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. These death rates can be fully customised via the configuration file.

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. The rate of illness can be fully customised either via the configuration file or the in-game mod options panel.

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.

The effect of these changes

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 amplified as, 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. This avoids the need to unrealistically restrict education just to ensure that you have enough entry-level workers, while still ensuring that higher-level workers are available for your more advanced jobs.

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.

Deathcare chance

This mod also changes the demand for deathcare in your population; specifically, it reduced the percentage of dead bodies that require deathcare (hearse) transport. The default game requires deathcare transportaton for 67% of dead bodies; this mod by default reduces that to 50%. This value can be customise anywhere from 0% to 100% either via the configuration file or the mod options panel; using this option, it's possible to entirely eliminate the need for deathcare and hearse transportation in your city, if you so desire.