Getting a desert town to grow

[jez]

I've been trying to get a desert town in my game to grow. It has a water tower, and I deliver food and water to it, as well as provide good passenger services by bus. I even created a large fleet of road vehicles to supply food and water on a more regular basis so it would have more of a constant supply, yet it still shows little to no growth. The town window shows it vacillating between no growth and growth every 199 days, but the population has hardly moved from where it was at the start of the game. Is it just incredibly difficult to get these towns to grow or is there a trick I'm missing?

town.png (477.61 KiB) Viewed 2018 times

[skc]

Small towns take a long while to get going, even with food & water being supplied regularly.

If you have enough money, and the option is enabled, you can 'fund new buildings', from the 'Local Authority' button at the bottom of the town info window.

[jfs]

One thing that helps growth a lot is to build a road network for the town to grow around. That makes it much more likely the town will use its growth cycles to build houses, instead of spending them on building roads.

Also I would suggest building one more bus stop and have one or two buses just running inside the town, even if it's not profitable. Frequent pickup service helps growth rate a lot. Ideally you'd have a bus arrive at a bus stop several times each month.

[jez]

So do they grow faster once they've gotten bigger?

[jfs]

Yeah bigger towns grow faster too.

[odisseus]

The town would grow only if it had both food and water delivered within the previous month. It is better to have frequent small deliveries than a few large ones.

Also, the town being in the "growing" mode doesn't guarantee that new houses are actually built. I've heard that the chance of successful house building depends on the number of road directions on the town's origin tile. Try bulldozing the church (ouch) and laying a new street in its place.

[jfs]

Yeah you would probably also be better off demolishing two of those lorry loading bays in the middle of the town and extending the road network out in the east direction too.


You can convert a service that delivers e.g. water or food in single large chunks to one that delivers in multiple small bits by using transfer orders: Have the train doing the bulk deliveries instead have a Transfer and leave empty order at a station a bit outside the town, then have a short truck route bringing the cargo from the transfer station to destination stations inside town, that accept the cargo. You can then adjust the length of that truck route, the number of vehicles, and optionally use timetables, to fine-tune the delivery frequency. Then you can aim for a minimum of one delivery per month, or attempt to be safer with two deliveries per month.

Desert towns don't actually care how much food and water gets delivered, just that it receives some every month.

[jez]

Yeah, what sucks about that is that the delivery train gets recorded as making a loss, I think, and so it'll get warnings every year (which I usually like to have for most vehicles).

[LaChupacabra]

From what I can see on your screenshot, the most likely cause of the lack of development is the location of the station label - it is too far from the buildings (there is no load acceptance within the range of the label). Then no road construction, no huge supply of water and food will help. For me, this is a flaw in the game mechanics. I've encountered this problem quite often in online games. The position of the label can also affect the assessment of the company in the city - it will not have any negative or positive impact.

Impact of station label position.png

(541.92 KiB) Not downloaded yet

[jez]

That's crazy, the label is moved based on where you build the initial station building! Lol. It'd make more sense to base it on the entire station's catchment area.

[Redirect Left]

Also be careful, that screenshot indicates you might be choking some growth points. The town can't expand immediately eastwards from its spawn point (to my knowledge, this is the tile 1 under the town name).
I've always struggled to grow a town if I've piled it with stations & stops that limit it's outward growth, given it can't just delete your property to grow, only its own.

I don't know how often towns delete a house (or other tile) to replace it with a road, or if it only grows from along the road route, which in this case would be damaging i think, if I'm wrong (fair chance), hopefully a dev can correct and I too can learn. Especially a town like in the screenshot, which is clearly not using a grid system of roads, so might build a road wherever RNG tells it to instead.

[skc]

From what I can see on your screenshot, the most likely cause of the lack of development is the location of the station label - it is too far from the buildings (there is no load acceptance within the range of the label). Then no road construction, no huge supply of water and food will help. For me, this is a flaw in the game mechanics. I've encountered this problem quite often in online games. The position of the label can also affect the assessment of the company in the city - it will not have any negative or positive impact.
Impact of station label position.png

LaChipacabra, if you click on the station to bring up the station info window, there's a 'Coverage' button at the bottom. That will highlight where the station actually covers.
As the OP said, the label is placed at the 1st tile of the station that was created.

[jfs]

A station always "belongs to a town", and that station-town relationship is based on the tile that first got the station sign for that station.
Additionally a station has a "distance from a town", which is the current distance from the station sign to the town name sign.

The station coverage determines which tiles are considered in range for the station for the purpose of generating cargo and calculating the cargo acceptance for the station, but they do not matter for which town or industry receives delivered cargo.

When cargo is delivered to a station, the station only considers the town it belongs to as the target for any town effects, such as water delivery.
(Reference: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob ... 1118-L1120 and https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob ... type.h#L25)

Cargo delivered to a station, which is accepted by an industry, is attempted delivered to the industries nearby the station in a specific order. The first industry near the station that can accept the cargo will receive the cargo.
(Reference: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob ... .cpp#L1038)
Stations consider the distance from the station to an industry to be the distance from the station sign to the closest tile of that industry.
(Reference: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob ... n.cpp#L362)
Industries with the same distance to the station sign are ordered by their index in the industries array.
(Reference: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob ... .cpp#L3113)


You're completely right that it's confusing and weird that so many game mechanics depend on the location of the station sign, but it's how the game works currently, and sometimes it's just necessary to "game" how you construct a station to control where the sign for it ends up. For example, build a 1x1 train station first to place the sign, then build your intended size train station over the initial station. Or first build a bus stop in a town and then build a train station you link to that bus stop.
Maybe it's possible to change this logic, or to change how the station sign is placed when a station is initially built, but if the cargo delivery logic is changed there's also a decent chance it might break someone's old saved games, so it'd need to be considered carefully.

[LaChupacabra]

LaChipacabra, if you click on the station to bring up the station info window, there's a 'Coverage' button at the bottom. That will highlight where the station actually covers.
As the OP said, the label is placed at the 1st tile of the station that was created.

And the location of the label matters, not the range of the station. Do you understand it? It's not intuitive, but that's how it works unfortunately. You can cover the entire city, you can transport 100% of passengers and mail, you can deliver 5 billion tons of goods every day, but if the label is away from buildings, this station will not affect the development of the city (scripts can change this mechanic), nor will it will affect the assessment of the company.

Maybe it's possible to change this logic, or to change how the station sign is placed when a station is initially built, but if the cargo delivery logic is changed there's also a decent chance it might break someone's old saved games, so it'd need to be considered carefully.

Heh... uphill all the time. Yes, changing the mechanics to make it intuitive, so that the city considers every station that has city buildings within range, could sometimes be a problem. For example, if someone doesn't want the city to grow and deliberately places a label away from buildings. Or when he wants to avoid a low rating due to infrequent visits to the station...

[jfs]

On a side note: Due to the way the cargo delivery works, if you have two desert towns close to each other, and town A has a water tower but town B does not have one, it would be possible to build a station that belongs to town B, but delivers water to the water tower in town A, and still have that count as water delivered to town B (and not town A).

[accipiter2000]

more stations inside the town is the key factor to increase town growth speed. 5 stations will reach to max. so you need to build 5 stations, but not one large station.
inside means stations label need to cover the land that town has authority on it