16th century cathedral - cost to clear $200

[uzurpator]

I think the title says all

It bothers me to no end - clearing of a sawmill - 1.000.000, but clearing of a town building costs a few pennies.

it gets pretty funny when a single truck may cost more then clearing a church.

So - my proposal.

base the clearing costs on the town zone the building is in.

1-st zone (the outmost one) - like now
2-nd zone - cost x4
3-rd zone - cost x16
4-th zone - cost x64
5-th zone (innermost) - cost x256

So - a building which costs $500 to clear in 1st zone would cost $128k in the 5th - pretty nicely showing land costs inside of a big city (note - if removal means that we get money, then this multipliers do not apply)

Likewise - to build something in a city would cost more like this

1-st zone (the outmost one) - like now
2-nd zone - cost x2
3-rd zone - cost x8
4-th zone - cost x16
5-th zone (innermost) - cost x64

So - lay a road in a city - $500 in first zone, $32000 in the 5th.

[Vloris]

I think the situation as it is right now is quite balanced because the city's local council usually isn't very permissive anymore after you demolished a couple of houses. This makes building your own stuff in the middle of a town already a pain-in-the-***.
First, while destroying buildings to make space for your stuff will anoy the local authority so destroying anymore and building your stations will not be possible.
But also, a very permissive city is usually also a large and quickly expanding one and it will start rebuilding the spots you cleared almost faster than you can do it yourself!

I think it would make it even more impossible and really less realistic to increase the costs of demolishing buildings.

[Maedhros]

It's possible to set the removal cost multiplier when using newhouses, so if the authors chose the cathedral could have cost a lot more to remove. I don't think this allows the costs to change depending on the town zone though.

[Csaboka]

Well, the removal cost for the cathedral is already maxed out. The only way to increase it would be to multiply all building removal costs with a constant, but I don't want to do this, for several reasons.

For a test, I've started a new game with TTRS2, and the removal cost of a cathedral was around $2000. I had to bribe the LA first, though, because the "removal rating" setting for the cathedral is pretty high as well.

The town zone multiplier you suggest wouldn't solve this particular problem either. Small towns usually have the outer zones only, so the cathedral is in an outer zone in the beginning of the game. The cost would gradually increase as the town grows (the cathedral getting in higher zones), but you could still remove cathedrals cheaply in small towns.

[Hyronymus]

How about introducing a "special building type" label that multiplies all demolision costs with a given factor for all buildings in that category.

[Csaboka]

Well, adding a second cost property that allows multipliers up to 65536 would be simpler IMO, and would require the same amount of work from the TTDPatch side. I don't know how much code would need to be patched for this to work, but given how little free time I have recently, it won't happen soon.