Vanille city growth.

[Doomed]

Do cities only grow so big in vanilla?
I have cities that keep 94% resources and have mass transit to many other cities and they don't grow beyond 750, while I have cities I basically ignore and they are over 1000.

Do I need to download that realistic city growth mod and start over or is there a trick to city growth?
Thanks.

[Vimpster]

All growth is based on the initial size of a town. If it's initial size was very small than it will always be relatively small compared to larger towns with similar growth modifiers.

Depending on how many other towns there are and how big they are there is a finite size that towns can reach. The most growth you can get from cargo if all demanded cargo is being supplied is a 200% modifier. So if the town was 300 then a 200% modifier would take it to 900. 300 is actually the biggest a town can be without any modifiers unless you use sandbox to increase it or you play on a custom map where someone has planted a city themselves. But most maps won't have a town with an initial size of 300 and will instead have its biggest towns be something less than 300.

Private and public destination growth modifiers have no cap on them but they are limited, as I said before, by how many towns there are on the map and how big their initial size was. So a map with 30 towns will allow for much larger towns than a map with just 10 towns. My biggest so far was a town of 2800 on a map with 32 towns. Its initial size was around 290 I think and had growth modifiers of over 870%
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2024747049
This was a vanilla game on a randomly generated map.

[Tsubame ⭐]

- Number of towns: more towns in general will result in higher %.
- Proximity of towns: towns closer together will result in higher %, because of private traffic connection bonuses.

Given private traffic is a factor, especially late game when people get cars, and the aforemented default town size mentioned above, you can have cities you service that are smaller than cities you do not.

You do not need to restart.

In Sandbox mode, you can edit town's values, to make it easier for you to have more people.

You can also plop more towns, either in Sandbox mode using the default Town plopper, or better, using this mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2308330610

You could also tweak up your cities up using this mod, and increase population values of buildings:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2265952996

Note that independently of the approach used, very high region populations - there is no hard cutoff as this depends on hardware specifications and road+train network size, but may be noticeable at around 20k-30k people - will result in performance issues, so it is recommended to not go overboard unless you are ok with this.

[Doomed]

Thank you.

[Zapp]

If you use the Sandbox mod to add new cities, they will all interconnect, and they will all grow massively.

The regular factors (reducing emissions, supplying goods etc) add perhaps 50 or 100 percentage units to the city's end total size (the number that's affecting the town's base size). As Vimpster stated, goods supply can give you +200 to the population increase percentage.

But if you have several interconnect cities they will all report figures like +500, +800 or even several thousand percentage units. Meaning that even the tiniest hamlet with a base population of 50 will grow to a population of 1000. While cities that start big can reach 2000, 3000 or even 5000.

All you need to do is the usual stuff - cover your cities with bus lines that lead to the city's railroad station, and connect the cities with frequent commuter trains.

Your city growth will skyrocket to the point where it will feel you have broken the game. Mucking about with industries and goods will pale in comparison. No need to bother with reducing emissions. No need for mods (other than the default Sandbox).

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Zapp:

But if you have several interconnect cities they will all report figures like +500, +800 or even several thousand percentage units. Meaning that even the tiniest hamlet with a base population of 50 will grow to a population of 1000. While cities that start big can reach 2000, 3000 or even 5000.

But not everyone wishes to cheat and place cities in their game. Which, if you are going to do that for the sake of increasing your city size then you may as well also just edit the city size directly and make it a larger size city by typing in a larger number.

But for those playing the game legit the significance of other cities is entirely dependant on how many other cities happen to be on the map from the start. On small maps cargo will play a much bigger role in growing the cities compared to larger maps with more towns. So for someone trying to understand why their towns are only growing so big they need to understand what the contributing factors are and why on smaller maps their towns will not grow as big.