City Rules improvement

[checksumdigit]

I spent some time working on a 2x2 grid city rule set. I have also tried to reduce the number of rules in the file. This appears to reduce city creation time when making new maps. These rules will make a fairly consistent 2x2 house grid with a street bordering the block.

I'd say it's mostly bug free, but please try it out and let me know if you think it can be improved.

I'm also attaching my start at 3x3 grid rules, The rules I'm attaching also tend to create 3x1 and 1x1 blocks, as well as larger 5x3, 7x3, etc.

I like the variation of 3x1 and 3x3 as well as occasional 1x1 blocks. I still have some work to do to prevent the 1x1 block from being created so frequently. The city size is also limited by these rules and I'm hoping to have greater coverage to create larger cities.

Again, comments and ideas for improvement are always welcome.

These should work with any pak. I've been testing with 110.0.2.

[wlindley]

The 2x2 rules make very regular cities.  Almost boringly so; when you have a number of large cities they look just like Manhattan with oh-so-perfect grid plans.  Also there is a degenerate case where all the buildings line up along a single street:



And -- At least with pak128.Britain-Experimental, the 3x1 ruleset didn't seem to populate the center of the blocks at all.

[Fabio]

Pure 2*2 is extremely boring (I made it at first, I had to change it later).
3*1 is not realistic, 3*3 is bad as the house in the middle has no access to the road, or it's empty and the tile is wasted.

The best cityrules are a combination of 2*2 and 2*3, which break the perfect grid.

If you didn't, you can take a look to the cityrules of pak128 I made a few years ago.

(Probably, I should update them at a certain point using the newer "u"/"U" entries instead of plain "n" or "H", which could improve road building.

[checksumdigit]

I suppose instead of improvement, my rules are just a diversion from the standard set and possibly extremely boring. Although I really appreciate the grid result, some may not.

Thanks for that catch wlindley, I hadn't noticed that behavior before, but was able to reproduce it. As for the center tile for 3x3, for me it does populate but on the edges of a city sometimes it is not filled in. I don't have a current version of pak.britan at the moment, but I'll see if I can reproduce that also.

Fabio, is the center tile not having road access an issue? While visually more 'accurate' I thought all that really mattered was station coverage to catch the potential passengers or mail.

So if the grid is boring in your opinions, what would make city rules more exciting then? all diagonals? no streets? 
While building these rules, I learned a lot and did create some other interesting rules by mistake.

[Fabio]

Sure trying is fun and gives you and other idead.

There is no need for direct road connection in ST, except for realism. But being default catching area 2 tiles on each side of a stop, a block 2 tiles large is the most efficient for gameplay too.