City won't grow denser buildings?

[shi4stone]

Whenever I created a map with a city with relatively high population and tall buildings, or use public player to inject large population into a city while limiting minimum_building_desity in the city rule to force grow tall buildings,  the city simply refuse to grow any further. I mean there are still many low level buildings in the city and the transportation network is doing a find job moving people around. Why they don't upgrade more buildings?

Smaller town grows, but only sprawling out forever with low level buildings. If I don't set a limit on minimum_building_desity, after a while the whole map would become a big suburbia!! But if I do put some high number to minimum_building_desity, then everything stops... This is frustrating. Why the city cannot upgrade into a concrete forest?

Btw I also tried renovation_percentage in cityrule, but no obvious effect observed.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - I am looking to refurbish the city growth code after the next release of Experimental, so I can look into this issue (in Experimental) then.

[shi4stone]

I am playing experimental in fact. Like the city growth, but kinda frustrated to watch the whole map being swamped by pity little cottages, while skyscrapers only show up in tiny island where the city has no room to expand...
Can't wait for the next release then

[jamespetts]

Well, release after next, in fact: I will be working on this issue after the next release. If you can in the meantime find any resources that give detailed information on how real cities grow over time, that would be helpful.

[An_dz]

This is a hard task, generally studies about the human behavior tend to be generic and are not fully correct. Exceptions of these "rules" are generally common.
There are a lot of factors that may grow or shrink a city. Politics, rules on urban planning, number and type of jobs, public services and the culture of the current and newcoming citizens can all influence how it grows.

[shi4stone]

It would be fantastic to apply a realistic model, but I would be happy enough for now to be able to have some control on the city growth. I mean if I can choose to make the city to grow vertically--more tall buildings, or horizontally--keep sprawling, by simply modify some parameters in the config files.

I found the renovation_percentage  and minimum_building_desity  in cityrules.tab, but they don't seems to be working as they are explained. If they are set to too high numbers, the cities won't grow anymore, and I don't think it is working as intended. can some more experienced players share some experience in this regard, how they handle the city growth pattern?

[jamespetts]

This is a hard task, generally studies about the human behavior tend to be generic and are not fully correct. Exceptions of these "rules" are generally common.
There are a lot of factors that may grow or shrink a city. Politics, rules on urban planning, number and type of jobs, public services and the culture of the current and newcoming citizens can all influence how it grows.

We we really need to know is what impact that transport has on growth, and isolate that factor, assuming the others to be relatively constant for the purposes of a game that does not simulate culture, politics, etc..

[prissi]

How dense city looks depends very much on the pakset and time. This is not solveable by cityrules. Just image city centers with parks for the highest level buildings.

[shi4stone]

How dense city looks depends very much on the pakset and time. This is not solveable by cityrules. Just image city centers with parks for the highest level buildings.

but what i don't get is that the buildings won't upgrade even if there are higher levels available at the time, say year 2000, they just keep sprawling. If I prevent them from sprawling by change the cityrules, they simply stops grow. I don't think in this case the city growth is limited by the availability of buildings in the given pakset and time.

How do you guys manage to grow large cities with large dense urban centers?

[prissi]

There are some settings to play around, like the

# chance for renovation versus new building (bigger number => less sprawling)
renovation_percentage = 12

# cities will not growth further along exiting roads, if the buildings density is lower (in percent)
minimum_building_density = 33

Setting those to 100 and 0 should almost avoid creation of new buildings.

[shi4stone]

There are some settings to play around, like the

# chance for renovation versus new building (bigger number => less sprawling)
renovation_percentage = 12

# cities will not growth further along exiting roads, if the buildings density is lower (in percent)
minimum_building_density = 33

Setting those to 100 and 0 should almost avoid creation of new buildings.

I did played along these values a lot. as I understand minimum_building_density should be high to prevent new building, setting to 0 won't stop new houses being built,
So I set both to 99 (did not dare try 100) and was expecting to see buildings upgrade and no more small houses. And... there won't be any new buildings, but no upgrade either...That's what surprised me.