they simply stop. the way I did this is I stopped putting down residential zones when there was a high demand for residential. I just started doing the opposite of what the demand bars were telling me, and the death waves evened out.

Deeper Explanation:
As you build your city, the demand between housing and industrial zones will rise as the other is lowering. So for example, there's a high demand for houses, you zone residential, demand for houses goes down as people move in, demand for jobs goes up. If you do exactly as your citizens demand when they demand it, you will hit a death wave cycle eventually. This is actually fine because once it starts, there's quite an easy way to fix it.

If you're stuck in a death wave cycle, the next time the demand for residential zones goes up, don't zone any. It will go down again all by itself eventually and demand for industrial zones will go up again.

When the demand for residential zones then goes all the way down, this is the time to zone residential. Do this a couple of times over the next death wave cycles, and your cities population should mostly even out.

To undestand why this works, you need to understand the mechanics behind the death wave cycles.

1, Whenever you build new residential zones, only adults move in. The first time you build residential, you are creating your first population bubble, a large percentage of your population that is the same age.

2, Those adults have children at the same time, which becomes your second population bubble.

3, the population bubbles age. When the first bubble of adults become seniors, their children become young adults, when those seniors start dying, their children become adults and start having children, growing a new bubble.

4, When adults start having children, your population starts rising, and they demand more housing.

5, you build more residential zones, which atract new adults from outside of the city. This is like throwing oil on a fire. You are adding new adults on top of a bubble of adults, making the situation worse.

If you zone residential when the demand bar is at it's lowest, means, you're adding new adults into the city in between two other bubbles. One bubble will be seniors, and the other young adults. By adding more adults at this time, you create new population bubbles to offset the ones already there.

When you start experiencing death waves, start doing the opposite of what the demand bar is telling you.

[Lavaduder]

Thanks....ish

[Johnny Penso]

You'll have death spikes so long as you have growth spikes. If you stop the time progression to do some landscaping + roadwork + zoning for example, then all those people in that little subdivision are going to die around the same time. Even if you don't stop the time progression but zone a ton of houses all at once the same thing will happen.

Spread out your zoning over a more gradual period and it'll even out much better.

[Kyle Butler]

good sruff wtf did you just call the ppl of skylines he said cims!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Good stuff]

Very good tips! There is also a mod to rebalance the aleatory death of yours cims : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=654707599

[lefty1117]

This is very interesting. To me it highlights that perhaps there are some charts missing that we actually need to predict these waves. For example the obvious one is workers added vs workers exiting the workforce. Another one might be the population replacement rate - or births per death. Maybe those numbers are taking into account on the demand sliders and we just don't see enough detail - if we knew those rates it might lead to a calculation (by someone with a better math mind than me!) on how many residential or industrial tiles to add per week.

[Democracy Officer [REDACTED]]

simpler zone out smaler zones over a long period of time....

[richards_e7]

I get your point, worth a try so thanks.

[Clover]

so just take the population cycle and fucking yeet it out the window, understood

[Badben]

100k? that's actually insane. I can't guarantee this will work for a problem of that size, but give it a shot.

[CaddyShack]

What a very insightful take on fixing the death wave cycle. I've been suffering with almost 100k cims dying each wave. Perhaps when the next death wave occurs again, I'll take this in mind!