Chapter 5 - City Growth

[Omogoto]

I have everything else on this chapter totally doable at this point, however, I am having trouble with City growrth at the end. Sacramento grows great in the begining but then stalls out around 70k to 85k in population and in fact sometimes even goes down. San Francisco never does grow, but since i was on pace to move the 50 passengers to Promontary it did not seem to be my issue there. I have never focused much on city growth so I am no expert on it att all. I have connected to almost every city on the west coast including LA and San Diego but nothing seems to help. I did notice a few things like almost all cities are either meat or beer so no one seems to have any freight demand. Every city also seems to have small mail and passengers demand / supply, so my trains run with just a few loaded cars each express run.
Any tips on this chapter or on city growth in general would be greatly apreciated.
I am not a world champion gamer and never have been, I never ace anything on the first try....

[Didz]

The trick...if one can even call it that....is to make sure everything that is in the cities demand list is being delivered to it.

In my case I found i had to lay on special point-to-point freight trains to get logs from north of Redding delivered direclty to San Francisco, andt I actually built a dedicated Brewery Station in Redding just to supply beer to San Fran.

Sacremento was less of a problem as it seemed to get most of what it needed without specail services, but i suspect that might just have been a quirk of the way I had arranged my lines.

I found that the cities started to grow once their overall satisfaction rate reached around 66%, less than that and they hardly grew at all.

Originally posted by Omogoto:

I did notive a few things like almost all cities are either meat or beer so no one seems to have any freight demand.

Meat and Beer are the staple diet of most cities in the early stages of development. It's generally considered that a two city cluster where one supplies meat and the other beer is the ideal early income generator. You pick up meat at one and deliver it to the other returning with beer.

So in theory an alternating sequence of beer and meat producing cities should be a good starting line.

Originally posted by Omogoto:

Every city also seems to have small mail and passengers demand / supply, so my trains run with just a few loaded cars each express run.

Thats not unusual and to compensate I usually add a mail car and dining car to the trains at this point to maximise the revenue for the reduced number of passengers and mail sacks.

I think train speed and frequency does have an impact on passenger and mail volume, if only because they only wait so long for a train. So, the more frequent they are the more get picked up. But its very hard to keep passenger and freight trains full. In some very special cases I do tell them to wait for at least 4 full carriages before leaving, but thats not very practical in most situations.

[introaether]

OK. Advanced city growing strategy.

• No exports/loading of any kind.

• Choose city industries that have highest input/output ratio - to serve just the city itself.

• Concentrate on supplying the items towards the bottom of demand list. A city requires less of these for the same fulfillment.

• Do everything possible to reduce turn unloading time. Think loops. Trains take longer to turn around.
Think no maintenence.

That's most of the theory covered.

[Omogoto]

I'm still not getting very far on this one AND get this. The best i can do is still about 85 k and i have tried supplying every single site into Sac., I tried cutting off ALL exports too.
Gold Beach just hit 98k and i payed no attention to it at ALL. The station up there is only using 2 tracks and the only things i ran up there was some express runs and i fed grain and nothing else.
So for me, city growth makes even less sense after all the things i tried than when i started. Whatever i am missing must be one of those things thats right in front of me but i just dont see it.

[gardlt]

One of the things that makes growth easy is to build a "local" industry of the right type. Generally a city is connected to at least two others, sometimes 3 or 4. So think of them together as forming a network that will supply each other. This also means that you should distribute, for example San Fran will need Logs or Grain to get going.

What I tend to do is weavers in Sacramento, Tailors in San Fran, Sawmill in Shasta. Remember to upgrade industries to get enough output to satisfy demand in all connected cities. You should make sure to haul in the resources for all industries to enable high production. Good money too.

This includes Grain to Shasta in the early game. A tip here is that if you connect Shasta to the one to the north instead of the one near Carson City, you will get some natural Grain flow right across the steep mountains and Sacramento will hit 40k much easier. It takes a couple months after game start for this to commence.

There is virtually every agricultural product just south of Sacramento. Remember that if you connect to a resource you are assuming responsibility for its deliveries, you wont get much natural flow. So haul from it to all surrounding cities, even if they are close.

Oh, and build a Museum once you hit 60k. Didn't refresh on this campaign, if memory serves it's possible? Generally it gets easier to supply cities as they get bigger until they get very large, 500k+. With the Museum you only need a good supply of 50% of resources. As the number increases there is a much better chance that you can source products locally. Also, important is the opening of all industry slots in surrounding cities. So growing in pairs is good strategy, at least till 90k. Max on many industries is 8 per week. If going for very large cities, should then stop growth at some because one industry can only support about 800k population. Divide that among all cities that are being delivered too, For example could supply 4 @ 200k.

[introaether]

Gold Rush : 8 city growth analysis:

CITY -------------------- Current Stock--------Itms required

San Fransisco-----------3/6-------------------Whaet, Logs, Beer
Sacremento--------------4/5-------------------Logs
Shasta---------------------4/5-------------------Corn
Gold Beach---------------3/5-------------------Corn, Meat
Carson---------------------4/5------------------Meat
Bodie-----------------------3/5------------------Logs, Meat
LA---------------------------2/5------------------Wheat, Logs, Beer
San Diego----------------2/5------------------Weat, Logs Beer

By looking at what each city needs you can figure a plan of expansion. For instamce, when you connect to Bodie, all you need to do to kickstart growth is supply logs, etc. This info helps puzzle the pieces and virtually TELLS you in what order to expand. Or, at least, what order to avoid.

Scenario Specification

* Generate enough money form initial layout so we are not waiting around for money.

*Stimulate city growth in the 8 cities ASAP.

* Concentrate on Gold/passengers until tasks completed. (If using automatic, this means having enough volume of trains to accomodate ALL freight - this ensures passeneger carriages are spawned.

* Concentrate on Carson City Growth throughout.

* Buy alcohol industry asap.

* Busy stations that have a lot of through traffic need expanding in an effective fashion. Failure to do so will result in massive choke points which will grind everything to a halt.

This is the summary of the notes i accumulated to attempt a walkthrough guide (of sorts, I am still learning in areas of the game and my score/time can be bettered (Cough * gardlt)) :D

Am currently uploading my trainiac 37.0 score. have been for THIRTEEN HOURS!!! Is my internet REALLY that bad??? Grrrr

[introaether]

Originally posted by gardlt:

Remember that if you connect to a resource you are assuming responsibility for its deliveries, you wont get much natural flow. So haul from it to all surrounding cities, even if they are close.

Are you saying that by connecting to a rural station to city A, we stop the land deliveries to A, B and C?

[Didz]

Originally posted by Omogoto:

I'm still not getting very far on this one AND get this. The best i can do is still about 85 k and i have tried supplying every single site into Sac., I tried cutting off ALL exports too.

I don't agree with the export prohibition idea. It might work but if so I would consider it a bug, as logic would suggest that increased trade ought to increase wealth and thust attract more people to move to the city if only to work at the thriving industry. I've certainly never bothered with it, and so far had no problems growing towns. In fact, I found that supplying local industries and then providing them with good export potential to other towns seemed to promote growth.

I think at this stage we would need to see some screenshots to be able to idnetify the issues you are having. I completed all the tasks in Chapter 5 with no real problems at all, including the optional ones. So, I'll post a few screenshots from my game to see if it helps.

San Francisco Demand Table
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1320324150
Fulfillment at this point is running at 60%, which isn't really good enough and the city has stopped growing again at 63,000 residents. The main problem at the moment is that I'm not delivering enough Beer, Milk, Fruit, Clothing or Lumber and that my deliery of Logs isn't enough to satisfy the towns Paper Mill.

However, I have been doing my best to resolve these issues.

I have a dedicated Beer train that only ships Beer from Redding to San Francisco.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1320333965
And a dedicated Log Train that delivers logs from just north of Redding direct to the paper mill.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1320341527
The interesting thing to note about the log train is that it's only carrying one wagon loaded with logs. Which is interesting as it has come direct from the Logging camp and is heading non-stop to San Francisco. So, I can only assume that it must have picked up all the beer and other commodities on its outward journey confirming once again that trains retain cargo beyond their next station stop. This is probably why the paper mill is low on logs, but as long as the goods are in demand at San Francisco it should boost their satisfaction anyway.
++++
I was bit puzzled by the consist of the San Francisco Log Train as many players insist that RE trains always drop off everything at their next stop, and that wouldn't explain where the beer and cloth came from on a train that came straight from a logging camp.

So, I sat and recorded a round trip of the train and confirmed that on the return trip it was picking up freight from San Francisco, Sacremento and Redding and dropping most of it off at stops on the return journey as intended.

However, on reaching Redding it picks up one wagon load of cloth and carries it back to the Logging Camp fills up with logs and then delivers both the logs and cloth to San Francisco. So, it proves that the AI does anticipate cargo demands along the entire route not just the next station.
https://youtu.be/knALYSGbFP4