How big can cities get in un-modded TF2?

[Grrr]

I started an un-modded game in 1850 and am now at 1982. All the factories are producing at 100%, no stations are overloaded, all cities are growing at around 330% and the four largest cities have a population of around 1100.

My feeling was that these number are way lower that what can be achieved. I had a look around this forum and reddit's but what I found wasn't clear, so I thought I would ask here.

Thanks for any info on this.

[SlimNasty™]

It's based on a percentage of the city's base size. You can alter the size with the in-game sandbox mod, then save and reload without the mod if you wanted to.

[TheGreenFellow]

The short story is that it's limited by what industry density level settings you've chosen, as that's the only thing strictly hindering your cities' maximum potential growth amount.

The base size suggested by SlimNasty is also a variable but mostly only affects the starting size, changing the base size amount with 100% factory production established will increase population caps only slightly.

You can try enabling dynamic industry placement when loading your save to a higher level, or use a higher industry per km setting in the base_config.lua file. Take heed that the more 'population actors' present in your game, the more intensive the game will be on your system's performance.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by TheGreenFellow:

The short story is that it's limited by what industry density level settings you've chosen, as that's the only thing strictly hindering your cities' maximum potential growth amount.

That is a curious statement. What makes you say that? The largest growth modifier you can get from supplying a city with cargo is 200% (100% for commercial and 100% for industrial).
So you are right that there is typically not enough industries on a map to fully supply every town. But supplying cargo is typically not the biggest potential contributor of the modifiers that make a city grow, destinations are.

Destinations is actually the bigger potential limiter on a cities growth. Unlike cargo, there is no cap on how big a modifier you can get for increasing destinations.

On a map with very few towns cargo may be where you will get most of your growth from. But most map configurations will have enough towns on them that destinations will be the bigger contributor to growth (even assuming there was unlimited supply of cargo to go around).

To answer the OP, I would say the upper limit with out the use of mods is probably in the ballpark of around 3500-4000 for a single city (with a base size close to 200 in the year 1850; 300 in the year 2000). This would require a map with a lot of towns generated. On your particular map the upper limit is perhaps much lower than that because perhaps you have very few towns on your map.

My personal largest city in an unmoded game is around 2900.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by Vimpster:

That is a curious statement. What makes you say that? The largest growth modifier you can get from supplying a city with cargo is 200% (100% for commercial and 100% for industrial).
So you are right that there is typically not enough industries on a map to fully supply every town. But supplying cargo is typically not the biggest potential contributor of the modifiers that make a city grow, destinations are.

Destinations is actually the bigger potential limiter on a cities growth. Unlike cargo, there is no cap on how big a modifier you can get for increasing destinations.

On a map with very few towns cargo may be where you will get most of your growth from. But most map configurations will have enough towns on them that destinations will be the bigger contributor to growth (even assuming there was unlimited supply of cargo to go around).

To answer the OP, I would say the upper limit with out the use of mods is probably in the ballpark of around 3500-4000 for a single city. This would require a map with a lot of towns generated. On your particular map the upper limit is perhaps much lower than that because perhaps you have very few towns on your map.

Because the destinations factor is static - there's a fixed amount of towns possible to connect with on any given map that cannot be increased or grown by any means (with the exception of using the map editor to place more towns, of course). What you're describing has gotten the cart before the horse.

The increase in population (which in turn is what determines how many destinations per town there are) can be grown, and that in turn can affect your growth modifier, but once you have connected all possible destinations, the only variable in the growth modifier list that can you can keep increasing is industry.

Phrased differently, once your towns have grown as much as they can based on connections & destinations alone, cargo becomes your limiter to growth, and unlike connections it is something you can keep directly raising so long as you still have more potential industry - which with the aforementioned settings can keep appearing effectively indefinitely (see my thread here where I did some testing myself and was able to get industries to keep spawning well into the 2200s on one of the DLC maps https://steamcommunity.com/app/1066780/discussions/0/3875968426422509160/ )

And I think you are overstating the impact of destination connections - it's easily observable ingame that simply connecting cities with passenger routes has a limited effect on city growth compared to supplying your cities with cargo. A recent example of a save I chose to restart, I supplied only 1 city with cargo early on with routes connecting all the cities with passenger services, and within short order it was about 4-5 times larger than all of the rest.

Perhaps it's a matter of map choice - I can see your point of view holding on a given megalomaniac map with 40+ towns or whatever, but that's rather a case of pushing extremes that naturally will shift considerations and delay this sort of endgame focus for a much longer time.

[numbat]

Hi Grrr,

I went through a similar exercise recently on this thread.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1066780/discussions/0/3879346999825598874/

I was able to get around the 2700 mark "naturally", mainly through the use of destinations. (I did use sandbox mode to ensure the base population was around the 300 mark).

The limiting factor with population growth is that it's not exponential. All percentage modifiers work on the base population. So if you work hard and get that percentage growth factor up to 1000%, then that's still only a population of 3300 for the largest towns, with many of them well below that.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by TheGreenFellow:

Because the destinations factor is static - there's a fixed amount of towns possible to connect with on any given map that cannot be increased or grown by any means (with the exception of using the map editor to place more towns, of course). What you're describing has gotten the cart before the horse.

The increase in population (which in turn is what determines how many destinations per town there are) can be grown, and that in turn can affect your growth modifier, but once you have connected all possible destinations, the only variable in the growth modifier list that can you can keep increasing is industry.

Phrased differently, once your towns have grown as much as they can based on connections & destinations alone, cargo becomes your limiter to growth, and unlike connections it is something you can keep directly raising so long as you still have more potential industry - which with the aforementioned settings can keep appearing effectively indefinitely (see my thread here where I did some testing myself and was able to get industries to keep spawning well into the 2200s on one of the DLC maps https://steamcommunity.com/app/1066780/discussions/0/3875968426422509160/ )

And I think you are overstating the impact of destination connections - it's easily observable ingame that simply connecting cities with passenger routes has a limited effect on city growth compared to supplying your cities with cargo. A recent example of a save I chose to restart, I supplied only 1 city with cargo early on with routes connecting all the cities with passenger services, and within short order it was about 4-5 times larger than all of the rest.

I would argue that the destination is the least static modifier between them. And you are incorrect in stating that the industry growth modifier can keep increasing. In fact if anything the opposite is true. Because there is a 200% cap on cargo modifier and the larger the town gets the harder it is to simply maintain that 200% since the amount of cargo demanded increases but the growth modifier does not.

Unlike destinations, where the larger the towns get the higher the growth modifier becomes, with no upper limit. Also you have to keep improving your network as the towns grow to maximise the growth modifier as towns expand beyond your initial networks reach and optimisations need to be made to road infrastructure to maximise private destinations.

The number of industries does nothing to change the fact that any single town can only get a maximum growth modifier of 200% from cargo. All that increasing the number of industries does is allow you to reach that 200% in more towns, Though the larger the towns get the more industries you need just to maintain that modifier. And there is a limit to how many industries you get. It will stop increasing once the target limit has been reached, determined by whatever target limit you set it to on map creation.

It does not take that many destinations to surpass a 200% modifier from the combined public and private destinations. I think it is only around 2500 destinations needed to surpass 100% for both public and private. Unless you are on a small map or have chosen very low amount of towns on a medium map, you should have little trouble surpassing the amount of destinations needed to reach a combined modifier of over 200%, which is greater than cargo delivery can accomplish.

Here is one of my maps. It is a very large size with 27 towns. So yes, there are perhaps more towns than your typical map. But even so my modifiers from destinations is far greater than what cargo delivery can add. Look at the town modifiers, from over 600% to over 800%. Even if I was getting the maximum modifier from cargo in all those towns (200%) that still means the other 400-600% is from destinations.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3054941320

[Tsubame ⭐]

@OP: some of it is map specific due to private and public traffic bonuses. Maps with more towns will have more public and private traffic bonuses, especially if said cities are closer together, and as such, towns in these maps will have towns that have a larger total potential than towns in more sparsely occupied maps.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by Vimpster:

I would argue that the destination is the least static modifier between them. And you are incorrect in stating that the industry growth modifier can keep increasing. In fact if anything the opposite is true. Because there is a 200% cap on cargo modifier and the larger the town gets the harder it is to simply maintain that 200% since the amount of cargo demanded increases but the growth modifier does not.

Unlike destinations, where the larger the towns get the higher the growth modifier becomes, with no upper limit. Also you have to keep improving your network as the towns grow to maximise the growth modifier as towns expand beyond your initial networks reach and optimisations need to be made to road infrastructure to maximise private destinations.

The number of industries does nothing to change the fact that any single town can only get a maximum growth modifier of 200% from cargo. All that increasing the number of industries does is allow you to reach that 200% in more towns, Though the larger the towns get the more industries you need just to maintain that modifier. And there is a limit to how many industries you get. It will stop increasing once the target limit has been reached, determined by whatever target limit you set it to on map creation.

It does not take that many destinations to surpass a 200% modifier from the combined public and private destinations. I think it is only around 2500 destinations needed to surpass 100% for both public and private. Unless you are on a small map or have chosen very low amount of towns on a medium map, you should have little trouble surpassing the amount of destinations needed to reach a combined modifier of over 200%, which is greater than cargo delivery can accomplish.

Here is one of my maps. It is a very large size with 27 towns. So yes, there are perhaps more towns than your typical map. But even so my modifiers from destinations is far greater than what cargo delivery can add. Look at the town modifiers, from over 600% to over 800%. Even if I was getting the maximum modifier from cargo in all those towns (200%) that still means the other 400-600% is from destinations.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3054941320

Static in terms of what you can do about it and need to think about it in transportation terms with the goal in mind of growing cities to be as large as possible. Upgrading a network to enable higher rate as necessary is a universal given, and you'll need to upgrade road infrastructure anyways for your city transit & final cargo delivery routes.

Yes, the impact of cargo on the growth modifier is expressed via a percentage figure with a "200%" cap, but that doesn't change points I've already expressed.

You said it yourself just now, in fact - "the larger towns get the more industries you need (to supply) to maintain that modifier". And again as you said, without enabling dynamic industry placement there is a hard limit on how much cargo production you have - which leads us back around to what I said in the first place here, that available cargo production becomes the only thing limiting your city growth.

Yes, having lots of cities on your map means the relative percentages of the modifiers involved will skew those figures so that destinations appears as a bigger chunk of the pie. That's not the point, however, as we're looking at the picture from a perspective of "what is the primary limit on our ability to keep our towns growing". Whether destinations is providing 200%, 400%, 600%, or 2000% of your town growth, that doesn't matter - all that is really being stated by those numbers is you have a high amount of towns providing destinations on your map. The number of towns & connections to form between them *is still static.*

Putting this in different perspective: in your given example of a 27-city map, that big growth chunk you're seeing is just saying you have a lot of potential growth to form from connecting all those cities together, because there are so many of them. That does not mean, however, that that is the primary limit on how much all your 27 cities can grow: once you've connected them all, the only thing stopping you is how much industry you have to feed them with - and thereby, the most important thing to look at is the industry density target settings you've gone with (and whether you've enabled dynamic industry placement).

By all means - in terms of a goal of "grow a city as big as you can" - it's important to still make sure you have the passenger connections in place, you don't want to ignore that any more than you want to ignore cargo. But the question originally asked here is "how big can a city get", so assuming equal focus on passenger and cargo and having all connections on the map in place, your final hard limit on growth is going to be cargo.

[Grrr]

I thought I had given all the relevant information about the set-up of my game but now I see I forgot an important number viz the number of cities which in my case is 8. I guess this is definitely the limiting factor in my game since all the cities are getting all the supplies they need.

Thanks for so much useful information and discussion.

[wellover-50]

I built a single city tiny sized map called 'Tiny Tester 10001' that is in the workshop with a you tube link in the comments.
That city although manually created with a base population set to 800 is fed by 55 industries, all maxed out and has a population of over 10,000.
The city and the industries are all unmodified .

[Zapp]

Originally posted by TheGreenFellow:

The short story is that it's limited by what industry density level settings you've chosen, as that's the only thing strictly hindering your cities' maximum potential growth amount.

No the number and location of industries doesn't play a large role in city population growth.

The number of possible private and public connections does.

If the city is surrounded by a lot of other cities (and their industry and commerce) close by, you get HUGE growth percentage numbers. Assuming you make it quick and easy for the citizens to get there (and back again) that is.

This factor completely dwarfs anything you can do with goods.

---

To answer the original question. I don't think there is an easy answer.

Try using the map editor to place several cities close to each other. Play the game, building up excellent public transport and making sure there are lots of fast roads as well. You will see the population explode in each of these cities, especially those best connected (those "in the middle").

Maybe a 300 base pop city eventually expands to 3000.

Now add a couple more cities, also close by. That should make the city grow further. Then more. Then yet more...

In the end you'll cover the map in a contiguous "concrete jungle" with a ludicrous number of passenger services criss-crossing this mega-city (assuming your computer doesn't choke first, that is).

I don't know if a definite "max number" can ever be ascertained here.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by Zapp:

No the number and location of industries doesn't play a large role in city population growth.

The number of possible private and public connections does.

If the city is surrounded by a lot of other cities (and their industry and commerce) close by, you get HUGE growth percentage numbers. Assuming you make it quick and easy for the citizens to get there (and back again) that is.

This factor completely dwarfs anything you can do with goods.

You should read the rest of the conversation first - or just read what I stated more carefully. wellover's post just above demonstrates my point perfectly.

The only true hard limit on how large your 'max number' is, is how much industry you will have to feed your city with.

[Autocoach]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3076846504

I'm not convinced that the game referenced by Greenfellow has anything to add , the numbers shown are highly dubious - far too much connection modifier - and (I guess) might be caused by having the industries need workers but even here 700% growth from passenger connections clearly dwarfs the industry benefit. Furthermore it should be clear that you can have too many industries as once you get to 100% that's your lot whereas more towns and the connections to them will grow population without limit. Unlike TpF1 where all growth came from passenger connections (or the delivery of passengers) , you do benefit here with goods being delivered - partially to create more buildings that then create more passenger connections and aid overall growth from that.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by TheGreenFellow:

wellover's post just above demonstrates my point perfectly.

Does it though?
He is getting 2400 growth from industry and 8400 from destinations based on the picture Autocoach provided. The 2400 is hard capped while the 8400 can continue to go up as the city grows and as better connectivity is made.

I do not see how industry is a limiting factor. At least not nearly to the extent that destinations are. It is not hard on any map to get a single city to it's maximum modifier from cargo delivery, while getting a city to it's maximum destinations modifier is practically impossible since it is always going up and can be improved upon for the duration of any game.

Perhaps it is just a difference in our understanding of the term "limiting factor".
But it should be easy for us to agree that destinations has the potential to contribute far more to a town's growth than cargo delivery can, regardless which one you want to classify as being the "limiting factor".

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by Autocoach:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3076846504

I'm not convinced that the game referenced by Greenfellow has anything to add , the numbers shown are highly dubious - far too much connection modifier - and (I guess) might be caused by having the industries need workers but even here 700% growth from passenger connections clearly dwarfs the industry benefit. Furthermore it should be clear that you can have too many industries as once you get to 100% that's your lot whereas more towns and the connections to them will grow population without limit. Unlike TpF1 where all growth came from passenger connections (or the delivery of passengers) , you do benefit here with goods being delivered - partially to create more buildings that then create more passenger connections and aid overall growth from that.

Again...you're misinterpreting the data the game is displaying to you, and what has already been stated. The relative size of the growth percentages here *does not change the fact that your final limit to growing your city will be determined by cargo*. All that data is informing you is that you have a lot of population/destinations active on your map, which you've clearly gone to great lengths to keep all sufficiently connected. Your ceiling, your uppermost limit of how far you can grow that city, *is still going to be determined by your industry/cargo limit*.

You guys are getting too hung up on comparing the relative sizes of percentages without thinking about what the numbers really mean for determining the final, largest size your city (or cities) can grow on any given map.