Garbage idea for limiting city growth

[MlemandPurrs]

Cities past an certain population would begin to produce this cargo per month, the housing would produce it similar to mail and passengers. For that city to further grow transport company must take it to an Landfill or Incinerator 'industry' belonging to that city(similar to how banks are 'owned' by their city). If 'garbage processed at landfills owned by that city'-amount does not exceed over an 'garbage to be processed'-quota for that city, then that city's growth slows down until comes to an halt at around having like 2x the amount of 'garbage to be processed' in the queue waiting. This would be reflected as "Hazardously Polluted!" in examining the city window(the one you get up via clicking on city name). "Clean" would mean full speed growth. "Somewhat Polluted" half the rate, etc.
The idea may not exactly be applicable as an cargo wont be generated without an station being placed down and an transport of that type arriving to that station. I do not know much about this game's scripting so if you can enlighten me on the possibility of this et all.

[Sylf]

First, a suggestion like this belongs better in the OpenTTD Suggestions forum.

Second, something that controls city growth is better handled by goal (game) scripts. There are several city growth script that requires you to deliver certain amount of cargo to a town before the town can grow. There is a script where growth is somewhat controlled by the city of neighboring towns (Neighbors are Important). There is a script where growth of towns is controlled by how well the transport demand is met (City Growth Limiter). You can see what game scripts can do and refine some ideas.

There are couple of problems I suspect from your idea.

First is the garbage cargo - who's going to produce it? Any given buildings in openttd can produce up to two cargo. Houses normally generate passengers and mail. This is not something you can change with game script. If you decide to write a town buildings NewGRF, you'll have to sacrifice one of the existing cargo - passengers or mail. Or create a balance between three cargoes. Or you can create a newgrf that adds garbage collection facility industry, which will create a demand for garbage cargo. But NewGRF can't control the town growth - you'll have to write both the newgrf and game script.

Second problem I see is the part "transport company must take it to an Landfill or Incinerator 'industry' belonging to that city". I don't know if NewGRF or game script has any control over this. You can perhaps tune the cargo distribution settings so it favors the destination that's closest to the origin.

These are just some random thoughts on your idea.

[Supercheese]

FIRS has Recyclables, which is a similar concept (output scales with population), but I'm not sure there are any goalscripts that limit growth based on recyclables -- especially since Recycling Centers are a fairly late-game industry.

It's a great idea though, and there's a lot of existing codebase for this idea to build on.

[Alberth]

The cargomonitor allows you to monitor pickups and deliveries in game scripts. NoCarGoal, Sillicon Valley, and Busy Bee at least use this a lot. Probably other game scripts use it too.

I wonder if you can use it as a money-sink instead. Rather than getting more money from transporting garbage, why not have to pay for it? Ie it's your town, you must handle it.
Make it exponentially more expensive for larger city population, and before long, you're very much broke

[Translink]

FIRS has Recyclables, which is a similar concept (output scales with population), but I'm not sure there are any goalscripts that limit growth based on recyclables -- especially since Recycling Centers are a fairly late-game industry.

City growth is not limited (as far as I am aware) The recyclables are just produced as a raw material in recycling centres and the player may chose to use that industry if the wish to, just like any other industry.

[ic111]

First, a suggestion like this belongs better in the OpenTTD Suggestions forum.

Second, something that controls city growth is better handled by goal (game) scripts. There are several city growth script that requires you to deliver certain amount of cargo to a town before the town can grow. There is a script where growth is somewhat controlled by the city of neighboring towns (Neighbors are Important). There is a script where growth of towns is controlled by how well the transport demand is met (City Growth Limiter). You can see what game scripts can do and refine some ideas.

Last year, I implemented this small patch viewtopic.php?f=33&t=73663

I used it in a longer single player game, and it really did what I want, I got slowly growing cities without any need to deal with city size myself. Something which I never had before.

(thinking again about it, maybe my approach of altering the config variable "max population on world" introduced by me would not work in a multiplayer game, but this wasn't my goal anyway --- in the first place I wanted to solve the problem of getting too huge cities for myself with a resonable amount of work (I think it took me one evening).

Thus, conceptionally I disagree with the opinion that such things always need to be done by Game scripts, sometimes a config variable with a clear behaviour is the better choice IMHO.