City Planners - And Fixers

[Wolfi]

First of all, hi. Ive been lurking about these forums a while, and you all have given me some great insights into this game. I thank you. Im not writing this looking for "hack" fixes...I already know the tricks to "wall" in a city.

Now down to buisness. I love this game, theres no doubt, but it was very obviously released unfinished. Ive read the forums, and it seems one of the biggest complaints out there is the insane city growth model.

I think we can fix that without hacking the .exe

Heres the reasoning - In the games ive been playing lately the city will grow without aid, expected. However at a certain point the city takes on its own, uncontrolled, growth pattern. Any player aid (tram, train, bus) included in this pattern simply causes it to grow much faster. Thats a given.

Now, there is a model involved in the city growth that we as players have very little influence over, short of passenger movement. From what I can tell food and goods really do nothing to cause city growth...which is too bad. But there is a model, that is the key.

Somewhere on these forums someone put forward the idea that city growth is directly tied to either money, or people. I concur with that. And that is what I am putting forward to this community. We can not change the exe, but we can change the .dat files.

This is all theory:
After playing around with a few (short) games, i noticed that the towns will build houses and these houses were ADDING 12 people to the population.

I put it to you that one possible fix is the population added by building type...it is a tad high, and if it were cut back- say 1/3 to 1/4 of what it is this MAY cause city growth to slow. It could, however, cause it to grow faster...and thats where the money comes in.

If we assume there is a monetary value on a building, and the city has to "buy" each building then the case above would slow growth, simply stated it would cost more to grow the city poplulation.

It could also be put forward that the city growth model could be adjusted by INCREASING both the cost of the buildings and the clearing cost (I assume the city pays to clear land before building).

What we should do is focus on how the city EARNS its funding. Im sure the primary factor is populace, maybe $1 per month per citizen or something, which would explain how a city bursts when it reaches a population of several thousand. It can afford to build whatever it wants, and each building is adding to the population in massive numbers. It becomes perpetual.

In closing, I am messing with these building dat files, but I havent a clue what the building costs may be, or how they are calculated. I have the wiki, which gives an idea of the population added, but we are very short on actual information of what these variables are and/or do.

So...sorry this is so long...I put it to you all to observe and give any information that may be useful to adjust the model (assuming it is possible by variable)....namely the COST of a city build. As well as the "financial" ability of a city at any given point.

If we lower the population produced by a building, and increase the cost of a building, we slow growth in a city. Simple as that. And then it may be possible to control the demands of food and goods into the city and make the products worth more than move from point A to point B in x amount of time.

Thanks for listening.

P.S. I would sign any petition to get Locomotion into the public domain and open sourced.

[metalangel]

Excellent theory

Anyone got the time to figure out if it can be done, and if it works? My dad showed me his scenarios the other day and couldn't stop chuckling at how outrageously huge the cities got.

"It's fundamentally broken," he said, and he's never read these forums!

[TheGrew]

I had a read when I have the time (when not doing HWK) I will check it out

[Villem]

Well reducing the amount of people the buildings produce is extremely easy, but theres many buildings to modify.
ill take bldcty10.dat as a example, it has two fields that tell Loco how much this building should produce, these are

<variable name="numproduce[0]" size="1">80</variable>
<variable name="numproduce[1]" size="1">25</variable>

the [0] in the numproduce is the cargo it produces, and in the office buildings case they are these, notice cargo[0] is passengers, and cargo[1] is mail.

<useobject desc="cargo[0]" class="8">PASS </useobject>
<useobject desc="cargo[1]" class="8">MAIL </useobject>
<useobject desc="cargo[2]" class="8">GOODS </useobject>
<useobject desc="cargo[3]" class="8">FOOD </useobject>

There are also fields that define how much these buildings accept cargo.

<variable name="numaccept[0]" size="1">4</variable>
<variable name="numaccept[1]" size="1">2</variable>
<variable name="numaccept[2]" size="1">2</variable>
<variable name="numaccept[3]" size="1">3</variable>

To modify the .dat files, all you need is Locotool, avaible here.
Note:Take backup of your .dat files before replacing or decompiling them.

All you need to do is edit the .xml file after you have decompiled the .dat, the .xml can be opened in notepad.

After you are done, just drag the .xml file on locotool.exe and it will compile the .dat

This should be all the information you need to go on and modify how much passengers and mail the buildings produce.

[MjD]

well said aka, just what i was going to say but u beat me to it (and saved me the effort of the copying and pasting ).

[Wolfi]

Thank you Akalamanaia.
I did spend some time with 5 of these files in a game last night edited to produce less population, and had fair results. The city did not break into mass growth mode for about 20 years, this was running 8 trams and a rail station -all stops at 90%+. This was using 3 houses set to produce 2 pop and 2 towers (offices which were set to 55) set to produce 2 as well.
However an interesting thing happened, the city began to convert housing to towers at about 3 a month once population hit 800 or so. This came and went in spurts...but the majority of the new population growth went into towers instead of adding new homes.

I found this to be rather odd. Although if we consider each floor of a building to hold X amount of population, in this case 2, then of course the use of a tower is wiser in terms of increasing growth. I did not verify that it actually holds more than 2.

Most of the variables are pretty self explanatory, but I have to believe there is an "unknown" that causes the game to prefer building "up" instead of "out" at some level.

I can now, pretty much, say that it is not neccesarily the population a building holds.

What Im looking for is the knowledge of these variables that have no clear definition, field_9C for example.

I have played other games done by Chris Sawyer, and I have a very hard time believing there is not some sort of underlying population model that governs the growth of the towns. I could be wrong, and it could be simple random choosings, but Id rather hope not.

Next step, I intend to change a building so that it subtracts from population, if possible. As well change office buildings so they add nothing to population and see if they get built in the same manner as they do now...if so, it would kill the town if it built towers over the housing. And I think that would mean that there is no AI in the town build code

But thats for later. Must work now.
Thanks for the responses.

[abarten]

For what it's worth, I've had some cities in North America Midwest with very slow growth. I even had to abandon a tram line because nothing was happening.

Al

[Supermint]

I figuured out the ultimate cure for this. surround the city with water. the ai wont build over water on the same level as the city.