New player! Question about town population

[JSmith0730]

Hi,

Not sure if this should be hear or in the Brit pak subforum so, apologies beforehand.

I recently started playing Extended using the Britain pak and have mostly been experimenting with the settings seeing what everything does/what I like. I'm just curious if there is any way to manually change the town populations at the beginning of the game. Just as an example: if I wanted the villages on my map to start with one resident each, is that possible? If I'm not mistaken, Extended uses a different method of populating towns than Standard; median town pop. seems to give weird results (sometimes every town will have 0 population while other times every town will have 0 population except for one town that has 6k people when I set the median settings to 1). I've tried using the public service tool to increase and decrease the population and while increasing the population works, decreasing it does nothing so I'm at a loss.

If it's something that can't be changed, fair enough. Just figured I'd ask anyway.

Thanks!

[jamespetts]

Welcome to the forums!

The current method of town growth in Simutrans-Extended is due to be overhauled comprehensively at some point; the current system is not entirely satisfactory in a number of ways. You can influence the starting town size with the "median population" setting in the dialogue for creating a new game (and also by specifying the number of "big cities"), but this control may be less fine-grained than is ideal at present.

I am a little reluctant to spend too long fixing town growth issues with the current code pending what will be quite a fundamental redesign, so things like the manual decrease not fully working is not currently a priority to fix.

Perhaps I might be able to help a little more by getting an idea of what overall effect that you are trying to achieve?

[JSmith0730]

Hey

I'm curious about seeing how small I could make most of the towns on the map (I'm trying to go for a map of small villages growing into large cities over time). I have big cities set to 0 but still seem to get one disproportionately big city when starting a new map, so I've been trying to see if there was a way to avoid that and set the numbers myself if it were possible.

[jamespetts]

If you get just one oversized city, you could just generate a map with one more city than you want and delete the largest.

[JSmith0730]

You know, it's funny, I was laying in bed last night and I realized I was so caught up in trying to figure out how to solve the problem I overlooked the easiest solution staring me in the face: just start on a map with 0 population and manually add a hovel to each town with the public service tool.   

[Introaether]

Just chiming in with some info. I ran some tests in extended 128 Britain.

You can grow a city which starts with zero population as long as another city has some population.

I tried a map where every city spawned with zero pop and couldn't generate any growth.

So, for extreme hardest settings. I go for a map where only two or three cities spawn with a few pop, the rest have zero.

Starting in 1750, this gives goal of building up all cities from scratch.

Glgl