Suburbs grow instead of urban core

[codycodes1234]

Hello i am new to the game and i just wanted to know how to promote growth of the urbanized portions of the city instead of having suburbs covering most of the landscape

[Eddi]

towns in this game have "zones", rings around the town center, which define which houses get built. the relative sizes of each zone are somewhat fixed, the only thing you can do is preventing towns from building roads by themselves, so they don't sprawl outwards as much.

[Argus]

This seems to me like the influence of ITL houses graphics or something similar. I've never seen it without this graphic before.
In addition to banning cities from building roads, you can also reduce their growth rate, although this won't matter for a city this big, especially if it's a large city.

[odisseus]

No, this doesn't look like the effect of ITL houses. The town grows in a perfectly standard way, i. e. around its origin tile rather than around the stations.

This particular town has a relatively large degree of sprawl due to its inefficient road layout. At a quick glance, there seems to be 2 to 3 road tiles per each house tile. You can try tweaking the town layout setting, or indeed just disallow road building by towns altogether.

[jfs]

Seconding the road layout thing. If you destroy several of the unneeded roads in the town, it will hopefully fill those spaces out with buildings instead, which should result in an overall denser town before it starts expanding outwards again.

[ebla71]

Seconding the road layout thing. If you destroy several of the unneeded roads in the town, it will hopefully fill those spaces out with buildings instead, which should result in an overall denser town before it starts expanding outwards again.

Is it correct that towns can build 1x1 tile houses only directly adjacent to a street?

So if "_" indicates a street tile and "h" indicates a house tile you can only have

_ h h _ h h _

and so on if you go in one direction, but never

_ h h h _ h h h _ ???

Meaning if you have a "block" larger than 2 tiles wide, the "inner" tile will remain "open land", like
_ h x h _ h x x x h _

if "x" is an "open-space" tile?

[Eddi]

there is some special logic to fill the inner tile of a 3x3 block in a grid layout.

[ebla71]

there is some special logic to fill the inner tile of a 3x3 block in a grid layout.

Is there any documentation on that procedure outside the source code itself?

And in blocks larger than 3x3 the inner tiles do not get filled at all, right? At least that was my impression from all my recent games.

[Eddi]

there is some special logic to fill the inner tile of a 3x3 block in a grid layout.

Is there any documentation on that procedure outside the source code itself?

unlikely

And in blocks larger than 3x3 the inner tiles do not get filled at all, right? At least that was my impression from all my recent games.

correct.

[trainrover]

I wouldn't agree to those innermost tiles not getting filled "at all", as I've had some bigger quadrants than 3x3'ers that got entirely filled...

Idly, I'm now dealing with a heavyweight that's shrinking due to its bus feeders having been mostly replaced by subway feeders.

[Eddi]

make sure the center tile remains a road tile, otherwise the town cannot grow at all.