First of all, greetings comrades.

I'll get to the point: I'm really a fan of the default populated map, and last night I decided to run a few experiments on it and took some notes, also with added research, regarding happiness and escapes.

Using easy reactions from citizens, I set up three scenarios running from March 19 to almost June, and got some interesting results, using the city of Lesczie (I hope it's that name) as a template.

The steps I took were simple: Set empty flats overlays and watch the statistics with the game running at 2x speed.

The first scenario: I built housing flats for 1.2k people and relocated 1.2k people there and gave them absolutely nothing. No sewage, heating, electricity and access to consumer goods. I then built a coal plant right next to them to generate power but left it at that. By the end of April, I've had 1.1k escapes, and the housing complex basically emptied.

The second scenario: Using cheat mode I built 6 Construction Offices, some concrete and asphalt plants with 100t storage (two mods that help a lot), and set up storages for all construction related itens (Warehouse, aggregate and open storage) and made the population built a huge shopping mall, a coal power plant and some housing complexes. I left it running for two months again, and by the end of it, I've had around 700 to 1k escapes.

The third scenario was identical to the second one, except I run it with water management turned off. The result was at most (I can't really recall the numbers) a third of the results of the second scenario.

Then I researched a lot and found out several posts discussing the effects of unemployment on happiness and apparently it's very small. They only demand things if they work, but as long as they needs are met, they really don't need a job. Another thing worth noting is that most escapes happened in the part of the city that I had set up stuff. So basically half the town was dormant and not caring at all, while the other half had fled because of the inexistence of basic needs being fulfilled, which seems to further some comments I read about workers only demanding things if they enter free mode (after working 8h or waiting 1h at a stop), instead of simply building anything near them. The happiness on average at the empty parts was below 20%, and on the untouched ones was over 60%. Regarding deaths, in all scenarios they stayed in the low hundreds.

I'll probably re-run this experiment a few times using different difficulties, conditions and etc, but for now those are the results I found. If anyone has any suggestion for a scenario, I'll test it as soon as possible, and if anyone runs similar tests at other conditions and share results, I'll be glad.