Hi everyone,

found Afterlife here after playing it already the first time in 1996, bought it... and ran in exactly the same problem I had back there in the 90s :)

As heaven grows, the roads get clogged and Aria never stops complaining about it.
I saw in online tutorials that developed 3x3 fates reduce this, and I can confirm out that this really helps a lot. In fact relocating the special buildings often did the trick to encourage the development of 3x3 fates by soaking them in good vibes.

Alas, as ich reach 50 Million Souls the problem emerges again, so the 3x3 tactics just delays is. Inspecting the buldings I think that the criterion about "X steps needed to reach this fate" (or a similar sentence, I play the German version) determines the road clogging.

As long as you have simple 1x1 fates these step counts tend to get really high, in advanced heavens more than 100.
At the beginning their conversion into 3x3 fates reduced this to >20 steps, and the roads were clear. Now that I reached 50 millions the steps even increase for the newer(!) 3x3 zones to 50-70,but not for the old ones.

Long story short:
I suppose the step count is essential but I have no clue how it is calculated. It seems pretty random to me, even placing gates and ykarma stations nearby does not seem to help.

Does anyone know how to prevent the problem?

What works pretty well for me is to make essentially a grid of roads, each box holding four different 3x3 rewards. From time to time, I'll still see some absurdly high number of steps show up, though.

I think what's happening is multiple-reward souls decide they want a reward offered in a partially filled reward halfway across the map rather than the partially filled one right across the street. Even if it's the same level of evolution.

Hi Thorfinn,

thanks for your reply.

The 4 box grid you describe is the best road layout for heaven I think. You can even use only two different rewards (say 2 yellow 3x3 zones and 2 red 3x3 zones) as long as they are placed diagonally. The souls still seem to be content about the mixing.

What you say about the step calculation depending on an awkward route calculation makes sense, maybe from all simulated souls the maximum is taken as value for each reward.
Strangely I even encountered 3x3 rewards which showed 0 steps to reach them - can't imagine how this could happen...

By the way you can modify the complete gameplay by influencing beliefs right in the beginning of the game because as the population grows they just seem to inherit the belief of their ancestors. I used this to get 100% HOHOists in order to reduce traffic. Might be one reason why the roads got clogged way later in the game as usual. But it is definitely no final solution.

Maybe gates and karma stations should be centered in heaven, and you should build several "mini-heavens" this way which are not connected. They could even share the same power stations as you could spread the power ower the water tiles at the map border. I could imagine that in each of these heavens the step count could not get too high because the distances are smaller.

After several attempts to reduce the step number I think that the game is just buggy or broken at this aspect.

What I did:
- converting the population right from the beginning to SUSAists (95-97%)
- converting the population right from the beginning to HOHOists (99%)
- converting the population right from the beginning to ALFists (95%)
- Putting the green, red and violet virtues to maximum
- Putting the yellow, orange and brown sins to maximum

By this I got almost only permanent souls which should not wander in any way: not between heaven and hell, not between the virtues and sins, and not between afterlife and karma station. And the fully developed 3x3 structures emit good vibes in heaven and bad vibes in hell.

As funny side effects I got a 4 times bigger hell than heaven (seems that the EMBOS consider their sins more relevant than their virtues :) ) and for some weird reason almost 100% temporary souls in hell for envy. Looks like almost all not SUSAists, HOHOists, and ALFists start by being punished for envy only - them temporary souls in all other sins and virtues are close to 0.

BUT:
Nothing of this did resolve the damn road problem! Heaven is really small and centered around one gate and karma station so all distances should be equally long. Well, the step counts don't care!

Instead the most stupid approach worked:
If new rewards are constructed then look at the step count. If it 100 or more then destroy the thing and create the zone anew. The new building will have a complete new step count.

Can't figure out any other working strategy