Colossal Order Is A Secret Death Cult

[BlitzPackage 19]

Why else would they require us to have like 5 death care facilities per 300 residents?  Then, they even have a statue about death, and another one about the cycle of life and death.  LOL!  I joke, I joke.

 

My whole point is that they seem to really want us to invest a ton of resources in death care.  I think this is one of the areas they need to tune.  Any idea about whether they will be tuning this?

 

 

[Mystrelia 57]

It doesn't seem overly excessive to me. I have a city of a little over 20,000 Cims and two cemeteries. Remember, as long as the hearses can get around your town not all roads have to be green, just those you where you want to provide extra services for top-notch building upgrades and such. When I first started playing I was worried about gentrification in all the neighborhoods. Once I discovered that since Cims can use services that aren't necessarily close to them I think the whole system is set up rather brilliantly.

[Jasoncw 11,940]

It's weird that out of everything they could have chosen to simulate they chose dead people. 

 

One of the benefits though is that in real life cemeteries take up a lot of land and is one of the bigger factors in shaping a city. I bet someday we'll have really nice modular deathcare lot systems.

[Mystrelia 57]

As frustrating as it can be to deal with, I'm loving the whole aspect of Cims retiring and leaving the workforce, then later dying and needing some type of internment. I've never liked the idea of cremation so I'm hoping to just keep adding cemeteries as necessary as I progress in my city. (Thankfully they're easy to build around then garbage dumps.) Shoot, probably what I should do is go ahead and place several cemeteries about so they can fill more gradually, like based on proximity. I think of all the areas around the nearby cities here and there are quite a number of cemeteries that have been here for decades, most of them not full yet.

[BlitzPackage 19]

Well...I do think it is great to have in the game.  I like that the simulation has all of this in it.  I think it's a tad overdone but I do like that the lifecycle of citizens has to be taken into account.  They have truly done a great job managing this in the game.

[Linoa06 1,374]

I also think they long for the days of the USSR...I built a Statue of Industry which is a man with a hammerw which I put in true Soviet style in the main square of the town. And if my poor cims get too unhappy, I'll just release water from the dam...

 

More seriously it's cool we have cemetaries and crematories, think about it, it's an often overlooked part of managing any town. I understand some are in for the cityscape, or to make the craziest interchanges but..Yeah.

[BlakeMW 84]

In the other thread... the 'I see dead people' one, I investigate how corpse incinerators (mmmm, what a nicer name) work. The basic facts are this, corpse incinerators can incinerate as many corpses as they get delivered, unlike the Trash Incinerator which incinerates a certain amount per week, the corpse incinerator just burns everything it receives nearly immediately. There is no pomp or ceremony, they just throw all those corpses in the incinerator and roast 'em. In practical terms they can incinerate at least 200 corpses per week, which means a single corpse incinerator can (potentially) burn all the dead people generated by a population of ~50,000, if you can somehow feed them into it fast enough.

 

The puny 7 hearses which the corpse incinerator comes with cannot possibly keep up with its voracious appetite, in practice you tend to get about 20-30 corpses burned per week, a mere 10% of what is possible, but when a cemetery empties, it uses it's own (the cemetery's) hearses.

 

The workaround goes like this, you build a few cemeteries, which are way cheaper, and come with more hearses. Once a cemetery is full, you build a corpse incinerator (*sigh*, crematorium) right next to it, and set the cemetery to empty. The corpse incinerator will burn them up at about 90-180 a week, and within 6-12 months, the cemetery will be empty. Now set the cemetery back to collecting corpses, and turn the crematorium off.

 

Once another cemetery fills up, relocate the crematorium to it, fire it back up, and feed in those corpses. Rinse and repeat.

(Note that you don't need the crematorium to be placed that closely, a couple of blocks away is good enough; because the cemetery has 10 hearses and only sends out at a limited rate you can still get maximum emptying rate at some distance)

 

One of the nice things about this trick, is that while the cemetery is feeding the crematorium corpses, the crematorium can still use its own 7 hearses to gather dead people, so while the cemetery is emptying, the crematorium takes over the collection of fresh corpses, meaning you get no interruption in services.

 

I don't know how much of this behavior the Dev's intended. I think it might partially be intended, i.e. that you are meant to have a motivation to set cemeteries to empty, such that the feature is useful. They probably didn't intend it to be cheesed by building a single crematorium and relocating it around the city - to be fair, that approach is optional. You can get most the performance benefits just by building a couple of crematoriums and setting full cemeteries to empty so that you are using cemetery hearses to burn people rather than the more expensive crematorium hearses.

 

edit: Incidentally, the realistic death rate for a city of 50,000 would be about 10 people per week. The in-game death rate is about 20x that, so there are grounds for thinking it's a bit excessive.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

I also think they long for the days of the USSR...I built a Statue of Industry which is a man with a hammerw which I put in true Soviet style in the main square of the town. And if my poor cims get too unhappy, I'll just release water from the dam...

 

During the 2nd world war the USSR was Finland's greatest enemy. Somehow the Fins successfully defended their country against the Red Army and Finland never lost its independence to the Soviets. Had the USSR occupied Finland the country today would probably be a developing one and still be struggling like the East European countries.

[Mystrelia 57]

 

 

edit: Incidentally, the realistic death rate for a city of 50,000 would be about 10 people per week. The in-game death rate is about 20x that, so there are grounds for thinking it's a bit excessive.

I think it's because their lifespans are so stinkin' short. With the longer life mod (the one where they live about ten years) I have about ten or so deaths per week in a city of slightly over 20,000. Maybe others don't have a problem with that short of lifespan but for me everything just happens way too fast if I don't extend their lives a bit. It seems like I can never get things evened out with the default.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Seems so horrible to think of it that way - a temporary roving "corpse incinerator" that comes to town and sets up shop for a few weeks a year, not unlike the circus.  Horrible yet hilarious.

[Cobraroll 138]

Just wait until the modders manage to make "moving crematoriums". I imagine a big vehicle, like a truck, roving around the city and spewing smoke like a locomotive. It'd cremate bodies on the fly, never returning to its facility unless there were no more bodies to pick up. In practise, it'd be a hearse with unlimited capacity.

[BlakeMW 84]

Speaking of mods, I was thinking a mass grave mod could spare me the trouble of my roving crematorium, just chuck all the bodies in a pit and burn them, as you do to eliminate evidence of war crimes. Although I suppose it would be strange if a mass grave gave people happiness for deathcare...

[eskie227 1]

 

 

 

edit: Incidentally, the realistic death rate for a city of 50,000 would be about 10 people per week. The in-game death rate is about 20x that, so there are grounds for thinking it's a bit excessive.

I think it's because their lifespans are so stinkin' short. With the longer life mod (the one where they live about ten years) I have about ten or so deaths per week in a city of slightly over 20,000. Maybe others don't have a problem with that short of lifespan but for me everything just happens way too fast if I don't extend their lives a bit. It seems like I can never get things evened out with the default.

 

I tried my latest city without the longer life span mod just to see how it would run if I built out quickly and allowed the workforce to "regenerate" at the faster, "game" rate. So I got nicely built out, with a ton of industrial and office space, when all of a sudden the Black Plague swept my town. Not only was i scrambling to get enough crematoria in place to handle piles of cims who all died at the same time, but buildings were getting abandoned from the smell of all those bloating corpses (can't blame them either, I'd move out if a dead body was in the next apartment for weeks on end too), my industry started contracting  from the loss of workers and demand for product, and it looked like I was in a death spiral of what was otherwise one of my better cities.

 

My population dropped precipitously, with a concomitant loss of revenue in taxes. I assumed it would simply implode, but as I had built up a pretty big cash reserve, rather than just moving on to another city, I let it run out to see when it finally would go bankrupt (and hopefully get me the 1,000 abandoned building award before going bankrupt). So after a few months in the red, low and behold, my population went from 150,000 to about 100,000, and stabilized. My cash flow turned around (just about right before I would have run out of money), and the town started growing again, albeit slowly.

 

Obviously, there was no demand for residential or industrial zoning as there were plenty of empty, abandoned areas. But interestingly, my commercial demand shot way up. In my earlier cities, I typically found demand for commercial space always felt kind of low for a city, but suddenly I'm having to lay in whole new areas, and even rezone some residential into commercial to keep up with demand. Which is nice, but not really the way I thought would the best approach to stimulate demand, having a mass die off.

 

Needless to day, I turned the longer lifespan mod back on. I might even try just toggling it periodically to get a more staggered age spectrum, because those mass die offs are just not fun to get through.

[Mystrelia 57]

I pretty much ignore the demand meter and build based on other things my city is telling me. How much unemployment is there? Do industries have enough markets for their goods? Do Cims have good access to shopping? Things like that. I only ever add commercial areas when it seems right, like after I built a sizable area of new residential and I think they could use a shopping center closer to their homes. I had what I think is a reasonably good sized area of light commercial and the businesses were struggling a little. I didn't do it for this purpose but I built the Sterling District, which is all apartments and offices over across the freeway then added a street over the freeway to that shopping district. Of course in the Sterling District they have the policies to increase land value and they shot up to really wealthy Cims in no time at all and boy did they have an effect on that shopping center! I was focusing on other things and came back to find all the businesses in that light commercial zoning had topped out their levels. I added a high-density shopping area in the Sterling District and the Cims who live in that district now use both of them.

 

It seems like no matter what industry always wants more and commercial varies. Then my residential demand rises and falls based on reasons I don't know but one thing I have seen is that lack of employable Cims doesn't seem to be one of the criteria so when the labor pool drops I just figure out ways to get more into town, despite what the demand on the indicator says.

[BlitzPackage 19]

I pretty much ignore the demand meter and build based on other things my city is telling me. How much unemployment is there? Do industries have enough markets for their goods? Do Cims have good access to shopping? Things like that. I only ever add commercial areas when it seems right, like after I built a sizable area of new residential and I think they could use a shopping center closer to their homes. I had what I think is a reasonably good sized area of light commercial and the businesses were struggling a little. I didn't do it for this purpose but I built the Sterling District, which is all apartments and offices over across the freeway then added a street over the freeway to that shopping district. Of course in the Sterling District they have the policies to increase land value and they shot up to really wealthy Cims in no time at all and boy did they have an effect on that shopping center! I was focusing on other things and came back to find all the businesses in that light commercial zoning had topped out their levels. I added a high-density shopping area in the Sterling District and the Cims who live in that district now use both of them.

 

It seems like no matter what industry always wants more and commercial varies. Then my residential demand rises and falls based on reasons I don't know but one thing I have seen is that lack of employable Cims doesn't seem to be one of the criteria so when the labor pool drops I just figure out ways to get more into town, despite what the demand on the indicator says.

 

Thanks for letting me know this.  I will have to put this into effect.

[Mystrelia 57]

Sure thing, BlitzPackage! When I played SC4 and back it seemed like the best way to build the city was based on the zoning demand. In this one, though, because of the way everything works together it takes a bit of fine tuning and it's something I'm really enjoying. It always seemed in SC it didn't matter if I had 10% unemployment or if work places weren't staffed. I could just go off the demand graph and not worry about it. It's just not that way in Skylines. If you don't have the workers to staff the buildings they'll end up going abandoned. At the same time if you have unemployment Cims will pack up their bags and leave town. (Yes, those cars leaving town really are Cims moving out--I had to pay close attention to the number of cars and population drops to make sure.) I think one of the reasons I would tire of SC games after a while was that they just felt like I was building and designing for the sake of doing it. You know, follow the meter and zone this. Build a road here. Put in services there so I can zone the next residential area, etc. I feel like I have more purpose to my building with CS. Blame it on my years of playing Sims but when I see those little bitty people walking and driving around the city I know that every decision I make matters in their little pixelated lives.