Since I also have experienced sudden unexplainable population drops, I will report in this topic as well instead of opening a new one.
- Plattform: PS4
- Add-ons / DLCs: None, currently only using basic Version
- Error-Code: None
I am a new player, just bought the game a few weeks ago. Basis Version to test it before investing in DLCs. I have built three cities in total up to this point, and in all three cities at some point suddenly my population suddenly declined drastically. It does not seem to be related to the population or the time, since it happened with 90K Population in my first city (year unknown), 140K Population in my second city (year 2035) and 230K Population in my third city (year 2041).
So what happens? In all three cases it was basically the same. Suddenly the number that shows my population growth changes drastically into the negative, had it at -2500 in some cases. At the same time in my Residential Areas suddenly Skull Icons appear, signaling death people waiting for transport. But if I take a look at the City Info screen, the death rate has no sudden spike and is also well below the birth rate, so the population should still be on the rise. The only thing that does change is the other graph related to population growth (I think it shows how many people move into the city?) that suddenly drops to 0. So basically at one point I had a population change of +1500, seconds later it is -2500. And after that my population just keeps droping for about a year or two, before it suddenly changes again and rises as if nothing ever happened. In fact, it is funny how fast the numbers suddenly are climbing again, jumping from -2000 to +500 or even +1000 within a few seconds.
I always lose about 50K people in this period of time, which is just frustrating, since there does not seem to be a reason that explains it. My happiness is usually at least at 90% in all areas except comercial (there for some reason it´s always only at about 70%), so unhappy residents leaving can´t be the cause. My health is also way above 80% since I always build clinics and hospitals in every residential zone. And I also always have a graveyeard and/or a crematorium in every residential zone, so it´s also not possible that it just piled up for a certain amount of time or that the vehicles can´t reach the location due to traffic problems (unless, for some reason, the game does not use the closest facility, then traffic might have slowed down transportation in some cases). And I have no demand for any zones, usually I even have a lot of residential zones just waiting for people to build houses on them, so no living space can also be ruled out as a reason for the sudden stop of people moving into the town.
So since there does not seem to be an event that explains it I think it must be some kind of bug (unless someone can tell me what other cause it could have so I can try it out). If it would only happen in one residential zone, there might be another explanation, like everyone moving in at the same time and then dying at the same time, but since it happens to all my residential zones at once, that is more than just unlikely, since they were built at different times.
