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About this mod
Rebalances citizen lifespans, avoids unnatural game 'deathwaves', provides more realistic demographics, helps maintain diversity of education levels at all stages of the game, and enables customization of transportation preferences and deathcare requirements.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Tired of immersion-breaking "deathwaves" in the base game? Struggling with the base game's unrealistic education level straightjacket, and not wanting to artificially limit education delivery to fill your base-level jobs? Unhappy with the transport choices of your citizens? Looking for a more realistic simulation experience? Then this mod is for you!
This is the official continuation of Whitefang Greytail's Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance mod, and is fully backwards-compatible.
What this mod does - basic overview
This mod serves two purposes:
Firstly, it applies various changes to your cim's (citzen's) lifecycles in order to make gameplay more realistic and avoid some of the problematic behaviours of the base game.
Secondly, it changes your cims' preferences for modes of travel (car, bicycle, taxi, walking/public transport), depending on age group, wealth level, and whether they live in low- or high-density buildings. Both of these behaviours are configurable (see below).
Lifecycle changes
Firstly, Cims have a chance of early death, and realistic distributions of death depending on their age, calculated from real-life stats using the Australian Government Actuary table (2010-12). Death rates will naturally increase as cims age, resulting in a more natural distribution of deaths than in the base game.
Secondly, illness rates are increased (note that this does NOT encourage deathwaves). This means that the standard of healthcare provision is more relevant, and can add another randomising factor to cim lifespans.
Thirdly, immigrants to your city will now have a wide range of ages, from child through to seniors; education levels are also additionally randomised. Incoming teens will automatically have elementary school education, and some (but not all!) incoming young adults will have high school education.
In the base game, if a large number of new cims move into your city at the same time, then they would all age and die at the same time, creating the infamous "deathwaves". These would be amplifiedas, in response to all the suddently-vacated housing, another wave of immigrants move in at the same time - and so on and so on.... The Sunset Harbor (1.13 update) introduced some level of randomisation of elderly cim death ages which helped this a little, but still left a lot to be desired.
With this mod, the combined effect of all the above changes is that even if a whole bunch of new cims move into your city at exactly the same time, they will have randomised starting ages, even if two cims do have the same age, they'll (most likely) die at different times. This spreads out cim deaths and smooths the deathwaves (note that there still will be some natural peaks and troughs, as happens in the real world, but nothing on the scale of the base game deathwaves).
This randomisation of both ages and education levels works in combination with the education system update included with the Campus update (DLC not required for this to work) to ensure that you have a steady stream of workers with with varied education levels.
Mode of travel
The default configuation is designed to work in conjunction with the Realistic Population revisited mod, and implements higher car usage in low-density areas but lower car usage in high-density areas (compared to the base game). Additional optional configurations are also provided for default game, car-heavy usage, and car usage scaled according to wealth (see 'Configuraton file' below). This setting can also be easily disabled in the mod's options panel (reverting to base-game behaviour).
Includes optional 'no deathcare' functionality
See the 'Death' tab in the mod's options panel. Set to 0% to remove the need for hearses entirely.
Warning
If you activate this mod on an existing savegame, be aware that it WON'T solve any impending death wave, as the ages of cims who have already moved in will remain unchanged.
However, subsequent deathwaves will be increasingly smoothed by the mod's operation (note that it may take several deathwave cycles to settle down properly), and you can use the mod's inbuilt 'no deathcare' functionality to avoid your buildings becoming abandoned from an overload of dead bodies.
Otherwise, this mod is safe to enable or disable at any time.
Configuration file
See the mod wiki for details on the configuration file and how to customise it. Several pre-prepared alternative configuration files are also packaged with this mod (including one that duplicates the base game's behaviour).
Credit where credit is due
Huge amounts of credit to Whitefang Greytail, the creator of the original Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance mod.
This mod uses Harmony version 2.0 by Andreas Pardeike via the Cities Harmony mod by boformer.
Source available on GitHub.
This is the official continuation of Whitefang Greytail's Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance mod, and is fully backwards-compatible.
What this mod does - basic overview
This mod serves two purposes:
Firstly, it applies various changes to your cim's (citzen's) lifecycles in order to make gameplay more realistic and avoid some of the problematic behaviours of the base game.
Secondly, it changes your cims' preferences for modes of travel (car, bicycle, taxi, walking/public transport), depending on age group, wealth level, and whether they live in low- or high-density buildings. Both of these behaviours are configurable (see below).
Lifecycle changes
Firstly, Cims have a chance of early death, and realistic distributions of death depending on their age, calculated from real-life stats using the Australian Government Actuary table (2010-12). Death rates will naturally increase as cims age, resulting in a more natural distribution of deaths than in the base game.
Secondly, illness rates are increased (note that this does NOT encourage deathwaves). This means that the standard of healthcare provision is more relevant, and can add another randomising factor to cim lifespans.
Thirdly, immigrants to your city will now have a wide range of ages, from child through to seniors; education levels are also additionally randomised. Incoming teens will automatically have elementary school education, and some (but not all!) incoming young adults will have high school education.
In the base game, if a large number of new cims move into your city at the same time, then they would all age and die at the same time, creating the infamous "deathwaves". These would be amplifiedas, in response to all the suddently-vacated housing, another wave of immigrants move in at the same time - and so on and so on.... The Sunset Harbor (1.13 update) introduced some level of randomisation of elderly cim death ages which helped this a little, but still left a lot to be desired.
With this mod, the combined effect of all the above changes is that even if a whole bunch of new cims move into your city at exactly the same time, they will have randomised starting ages, even if two cims do have the same age, they'll (most likely) die at different times. This spreads out cim deaths and smooths the deathwaves (note that there still will be some natural peaks and troughs, as happens in the real world, but nothing on the scale of the base game deathwaves).
This randomisation of both ages and education levels works in combination with the education system update included with the Campus update (DLC not required for this to work) to ensure that you have a steady stream of workers with with varied education levels.
Mode of travel
The default configuation is designed to work in conjunction with the Realistic Population revisited mod, and implements higher car usage in low-density areas but lower car usage in high-density areas (compared to the base game). Additional optional configurations are also provided for default game, car-heavy usage, and car usage scaled according to wealth (see 'Configuraton file' below). This setting can also be easily disabled in the mod's options panel (reverting to base-game behaviour).
Includes optional 'no deathcare' functionality
See the 'Death' tab in the mod's options panel. Set to 0% to remove the need for hearses entirely.
Warning
If you activate this mod on an existing savegame, be aware that it WON'T solve any impending death wave, as the ages of cims who have already moved in will remain unchanged.
However, subsequent deathwaves will be increasingly smoothed by the mod's operation (note that it may take several deathwave cycles to settle down properly), and you can use the mod's inbuilt 'no deathcare' functionality to avoid your buildings becoming abandoned from an overload of dead bodies.
Otherwise, this mod is safe to enable or disable at any time.
Configuration file
See the mod wiki for details on the configuration file and how to customise it. Several pre-prepared alternative configuration files are also packaged with this mod (including one that duplicates the base game's behaviour).
Credit where credit is due
Huge amounts of credit to Whitefang Greytail, the creator of the original Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance mod.
This mod uses Harmony version 2.0 by Andreas Pardeike via the Cities Harmony mod by boformer.
Source available on GitHub.