How to stimulate town growth

[numbat]

Hi All,

I've read a number of different threads on the forums, most of which were written a few years ago, and am wondering how I can generate better town growth. This current game started in 1900, and so has been running for 158 years, and my biggest town is only 1400 residents. I've read comments, and seen screenshots where people's towns are double or even triple that in under that time.

I tend to supply most towns with at least their initial two requirements, and setup a number of passenger routes. I have busses in my cities - I tend to setup two routes that meander through the city, and run one set clockwise, and the other anticlockwise. As you can see from the attached screenshots, I get a good bonus for destinations and not a lot of penalties for noise.

So how do I got from this level, to the levels I've read about where people are getting target sizes of 5,000 or even higher?

Cheers,
Chris.

ps. I'm not worried about "late game lag" at this stage.

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198860740577/screenshot/2125195086907209871/

[Vimpster]

You could certainly improve your cargo supply. You can get a combined total of +200% from cargo alone. At the moment you are getting +90% from cargo.

The bonus you can get from destinations is largely determined by the map you are playing on. Maps with fewer towns will not get the same amount of growth as maps with lots of towns. And the base size of the towns matters too.

In your picture your town has just about 12,000 public destinations. If your global pop is about 12,000 then you are essentially at your limit for the time being. If your global pop (which can be seen in the budget window under graphs) is for instance 20,000, then you have a lot of room for improvement on your passenger network in order to increase the amount of destinations that can be reached.

Your private destinations is only 1600, which to me seems rather low. If your towns are far apart then that might be as good as you can get. But from the looks of it you do not have very good road connections coming out of your town to connect to other towns, which is what you need to improve private destinations.

[numbat]

Hi Vimpster,

thanks for the response. This particular town is quite separated, but I have spent some money adding in highways to other nearby towns and that has improved that score. I'd never considered making sure that the towns were connected via public roads before. Of course, now that there are roads, my destinations via public transport are decreasing, but only marginally.

I will work on getting those cargo deliveries up. I tend to use hubs for everything, so the game assigns the output from a factory evenly among all the other towns as well, so that is going to be a bit of a project, but one that will benefit all towns by the looks.

All my towns seem to have very low starting points. I thought I read somewhere that they are supposed to start with a random number up to 800? None of my towns have a starting pop anywhere near that. Not sure why.

Anyway, it's a good project for me to try to increase them all.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Increase passenger connections - faster passenger lines will do that.

Decrease emissions.

Note this larger cities are easier to achieve in regions with lots of towns, and/or if the towns are closer together, as this will increase private/public passenger bonuses.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by numbat:

Of course, now that there are roads, my destinations via public transport are decreasing, but only marginally.

Just so you know, the public and private destinations do not compete. Raising one should not lower the other at all. It is not a measure of which one people are using, but merely a measure of what is reachable with each type. So if one dropped around the same time that the other raised, it is a coincidence or incidental.

Originally posted by numbat:

All my towns seem to have very low starting points. I thought I read somewhere that they are supposed to start with a random number up to 800? None of my towns have a starting pop anywhere near that. Not sure why.

You can customise a town with the sandbox mod turned on to have a starting point of up to 800 (in 1850; 1200 in the year 2000). But a town will never normally start anywheres near that. The largest a town can be normally generated is between 200-300 depending on the year. In 1850 it is 200 max. In 2000 a town that would have started out as 200 in 1850 will be 300. If you start in 1850 all towns will increase their base size by 50% by the year 2000.

[Zapp]

Getting that +200% from cargo requires a TRUCKLOAD of work on your part. And as the city keeps growing, you will need ever-more cargo just to maintain your supply rating. And I mean insane amounts of cargo! It's completely unrealistic that you would need a dedicated double-tracked rail line just for one cargo type. (When cities grow into megapolises with 3000 or 4000 pop you likely will find you will need two entire sets of cargo networks for a single cargo, with dozens of long trains running neck to neck to provide a decent supply rating. And I don't necessarily mean +100%. Even half that can be a challenge to supply if the city is humongous enough. And for what? A measly +200%...)

MUCH easier is to just use the sandbox and plop a new city or three in close by. This will make public and private connections skyrocket. You will probably gain +200% without doing anything. Then set up good public transport, open up the private road network, and gain much much more. The game is much better at portraying passenger traffic realistically, which is another benefit. A town with 300 base population easily grows into 3000.

Much more verisimilitude for far less work :)

[numbat]

Hi All, thanks for the info. I'm slowly building that city size now. It's taken quite a bit of work but I've got the target population up to 2100 now. I shall keep at it. :-)
Cheers,
Chris.

[numbat]

I've been thinking about the way the towns grow, it seems that there's no exponential growth. As far as I can see, there's only the percentage growth factors which always work against the town's initial figure, so there will be a limit to how much each town grows.

I'm starting to wonder how others get these huge towns that I see, would they be the result of a mod? or editing the initial figures in sandbox mode?

Cheers,
Chris.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Horizontal sprawls are easy by plopping a bunch of towns together.

The default tool works, but this mod is better, and can be also be used to create insanely populated single towns:

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

Sandbox and map editor can be both be used to edit town values and place a bunch of towns closer together, this will increase the private and public transport bonuses and the maximum town size, respectively.

[Zapp]

Note that the number of citizens is by far the biggest influence on game speed.

You're far better off adding smaller towns that organically grow large, than using mods to start off with super-large cities.

Your computer will thank you.

[numbat]

Originally posted by Zapp:

Note that the number of citizens is by far the biggest influence on game speed.

You're far better off adding smaller towns that organically grow large, than using mods to start off with super-large cities.

Your computer will thank you.

Hi Zapp,

yes, I understand that population will eventually bring a game to it's knees, but I'm trying to understand how I get there. None of my games so far have managed to get that far.

From my understanding, a city which starts with 200 people will end up (possibly) with a "base" population of around 300. All the rest is based on the percentage multipliers. If I work really hard, I might get my percentage multipliers up to 800%. that means that city has a maximum population of around 2,700. It will never grow to a metropolis of 5,000 or even the 20,000 that I read in another thread. From what I've read here and on other threads, they must all be the result of artificial growth.

I will have to admit that once I get to around 2050 with all my lines working and towns supplied, the game starts to lose some of it's challenge, so I've been looking at other areas to concentrate on. Building the cities into huge metropolises (metropolii ?) is a nice challenge at the moment, with the understanding I'm going to have to abandon it at some stage once my computer churns to a halt.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by numbat:

From my understanding, a city which starts with 200 people will end up (possibly) with a "base" population of around 300. All the rest is based on the percentage multipliers. If I work really hard, I might get my percentage multipliers up to 800%. that means that city has a maximum population of around 2,700. It will never grow to a metropolis of 5,000 or even the 20,000 that I read in another thread. From what I've read here and on other threads, they must all be the result of artificial growth.

That is correct. In a normally generated map a city of 2700 is probably going to be near the upper limit on a map with a lot of towns. Anyone getting significantly higher than that is using a custom map with higher concentration of towns and/or modified towns with higher base sizes or using a mod to inflate the numbers or size further. Some players may even claim to have a city of a certain size when in fact the "city" they are referring to is actually several towns together.

[Zapp]

To clarify upon the previous answer:

The base population doesn't increase. A twon with 160 base pop stays 160 base pop even a hundred years later. But if you get the percentage up to +800%, your city will now have grown into a nice 1440 pop city, since 160+(160x8)=1440.

Of this +800% you'll struggle to get more than maybe +150% from cargo, so the remaining +650% will come from public connections (allowing a citizen to take the bus to the station, and then take the train to another station, then a second bus to your destination) as well as private connections (building and upgrading highways to let people drive themselves).

The game's algorithm is heavily based upon these connections (public and private transport).

The developers wrote this code with their own map generator in mind - it seldom (or never) places many towns very close by. (Although if you ask the map generator to place the maximum number of towns on the map you can come close).

However, the sandbox mod enables the "add city" button. If you do that, you'll find that the very large amount of connections you get from having many destinations (shops and factories in other cities) very conveniently nearby, will make the percentage number go through the roof.

That 160 base pop town? It can easily reach 3000 pop and even more if you really try to provide massive amounts of transport.

Note how the base pop doesn't need to be inflated. Having towns with 100 base pop still yields great results. (Using mods to place a dozen 500+ base pop cities next to each other is possible but not necessary. It will only result in your computer catching fire...)

Now then, connections.

Provide lots of highways and you'll quickly realize traffic becomes hell. Go down that route and you will likely have to raze whole blocks of your cities and rebuild a more efficient grid. And the game isn't really about cars, and you simply don't have the level of control you do in, say, Cities Skylines. I don't think you can ever be truly happy with what you can do with cars in this game.

So instead cut down on roads and instead provide EXCELLENT rail and tram service, and you will still see people flocking to live in your cities.

And the amount of work needed to achieve this is a fraction of what you need to do to get cargo supply up and running. And let me tell you that reaching say 90% capacity of a good for a city of 3000 is quite a challenge: you probably need multiple double-tracked freight lines dedicated to just that single cargo, and have several stations in your city from which trucks can distribute it.

So in the first case you get elegant design and moderate work (and "cheating" by placing towns in clusters) for maybe +1500%. No mods, nothing artificial. Just the base game but with towns closer together than perhaps the developers anticipated.

In the second you get horribly unrealistic cargo handling and loads AND LOADS of work, for what - maybe +150%...?

I know what I prefer

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Zapp:

The base population doesn't increase. A twon with 160 base pop stays 160 base pop even a hundred years later.

Just a correction on this statement. As mentioned earlier, yes the base size does increase, without any modifiers, by up to 50%, depending on when you start the game. A 160 base size town in 1850 will not be 160 100 years later, even with 0 modifiers. It's base size will have grown to about 213 by that point.

[numbat]

Hi All,

thanks everyone for their comments. I have been playing around with my current map, and after adding extensive road networks, and using the "natural town growth" mod, I increased my population from around 15,000 to 52,000.

Now, my roads are totally gridlocked with private traffic, all my stations are overflowing and I think I heard my power supply fans for the first time ever. My fps has gone from around 22 in normal view and 44 in cab view, to around 11 in normal view and low 30's in cab view.

It has been a very interesting exercise.

Cheers,
Chris.