Town growth or lack thereof

[ThunderClaw]

Hello. I've done a lot of searching through this forum on this topic, so please don't tell me to use the search function. I'm obviously missing something critical with this aspect of the game, though.

I only recently started playing TTD when one of my friends opened an OpenTTD server. This particular scenario took place in a desert clime, but I've had problems stimulating towns to grow in other climes, too. This will get a little long because I'm not sure what's important and what isn't.

I decide to set my hat in a network of four towns. All of them are roughly 200 people. Two are coastal. I set up a nice transportation hub at all of them (big airport, 3-line railstation, bus/lorry station on one side) and get my rail network and road network set up, making sure there are no intersections between rail and road to eliminate safety and contention concerns and to direct the town growth. I then realize that a few of my hubs are not central enough, and set up a central bus station in each town. I take care to make sure that the central bus station is always busy by having one intra-town bus (going to the bus station at the air/rail hub), and two inter-town buses (going to another town's central hub); one that leaves immediately after loading, and another that waits for a full load. I set up two Dinger 200s ferrying in food from my processing plant per town, taking care to stagger them so I don't get a ton of planes that all want to land at once. I set up the trains to carry chiefly water, but also some passengers, mail parcels, and diamonds; I started diamond mines in the desert towns and water supplies in the coastal ones.

Just as I'm about to call it a day and quit until later, I notice a Passenger subsidy offered for a pair of desert towns (150 and 93 population) just north of the town network I just finished. I figured "what the hell," and set up a few central bus stations and haphazardly threw cloned buses at the situation. I'm the dominant company in this game, so I wanted to make a few strong towns for my competitors to take so the game would stay interesting. I figure the subsidy would more than compensate my investment and resolve to set up food and water supplies tomorrow.

The next day comes. I log into the server. You'd expect to see my carefully planned and thought out towns flourishing with a minor promise in the subsidized towns, right?

Wrong.

One of the subsidized towns has exploded from 150 to 15,000 people with no food or water supplies, terraforming all the land upward as it goes. The other subsidized town is still at 93 people. Of my four nourished towns, only ONE of the coastal towns has grown--and even then, it has only gone up to 6,000 people. The rest have not gained a single citizen.

I immediately assume that my Dingers must have crashed, but nope; a quick glance at my aircraft line shows that my 60-day maintenance schedule and auto-rebuy old vehicles has prevented even a single plane crash. I check the water route; good. The trains are finding their way across the network just fine, and the water supplies have ~75% ratings. Ditto for the passenger, mail, and diamond ratings for the hubs. Passenger ratings in the central bus stations are all over 90%. I check the local authority--I'm Outstanding with all of them! What? It was my understanding that it never went above Mediocre if the town wasn't growing!

I express my disbelief about this to my friends, and they say "You've set up mass transit too soon. Running trains while a town is still small will kill it." I order all my trains to depot and remove their passenger and mail cars; they are now hauling only water and diamonds. I set up mail trucks to take over the freed up resources, though they do a far worse job. I leave the subsidized towns the way they are and call it a day.

The next day comes, and a similar thing happens. The 15,000 pop town has ballooned to 25,000 and has now totally surrounded its partner town, which is still 93 pop. Again, these two towns are in the MIDDLE OF THE DESERT and have no means of getting food or water. My one growing town has come up to 10,000, and my other 3 towns are still totally static. Again, my Dingers are still zipping along like everything's great. In frustration, I order all my trains to depot and painstakingly make an intricate lock and canal system to allow freighters to deliver water to my desert towns. They're terrible compared to trains, but I wanted to totally eliminate the possibility of trains being the problem. I then intentionally annoy the local authorities of these towns down to Mediocre before calling it a day.

The third day comes. The 25,000 pop town--which, once again, has no food or water--is now 30,000 pop. My one growing town has plateaued at 10,000 people and my other three towns are STILL not growing. I check my ratings--I'm back up to Outstanding. Ratings for the water supplies are around 60 to 65%.

I am at my wit's end with this, and unfortunately my situation is not unique. It's happened to me in Temperate climates more often than I care to count. What am I doing wrong?

[Dave]

Maybe a legacy of the largertowns patch from TTDP, whereby only 1 in every x towns will grow as fast as they do in OTTD.

Whether this is implemented in OTTD or not, I don't know.

At least you've explained yourself properly, welcome to the forums.

[ThunderClaw]

Maybe a legacy of the largertowns patch from TTDP, whereby only 1 in every x towns will grow as fast as they do in OTTD.

Whether this is implemented in OTTD or not, I don't know.

At least you've explained yourself properly, welcome to the forums.

Thank you. I'll ask the server administrator if he knows anything about this patch. If so, well, that explains everything.

EDIT: Yeah, spoke to him. He failed to mention that only one in 5 towns ever become cities on this particular server. Thank you for the lead!

[Raichase]

As the problem seems to be based in OTTD, I moved this to the OTTD section.

Welcome to the forums ThunderClaw, quite a decent first post you made (far better than some users that register and post meaningless drivel).

Hopefully you can get more information from friendly people in the OTTD section, who may be able to explain to you more about it. Sadly, being a TTDP player, aside from what Dave has already shared, I have nothing to add.

Good luck, and please stick around, members who take time to write proper posts seem to be few and far between sometimes! .

Any questions or problems, please contact me

[Maedhros]

Please could you upload a savegame, so we can see more easily what might be wrong? The 1 in x towns becoming cities only means that those towns grow twice as fast - the others should still grow at least a bit...

[maartena]

I connected 2 towns in an arctic scenario with a passenger train, and each town had about 8 buses running around in it. Each city was a little over 500 people. I had created a maze of roads to progress growth and I would fund new buildings every now and then, and bribed them to the level they were "outstanding" with me.

If this was a temperate climate, I could have walked away and come back to two cities that were each 20.000+

In the arctic climate however, I came back the next morning (left it running overnight) to find that the cities had not grown at all. And I mean not even passed the 600 inhabitants, they were both virtually identical in population.

Do arctic cities also need food to grow, and they won't grow without it?

[Vloris]

Do arctic cities also need food to grow, and they won't grow without it?

Yes, they do. At least, the cities above the snowline will not grow if they aren't provided enough food.

[ThunderClaw]

Please could you upload a savegame, so we can see more easily what might be wrong? The 1 in x towns becoming cities only means that those towns grow twice as fast - the others should still grow at least a bit...

I'll try. If I can't get a proper savegame from the server we're playing on, I'll just start a new single player game until I manage to replicate the problem. I'm a computer scientist, myself, so I'm delighted to try to help squash bugs where they exist.

Failing that, I'll be just as happy if someone tells me what I'm doing wrong.

[Hanno]

you can save the game when you play on a server just like in single player, because every player has an identical copy of the map.

[Dave]

I'm a computer scientist

The depth and thoroughness of the first post suggested something along those lines

Please stick around, it'll be great to see a few brains here instead of the usual LOL IM BUILDING 10 TRK RAIL STN 4 MI 2 COAL TRNZ LOLOLOL

Although admittedly, I've never seen anyone do that.

[toholio]

I am at my wit's end with this, and unfortunately my situation is not unique. It's happened to me in Temperate climates more often than I care to count. What am I doing wrong?

People seem to be constantly confused over this stuff. The things to remember are that: in desert and arctic climates town wont expand without food or water if they are above the snow line or in the desert and the only thing that is used to determine the growth rate, ignoring things like funding new buildings, is the number of recently serviced stations within the town's radius.

And I really do mean that; the number of recently serviced stations determines the growth rate. Take a look at UpdateTownGrowRate() in town_cmd.cpp if you don't believe me.

The practical upshot of this is that you can maximise the growth of a town by prvoviding five stations each of which is serviced at least once every 20 days. Goods services, mail, passengers or coal doesn't matter. Just the frequency of service.

This can be done easily using a few busses setup like this:


If you still want more info take a look at some of the older posts on this topic.

[Ailure]

And doing the above, you be known as the transport company that brings you to the other side of the road.