When I buy a building, does it stop growing?

[T/C]

In my current game, I'm watching a small town grow into a big city. When I discovered the "Buy house" command, I assumed it must be a way to make money in the game by buying cheap properties and watching them appreciate. Therefore, I bought a few inexpensive buildings in the heart of the city, expecting them to grow into precious assets. Since then, however, almost every other building in the area has evolved into something more valuable, but my buildings have remained unchanged. Is that what is supposed to happen? When you buy a building, does it stop changing? If so, then clearly the purpose of buying buildings is not real-estate speculation. What, then, is the purpose?

-TC

[IgorEliezer]

Is that what is supposed to happen? When you buy a building, does it stop changing?

Yes, that's because Simutrans is not a real-estate game, it's a transport simulator game. The only way to make money is transportation: delivering yourself items (freight) or taxing other player's transportation (tolls).

There is a few purposes involved with this tool:
- preserve the landscape: perhaps you don't want skyscrapers around your fine-tuned station, or you just want to keep a historic district.
- use the buildings you bought as placeholder, so other players (AI or humans) won't build there.

[AP]

It can be useful to discourage the city from growing too much in the centre, to avoid a skyscrapers-surrounded-by-slums appearance.

In pak-gb, it allows a (rich) player to ensure that a historic city core remains, with more modern city growth around it - as happened in reality in many places.

[jamespetts]

More prosaically (and usefully), it can be used to reserve land on which a player wishes to build, so that larger (and more expensive to demolish) buildings are not built on it.

It is often said that "Simutrans is a transport game not X", but the X is very often something closely related in economic terms to transport, the simulation of which would enhance the core simulation of transport. Land value is one of those things: a good land value model would make cities develop more realistically, thus causing a more realistic (and interesting) pattern of transport. It would be more interesting still if the pattern of development in a city were to be heavily influenced by the availability of transport, as it was in reality. However, this would be a very large programming task, and there are many other more important things that all programmers, in both Standard and Experimental, have to do first.