London population

[jmuria]

One of the first tasks in Flying Scotland scenario is to reach a population of 40.000 in London. It's funny because in that time (1860) London had a population of more than 2.000.000 people. I know, it's a game, but it's based in railway history... I think that cities population should be more realistic. New York as big as Albany? London as big as Aberdeen? It makes no sense.

[Tsubame ⭐]

"Game balancing" lol.

Yes it really does not.

While there are many cities that grew drastically due to direct or indirect influence of the railway, or created outright thanks to them, there are others that were already well established without them. I suppose the game extrapolates the former to the entire game for the sake of gameplay.

Would not hurt to have a few cities per map that were not strictly tied in to game mechanics - meet freight demands to increase population - so much.

[jmuria]

Originally posted by Tsubame ⭐:

Would not hurt to have a few cities per map that were not strictly tied in to game mechanics - meet freight demands to increase population - so much.

An easy option to mantain huge cities is to introduce ports or city warehouses with additional supplies, like in Railroad Tycoon 3.

[gardlt]

In RE1, I was a bit bored of the random maps after a dozen or so games because all cities start around 20k. And now almost all cities on the hand-crafted maps are around 20k. . . .

Needless to say, I think this is a regression even from a purely gameplay perspective, let alone historical. Strategy is almost always improved with variety. I would really be curious why the decision was made to set almost everything at 20k? If it was explained somewhere, please share a link. :)

[Fargel_Linellar]

If a city is above 20k it will directly start to shrink.

As this is about the limit that "road" freight can support for starting goods fulfilment to not fall below 40%.

If you made a map with any city above this, it would start to shrink from day 1.
So making London start at 2M would just be a population that will shrink slowly.

This would also make the game way easier.
As you could just instal a station in those big cities and without effort you now have hundreds more passengers/mails that are generated without any efforts.

[jmuria]

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

If a city is above 20k it will directly start to shrink.

As this is about the limit that "road" freight can support for starting goods fulfilment to not fall below 40%.

If you made a map with any city above this, it would start to shrink from day 1.
So making London start at 2M would just be a population that will shrink slowly.

This would also make the game way easier.
As you could just instal a station in those big cities and without effort you now have hundreds more passengers/mails that are generated without any efforts.

But if those big cities had a port and recieve additional products through it, as in real life, it would be easy to fulfill the demand. Not a population of 2M but at least 100K.

Also they should rebalance the game and reduce the number of passengers/mail or the total income.