Newbie questions about Crime and Pest

[lauchunho]

Hi all, I know these are newbie questions but can anyone help:

1. Why the crime rate is fluctuating? For example, the crime rate of one of my city is +200 (yes it's high...), and the production is not crime-related. Next round it is 201, next 202, and so on. What factors actually affects this crime rate change? By the way I have seen it dropping from 203->202->...180 gradually as well with no crime-fighting work done.

2. Is there a way to remove Pest (cockroach) and Pest (rats), they cost me 3 and even I build healer hut to reduce disease to negative they still exist.

 

[AIAndy]

Hi all, I know these are newbie questions but can anyone help:

1. Why the crime rate is fluctuating? For example, the crime rate of one of my city is +200 (yes it's high...), and the production is not crime-related. Next round it is 201, next 202, and so on. What factors actually affects this crime rate change? By the way I have seen it dropping from 203->202->...180 gradually as well with no crime-fighting work done.

What you are seeing there is the current crime, which moves to other cities via trade routes or to plots around the city (and on from plot to plot). There are sources (on buildings or units) that add to crime each turn but crime also decays.

 

[Yudishtira]

2. Is there a way to remove Pest (cockroach) and Pest (rats), they cost me 3 and even I build healer hut to reduce disease to negative they still exist.

I don't know if you can get rid of them at all. They auto-build as you know, based on factors such that the game doesn't tell you what they are. You can guess that they might be housing types, health and disease level, excess food availability...that's all I can think of.

Before you work on reversing them entirely (which may not prove possible at all), of course you will want to build some happiness buildings to counteract the unhappiness effects.

You can't say it's not realistic - what city has eradicated rats and/or cockroaches entirely...even in the modern world and era?

 

[HTAPAWASO]

I could definitely be mistaken, but I think pests are based only on city size - you can't eliminate them in the same way that you eliminate diseases and crimes by lowering their properties.

 

[ls612]

What you are seeing there is the current crime, which moves to other cities via trade routes or to plots around the city (and on from plot to plot). There are sources (on buildings or units) that add to crime each turn but crime also decays.

Would it be possible (or easy) to make the hover text for Properties give more detail about what is causing their decay or increase, as well as show how much the rates themselves are changing? The opacity there is something I've found turns off people from C2C, as they don't understand that Properties follow logistic curves in growth/decay.

 

[Yudishtira]

Would it be possible (or easy) to make the hover text for Properties give more detail about what is causing their decay or increase, as well as show how much the rates themselves are changing? The opacity there is something I've found turns off people from C2C, as they don't understand that Properties follow logistic curves in growth/decay.

Unless you mean 'logarithmic', congratulations as you have successfully blinded me with science!

 

[AIAndy]

Would it be possible (or easy) to make the hover text for Properties give more detail about what is causing their decay or increase, as well as show how much the rates themselves are changing? The opacity there is something I've found turns off people from C2C, as they don't understand that Properties follow logistic curves in growth/decay.

Possible, yes, just a matter of the effort to write the functions and add more info to the mouseover.

 

[pzm52v]

Possible, yes, just a matter of the effort to write the functions and add more info to the mouseover.

It would be fantastic to know really what is happening and how is changing only hovering the mouse over....

 

[ls612]

Unless you mean 'logarithmic', congratulations as you have successfully blinded me with science!

No, Logistic functions are exponential functions with a rate limitation, or carrying capacity. For properties IIRC the carrying capacity is 10 times the raw rate of growth or decay.

 

[Hydromancerx]

2. Is there a way to remove Pest (cockroach) and Pest (rats), they cost me 3 and even I build healer hut to reduce disease to negative they still exist.

2. Not currently.

 

[Raven Destroyer]

eliminating Rats from cities would never come true maybe in the FAR FAR future where they can use transporters to disassemble them and use them as their power source (Poor rat btw) i can't think of a better solution against them Heck even New York city has a Rat problem and those ain't small either

but Crime and disease i never found challenging maybe because i'm playing some halfass way idk but even on about Midscale [prince or something] difficulty (high for my standards i dislike getting slaughtered) at one moment or another i just manage to get the city guard so tight the thought alone chokes criminals (more so when i just upgraded them to the next tier) same with Disease -1000 is normal to me -500 is rampant yea i have sometimes it above 0 but that's early to mid game Medieval Era most disappeared only where my expansionism has expanded further then my jihad on criminals and diseases you have some problems

 

[lauchunho]

Thanks all for your replies!

 

[Raven Destroyer]

Thanks all for your replies!

Gladly done and just play to play Worrying only makes you old i just play and see what crazy stuff i can make happen and usually the cat lands on his paws making me happy

 

[Antaryon]

Regarding this topic, can someone briefly explain to me how does the crime/disease/pollution system works now, because I'm unable to figure it out.

I would guess, that since everything else, this works in the same way as like happines, meaning, that there are certain buildings/civics/population/trade that give different effects regarding this, but since the cities affect there surrounding plots too (by the way which I don't know what effect has on these said plots) there must be some different mechanic behind it.

What I've found on it so far is that neither of these are properly implemented yet, if that's the case, then why don't you remove them or get something more simple in place of these, like simple building/civic based calculations?

By the way the main thing I don't get, is why are there negative numbers, I mean why can be the current crime rate a negative number (not the per turn number)?

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's a very complex formula that takes decay, trade, and in general many factors into consideration. It can get overwhelmed later in the game when the values go beyond the normal integer limitations but otherwise the math does work accurately, if not a little mysteriously to the player getting used to it.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

What I've found on it so far is that neither of these are properly implemented yet, if that's the case, then why don't you remove them or get something more simple in place of these, like simple building/civic based calculations?

As far as I know they are fully implemented and working as intended except in the later eras. It may have been better if we had not used integers and a linear approach to values but I doubt we need to go back and redo anything.

There is a problem with display of the numbers, it shows the change that happened between last turn and this not the expected change between this and the next like food, production and revolutionary sentiment etc. Maybe we can come up with some other display options such as the current total unhealthiness caused by disease.

 

[Antaryon]

As far as I know they are fully implemented and working as intended except in the later eras. It may have been better if we had not used integers and a linear approach to values but I doubt we need to go back and redo anything.

There is a problem with display of the numbers, it shows the change that happened between last turn and this not the expected change between this and the next like food, production and revolutionary sentiment etc. Maybe we can come up with some other display options such as the current total unhealthiness caused by disease.

In that case could you explain how does it supposed to work in the early eras, because in that case I could check whether it works properly or not.

And if it works properly why are there negative numbers? (Unless it is a display issue, and in reality those aren't negatives)

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Why should there not be negative numbers? There are for happiness, they are called unhappiness. The negative of crime is law abiding, you don't get anything special for negative crime it just takes longer for crime to become a problem. Whereas with positive crime as you reach certain values you get buildings that cost you money and cause unhappiness to reflect the amount of crime in your city.

An description of what the properties are and how they work should be in the concepts page of the pedia. If they aren't then they need to be written and added.

 

[Antaryon]

Why should there not be negative numbers? There are for happiness, they are called unhappiness. The negative of crime is law abiding, you don't get anything special for negative crime it just takes longer for crime to become a problem. Whereas with positive crime as you reach certain values you get buildings that cost you money and cause unhappiness to reflect the amount of crime in your city.

An description of what the properties are and how they work should be in the concepts page of the pedia. If they aren't then they need to be written and added.

You are right, I should have looked there first, there is a description, although it is not an exact description, just describes approximately the working of crime pollution etc.

Now regarding the negative numbers, in my head, 0 means no crime, no pollution, no diseases. Now if there is no pollution, say, in the air, then there can't be less then that, because there is none. The same with crime and diseases. Although with the diseases and crime, I could say that you can be more healthy and safe or maybe you could say that the air could be even more clear, but from a practical persepective, it is easier to say, that 0 means that it is as good as it can be, and the buildings/events should occur, when a 'threshold' is broken as it is in the game. So it could be much easier to decipher what's happening at least for me. Another much bigger issue, that unlike happiness in the game these things work like money, you can accumulate them. And if in the early eras you accumulate a lot's of negative points it would be harder to later have, say, high crime rate. It doesn't work like that in reality. If you stop preventing crime or stop preventing air pollution there will be in that instance crime and pollution. Or if you build a huge coal power plant then no matter how clean was the previous kind of energy source there will be pollution. That's my argument in this case.

 

[Yudishtira]

Now regarding the negative numbers, in my head, 0 means no crime, no pollution, no diseases. Now if there is no pollution, say, in the air, then there can't be less then that, because there is none.

The short answer is that a zero value in the crime/pollution/disease "index" does not mean a total absence of crime. Lots of indices and scales go negative when they are still actually positive: an obvious example is the Celsius (and Fahrenheit) temperature scales.