Question from Chris: What's killing you?

[x4000]

I see you guys are having a longer discussion about things, and that's cool -- please do keep doing that, and I'm going to pretty much stay out of there because the discussion is long and I can't really read and respond to stuff of that length without derailing all my work for the day.  I'm already about 3 hours into my workday without actually starting any work except doing mantis and similar, so that's not a great start.

What I'm looking for in this thread are more... semi-conclusions based on the other thread.  Please keep the main body of your discussion there, and then if you have small things you want to lob my way here, then lets have them.  Things I can digest easily, and then potentially improve for you.

Specifically, a few things I noticed:
1. Trash is supposedly killing a lot of you.  That really surprises me, because it should be easy to avoid that.  It used to kill me as well, but I managed to rebalance things so I don't die from that at all anymore.  I'm not sure if your cities are designed in such a way that this is happening, or if it's actually pollution that is doing you in.  I'd love to see savegames of your nearly-dead scenarios if you have them.

2. Crime is obviously the big killer.  In general if you have savegames of where you're nearly dead from it, I'd love to see your cities and I may have some questions about why you did this or that.  Just trying to understand how you guys are getting into these bottlenecks and thus what I can do to prevent that in the future.

I figured that crime might be something that impaled a lot of you redshirts, haha.  It was one of the biggest things that kept getting me prior to beta, but now that I know how to play and have adjusted a lot of things I'm finding it easy to manage for myself.  But that might mean "if you know the secret pattern this is easy, otherwise it is death" (that's bad), or it might mean "if you play in certain ways, you head into decline if you're not warned about XYZ."  I'm not sure if this is an interface or a mechanics problem or a bit of both, but either way it's fixable.  You wouldn't believe how much knob-turning I've done on crime in the last two weeks.  I was getting some mall shootings the likes of which you probably wouldn't believe.  150 people dead in one mall on a turn, etc.  Or maybe that's still happening to you?

Anyway, normally I'd want stuff on mantis, but this is a bit more freeform, so posting in this thread for now would be great.

Thanks!

[Misery]

I already rambled on in great detail about my overall experience in a topic I just made, but on the specific subject of what finally wrecked me.... it wasnt garbage, and it wasnt crime.  It was disease, and pollution. 

Garbage was easy to handle.  Keep an eye on the number, drop a dump... BAM, problem solved! 

Crime?  Oh I had it go really freaking high at one point, but I was actually able to fix it up very fast.   Smash a few buildings in strategic spots, plop down riot police in those locations... problem was solved pretty fast.

But disease?  It was like dominoes.  Which are on fire, covered in bees, and explode violently when toppled.  Once it started, it was too late.  I fought against it as long as I could, but there really wasnt any stopping it.  Couldnt do anything.  didn't help that the only anti-disease building I'm aware of takes quite some time to get to.... and the anti-pollution thing, the hazmat, just didn't seem to DO much.


So yeah, that's what got me.  Very abruptly.

[Captain Jack]

Trash is the symptom. Pollution-->crime seems to be the disease. Which is appropriate, because once trash piles up you get diseases which then kill you stone dead. Or rather don't because ~300 citizens will always survive, even when infected with five separate diseases.

There's a really interesting cascade effect where you get a small amount of crime in one turn, and next turn you are knee deep in dead bodies and all that entails. There's no way to react to this, you either don't have any crime or you're spiraling.

Makes a guy want to nerve staple the population and be done with it. 

I'll check my savegames, might be able to provide before and after.

[ptarth]

If you don't build a trash dump and rely on incineration, then as soon as you break the barrier, the litter starts to accumulate, which then starts the litter - pollution - crime death spiral.

[TheVampire100]

2. Crime is obviously the big killer.  In general if you have savegames of where you're nearly dead from it, I'd love to see your cities and I may have some questions about why you did this or that.  Just trying to understand how you guys are getting into these bottlenecks and thus what I can do to prevent that in the future.

I had a game with over 2 million crime in the end. I should have screenshotted it or saved it. But I'm very confident that I can manage that "abandona ll hope here" state again.

In the end the city looked more like a smog cloud instead of a city. Funny how 100 people can be such criminals...

[crazyroosterman]

I was thinking since pollution is what's causing this problem(people say litters a problem but I've had absolutely no problem although I am only 73 turns in) then shouldn't giving the pollution cleaners a mild buff at least reduce the problem personally 100 points of pollution cleaning for 24.000 crowns seems a bit over priced so perhaps the price of the buildings should be reduced or the points should be increased a bit?.

[FractalReaper]

I've finally pinned down what has been killing me. Stock exchanges. They generate something like 4k crime, it's ridiculous. I actually haven't had any problems with trash or corpses until the stockbrokers go on their murder sprees. I have a savegame right now of the turn after I put down a stock exchange. About two thirds of my population just died and there are way to many corpses for my single cemetery to handle, but my single dump is still handling all of my trash for now. That probably has something to do with the fact that I'm not using any factories this playthrough. This also means that my pollution isn't skyrocketing without people working my hazmats.

Disease is a huge problem once it happens. They spread through and kill off the population too fast. I've only ever been able to deal with it in a preventative manner, since if you don't have the infrastructure in place to handle it you won't be able to place that infrastructure until the disease has run its course. Which never seems to happen as it will just keep infecting the handful of citizens who never seem to die. Especially disease from pollution, since it will just keep on spawning new diseases.

[Captain Jack]

Yeah, I think disease virulence is the problem. I was two turns away from the Zenith ability that prevents trash diseases when one hit, and killed half my population. Five turns later (accounting for the SP delay) I get the ability... and then Redrash goes off anyway and I have more diseases than citizens.

As a heads up, it took me forever to learn that resource builders cause pollution. I suggest NOT building any gatherers until MUCH later into the game since you can build gatherers further out than you can Hazmats.

[Misery]

Yeah, I think disease virulence is the problem. I was two turns away from the Zenith ability that prevents trash diseases when one hit, and killed half my population. Five turns later (accounting for the SP delay) I get the ability... and then Redrash goes off anyway and I have more diseases than citizens.

As a heads up, it took me forever to learn that resource builders cause pollution. I suggest NOT building any gatherers until MUCH later into the game since you can build gatherers further out than you can Hazmats.

I havent even USED any resource gatherers myself.  There's... maybe a couple of factories, some eateries, a couple shopping malls, power things (the ones that make no pollution), about 5 linguistic centers, and... that's about it. And a million hazmats. No military, no resource, I did get a sonar system but I can probably just disable it, it seems pretty useless, same with the scouting thing.... actually I can probably disable ALOT of things right now, come to think of it....

Yet without any of those things, DISEASESPLOSION.   Just.... what.

Ah, the fun of early beta testing...   

[Misery]

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=16227

Also, I made this ticket;  because the only way to stop a disease is to very specifically and selectively leave only certain buildings active, because otherwise the dolts that make up the city will happily continue to work in their blasted shopping malls instead of, you know, saving the city.  I'm about ready to just start exploding buildings, rather than take the irritating amount of time to turn them off.

Though, maybe not... I'm probably going to quit momentarily here.  Once the stats go bonkers it seems there's no real solution to it.  Each temporary solution is then defeated by a new inevitably-disease-related problem.   I'd *love* to turn off that mechanic entirely right now....

Next time I play, the first and ONLY thing I'm going to do for awhile is build like 6 garbage dumps, and utterly surround them with hazmats.  NOTHING ELSE until that's done.

EDIT:  Yeah, I've quit that particular game;  dealing with the building toggles is just WAY too annoying for my limited patience.  I cant get the damn fools to work the stupid garbage dumps and such. 

[TheVampire100]

Hm, the problem with diseases is, you have no way of fighting them until you unlock the specific tech that appears very late in the game. To late for somethign that can just happen.
I suggest that either small hospitals give already a small disease fighting modifier (why shouldn't they anyway?) or that the required tech is unlocked much earlier. Otherwise, as soon as the first deseases appear and you have nothing to fight them you can give up your game.
I also think that pollution has a too drastical impact to the game for something that you cannot reduce. either that or the cleanup is bugged since having a bigger clean up as generated pollution does not reduce the pollution at all.

[ptarth]

I did some experiments, and I think we are misunderstanding how pollution works.
1. Pollution is like crime.
2. Pollution doesn't grow infinitely, it seems ALL tiles are able to reduce pollution. Forest & Jungle is 2. Grassland/Mountain very, low but still some.
3. Pollution drifts in certain directions, for certain distances (i.e., smog & wind). I don't think the direction every changes. I'm going to refer to this as wind & wind direction. Down wind is the way the smog pollution goes.
4. Solution to Pollution: Find out which way is down wind, mostly likely left or right. Build everything that doesn't produce pollution upwind. Build pollution sources downwind, but orthogonal to the path of the wind. Build hazmats, 1 space upwind of the pollution generators.
5. You will see your pollution increase some, but then it will stabilize. With a factory, dump, 3 extractor and an OIL power plant (2000 pollution in 5 tiles!), I was stable at 1400 pollution. The OIL Power plant didn't even have a hazmat next to it. I believe the hazmats are used to hurry the removal of pollution from buildings, not to completely cancel pollution out.

I think I was wrong when I framed this game as Skyward Collapse. It isn't. It is SimCity with combat. Put your Industry away from your Residential areas. High level buildings all seem to produce pollution, so that may be an issue. Stay upwind.

Now to figure out crime. Because apparently Banks and Stock Exchanges are actually Burlust Mafia Dons working part time for the Triads and the Yakuza.

[Misery]

I did some experiments, and I think we are misunderstanding how pollution works.
1. Pollution is like crime.
2. Pollution doesn't grow infinitely, it seems ALL tiles are able to reduce pollution. Forest & Jungle is 2. Grassland/Mountain very, low but still some.
3. Pollution drifts in certain directions, for certain distances (i.e., smog & wind). I don't think the direction every changes. I'm going to refer to this as wind & wind direction. Down wind is the way the smog pollution goes.
4. Solution to Pollution: Find out which way is down wind, mostly likely left or right. Build everything that doesn't produce pollution upwind. Build pollution sources downwind, but orthogonal to the path of the wind. Build hazmats, 1 space upwind of the pollution generators.
5. You will see your pollution increase some, but then it will stabilize. With a factory, dump, 3 extractor and an OIL power plant (2000 pollution in 5 tiles!), I was stable at 1400 pollution. The OIL Power plant didn't even have a hazmat next to it. I believe the hazmats are used to hurry the removal of pollution from buildings, not to completely cancel pollution out.

I think I was wrong when I framed this game as Skyward Collapse. It isn't. It is SimCity with combat. Put your Industry away from your Residential areas. High level buildings all seem to produce pollution, so that may be an issue. Stay upwind.

Now to figure out crime. Because apparently Banks and Stock Exchanges are actually Burlust Mafia Dons working part time for the Triads and the Yakuza.

The problem:  You cant just put those things anywhere.  The buildings are restricted to needing contact with other buildings.   And if there is some sort of wind effect, I havent seen it... my own residential WAS away from the industrial (or at least, as far from it as the connection restriction allowed) but also, I had very, very little industrial.  Or other things that produced pollution.  As it was, I was also sitting right around 1400; the number was VERY SLOWLY going down.  Yet still, when disaster struck, everything in every direction from the industrial soon corrupted (all at once) with disease.

Though, in addition to this, it was an extremely sudden garbagesplosion that suddenly made it go bonkers.  Garbage went from a count of 0, to about 22,000, in *one* turn.  Which made no sense at all.  And of course, the instant this happened, the pollution went off the charts. 


All very confusing.  Still feels like Skyward to me though; there's too many restrictions on where things can be set down, which is exactly how Skyward had it.

Crime I still havent encountered.  I've so far been about 170 turns into the game.

[mllange]

What's killing me? In my latest game - nothing. I've seemingly reached something of a population-plateau around 2250 which is frustrating ambitions for growth, but aside from an encroaching but seemingly benign neighboring race (Burlusts), I have nothing to worry about.

The most frustrating aspect of the game for me (as anticipated) at this point is the lack of information on why and how the mechanics are operating. Why isn't my population growing when I have excess food, water, population capacity, good overall health and relatively low crime and no pollution, disease or planet rage?  Things like that.

[Captain Jack]

What's killing me? In my latest game - nothing. I've seemingly reached something of a population-plateau around 2250 which is frustrating ambitions for growth, but aside from an encroaching but seemingly benign neighboring race (Burlusts), I have nothing to worry about.

The most frustrating aspect of the game for me (as anticipated) at this point is the lack of information on why and how the mechanics are operating. Why isn't my population growing when I have excess food, water, population capacity, good overall health and relatively low crime and no pollution, disease or planet rage?  Things like that.

How's unemployment? If more than 10% of citizens are unemployed, births stop.