Map generation - less towns than set

[maedde999]

hello all

first sorry for my bad english..,
I‘m a newer openttd player and I love it! so far I made mostly industry networks, now I want to make a passenger network and therefore want to create a map with a lot of towns. So i create map and set number of towns to „high“. However, there are only 120-130 towns on the map.. I saw a lot of youtube videos with a lot more towns on the map.., and even if I set manually a number for the towns to „5000“ it only has about 130 towns on the map.

what am I missing? or is this just normal..?

thank you a lot!

edit: typo

[Leanden]

How big is the map you are playing on?

Regardless of how high you set the number of towns. Map generation is still limited by minimum distance between towns making space a limiting factor on town quantity.

[maedde999]

How big is the map you are playing on?

Regardless of how high you set the number of towns. Map generation is still limited by minimum distance between towns making space a limiting factor on town quantity.

small, 512x512

what confuses me is that it doesn‘t make any difference between „high“ and manual set „5000“. there are not more than 120-230 towns

[Alberth]

Scenario editor would work, I think (never tried it though).

Don't underestimate the additional space that gets eaten by towns due to their natural growth. Also, you can 'guide' that somewhat by making roads for towns to expand along.

[maedde999]

Scenario editor would work, I think (never tried it though).

Don't underestimate the additional space that gets eaten by towns due to their natural growth. Also, you can 'guide' that somewhat by making roads for towns to expand along.

ok, thanks.., so 128 towns per map is the maximum in the „normal“ map generation?

[Leanden]

Scenario editor would work, I think (never tried it though).

Don't underestimate the additional space that gets eaten by towns due to their natural growth. Also, you can 'guide' that somewhat by making roads for towns to expand along.

ok, thanks.., so 128 towns per map is the maximum in the „normal“ map generation?

Not exactly. Lots of factors in map generation dictate the number of towns. Aside from map size and town density, sea level and terrain roughness also play a part.

A flat 512x512 with no water will have more towns than a mountanous map with high sea level.

[maedde999]

Scenario editor would work, I think (never tried it though).

Don't underestimate the additional space that gets eaten by towns due to their natural growth. Also, you can 'guide' that somewhat by making roads for towns to expand along.

ok, thanks.., so 128 towns per map is the maximum in the „normal“ map generation?

Not exactly. Lots of factors in map generation dictate the number of towns. Aside from map size and town density, sea level and terrain roughness also play a part.

A flat 512x512 with no water will have more towns than a mountanous map with high sea level.

ok, thank you a lot..! I play around with the settings more tonight..
I‘m inspired by the youtube series „an empire from scratch“. also a 512x512map but faar more towns than on my map.

[Alberth]

I never bother about cities, but it's easy to get the entire map filled with houses as far as I know.
Just layout a 2x2 or 3x3 grid road network, and wait a few decades.

From what I have seen in the screenshot topic, a strategy is to first setup stations, then add the roads, then let time do its job

[maedde999]

I never bother about cities, but it's easy to get the entire map filled with houses as far as I know.
Just layout a 2x2 or 3x3 grid road network, and wait a few decades.

From what I have seen in the screenshot topic, a strategy is to first setup stations, then add the roads, then let time do its job

yeah that is clear I just wanna understand why I get so much less towns (the number of towns) than I should regarding to so many youtube vids and tutorials that I‘ve seen. I always got around 128 towns per map and for what I plan to do in my next play I just wanted to have much more single, small towns than like 128.. mainly I just wanna understand it

[Alberth]

Let's see, 512x512 / 128 = 2^18 / 2^7 = 2^11 = 2^5 x 2^6 = 32x64 tiles for each town, and then you don't have room for any water, any tracks, or any industries.
As a generic setting for all types of play, it looks quite reasonable to me for 100 year city growth where you don't get stuck completely by expanding towns in 50 or so years.

There is one other possible reason not mentioned yet here so far, I think, which is using a NewGRF for town names. Some such NewGRFs have a limited number of unique names, and since OpenTTD doesn't generate towns with duplicate names, that would also limit the number of towns you can have.
The default name generators have enough names to avoid this limit.


I don't look much for OpenTTD youtube movies, as they don't tell me much new, and if they do, they take too long
Are you sure they just generated a random map, and not have something prepared beforehand?
It seems reasonable to assume that when you intend to show some feature in a video, you prepare for it, which thus might also mean they prepare a map beforehand, which doesn't limit them to the random map generator.

[cmhbob]

In Settings > World generation there's a setting for Minimum Distance between Towns. If that's set too high on a small map, the game won't have enough space to place towns. Default setting is 20.

[Eddi]

number of towns generated is also limited by the town name generator, not just space on the map.

[PaulC]

The default name generators have enough names to avoid this limit.

Not quite true, some of the default town name sets are quite limited. By my reckoning:

French = 68 max
Latin-American = 85 max
Romanian = 94 max
Slovak = 85 max
Swiss = 123 max

The rest all seem to generate considerably more, though.