Boost city growth

[Roo]

Our city created long time ago. Also a savegame included.

[Buggi]

HOLY CRAP!!

[Arsenal]

That farm can't be producing much - it's hardly got any land left to harvest!

[Dangus]

Wow, that is one big city man......

Anyway, I am shocked at how few people bother to bury their lines leading in and out of the stations they have in cities! BURY THE LINES!!!! This will give you more space for the city to grow!

[The Frog]

Think about the possibilities of underground stations! That would be a cool feature.

[Rexxie]

A cool feature, and a planned feature

Can't wait to see that in action

[Roo]

version 0.4 should include it

[orangemoo]

I've been playing for a little while now (50 years) and although I have tried all the tactics described above, none of my cities grow. In fact they just shrink.

A case in point: I have one town that had about 800 people before I linked it up. I built 3 bus stations and ran buses between all the stations and stations in all the neighbouring towns. I built a goods depot and delivered goods and mail to it. I built some extra roads for the town to expand. However, the population quickly dropped so that my goods are now no longer accepted and it just doesn't seem to grow again.

Another case: One town that started with a population of about 1000 now just has 100 people living there, despite 3 bus stations and a train station.

This is sort of very annoying, especially seeing as I now have piles of goods and nowhere to deliver them!

[haakon99]

The need for buses to initiate city growth is a myth. The mythbuster has spoken!

City in attached screenshot was founded in 1930 and has NEVER seen any buses. My secret? Build ONE station that covers whole town and supply it with a transport sevice sufficient for it needs and it will grow. And grow. And grow.

Please note that there is ONLY one station so nothing clutters your view (Thanks to multistop!)

Håkon

Edit: Please note that even if I do get some grain and livestock FROM the city, I NEVER EVER delivered anything but passengers and mail! (Another myth killed?)

[Wolf01]

i can't boost the city grow, cities refuse me
if i find (on big maps) a city with 1000+ people and try to establish a road network without demolish buildings/roads, but only laying roads from one city to another the city start to lose peoples an i get after 3/4 years a city with 100- peoples... why?

[Default]

I have a city with 15.000+ citizens.

I always create 3 busstations with 3 busses. After a while i link that town with another town and let 2 busses go to each town.
And it starts growing after a few years.

[Apostate]

The need for buses to initiate city growth is a myth. The mythbuster has spoken!

As far as mythbusting is concerned, I've taken a look into the source code. If I understood it correctly, nothing has changed in comparison with plain TTD. One factor influencing town growth is the number of active stations in the town radius, up to 5. The station is active if ANY cargo was loaded or unloaded within the last 20 time units, probably days, but only devs know for sure The second factor is funding buildings. The third is town's size, which also influences its radius. The conclusions:
1. Having only one station certainly isn't optimal for town growth,
2. Your farm station may have influenced the town growth if it was in its radius, which is probable,
3. Busses are good for growing towns, because you can easily fit bus stations within town radius when it is still small, they visit bus stations frequently making them active and you can have 5 bus stations without problems.

[Apostate]

So, based on this I can suggest the ultimate method of growing towns. You place exactly 5 bus stations within town radius, which is counted from the tile with town name. The town radius is rather small for small towns. For the town in my example it was 5. You have to be careful and place your stations very close. You order 1 or 2 buses to go between them. If you want a really fast growth, you can fund new buildings every 3 months.Here is the result:

[haakon99]

Maybe my multiple stops count for the same effect? Since all of them is the same station, all of them get serviced regularly. I don't think the grain farm has made a big impact, since I have other towns with only passengers and mail, and they seem to grow more or less in the same speed.

Your town grows faster than mine, but since you use buses and I only have trains, it's possible that I don't make the 20 day limit verey time, while you probably do.

Håkon

[orangemoo]

Right, I have poked around in the code and fiddled with things. I am 99% certain that this is a bug (possibly introduced with the bigmaps stuff). To test it, I forced every town to grow ten times at each tick. Then I created a big map and ran it for a few years. Sure enough, only a handful of towns actually grew - all the others stayed the same size or shrank.

I wasn't able to work out why it happened - perhaps it has something to do with the pool of towns returning the wrong number of towns?

I don't have time to submit a bug report just right now though - perhaps someone else could do this for me? :-/

[CombatWombat]

I'd like to confirm that my current bigmap game (9x9 or 10x10, forget which) has no town with population over 1,200. Those that I serve always shrink and I must repeatedly fund new buildings to maintain goods. One town I set up with 5 bus stations in its radius at 1950. Now its 2021 and the population is 321. Down from the ~800 it started at.

[Jouster]

Thanks a million Apostate!
This fixed the problem even with big maps!

Again, many thanks for taking your time and posting the fix for us.

[ConductorBob]

Hey, I normally leave my old rails. I just then start build other rails around the first set.

[Korenn]

Thanks a million Apostate!
This fixed the problem even with big maps!

Again, many thanks for taking your time and posting the fix for us.

what fix? that's a workaround...

if the only way to make towns grow is by having 5 very active stations nearby, and besided that nothing else is required, it looks like a bad feature to me...

conductorbob: what does that have to do with towngrowth?

[ConductorBob]

Somewhere in thread, a little back, someone said it looked like BS cause it was 2021 and he was using normal rails.