Finally upgraded to 1.20 - City growth mechanism changed?

[Giziar]

So I finally upgraded my (very) long lasting save to 1.20 (was unchanged at 1.11 since November 2011) and besides that I'm impressed with yet more improvements in the game (network map mode yah!) I have a question about the growth of my cities as it seems that city growth has slowed down significantly.

City growth of all cities combined used to be around 12-15k per month but has slowed down since upgrading to around 500 per month.
This might have been in the release notes somewhere but I might have overlooked it then.

Any setting to alter to change the city growth (at least partially) back to what it was?

Note:
Game started a few versions ago and since a lot of game info is in that older simuconfig file I don't have the exact details at hand but game was started with lower amount of passengers and slower movement of time

[Combuijs]

There is in simuconf.tab:

Code Select Expand


# town growth is size dependent. There are three different sizes (<1000, 1000-10000, >10000)
# the idea is, that area increase by square but growth is linear
growthfactor_villages = 400
growthfactor_cities = 200
growthfactor_capitals = 100


I don't know, this might be older than november 2011.

[Giziar]

That was already in the simuconfig of the 1.02.2 version which is one of the more likely candidates for the version that the current game is started with.

Edit: on 2nd thoughts: the game is likely started with 1.10.1

[DrSuperGood]

City growth is influenced by consumer industry supply percentage. Check that all industry are still functioning correctly as there are at least 3 errors with industry in RC120.

These were...
1. Cross linking results in incorrect maximum in-transit values on load (each supplier adds 1 to maximum in transit, nowhere near enough for efficient operation).
2. An overflow can occur with large in-transit percentages resulting in negative maximum in-transit (so no goods can ever be produced).
3. An interpretation error results in corrupting in-transit values. This should mess up graphs but have no impact on factory operation.

[prissi]

If memory serves me right there was rather an error in city growth which used the bits per month setting wrongly and grew cities too fast instead.

[Michael 'Cruzer']

We (pak192.comic network game) use the recommended city growth settings and even tried to play around with it, but city growth is very low in latest nightly. Independent from settings we only get a growth value 0.0 to 5.0 while half of the map is fully connected (industries and cities).

While using RC120 city growth seemed to behave as expected.

EDIT: May be worth to mention that our frames_per_second are set to 15 and bits_per_month is set to 20.

[DrSuperGood]

The growth rate code should be functionally identical and was last modified before RC120. That said growth probably could be done better.

Currently there are 3 growth modes (small town, medium town and city) which define how fast base growth is. The cut-on for these is 1,000 for medium town and 10,000 for city. Although a constant "CITYGROWTH_PER_CITICEN" is defined the actual city population is not used in any way during the calculation for growth. This is why a 100,000 city will grow as fast as a 10,000 city with similar services.

Intrinsically this is bad for gameplay as it encourages city spamming. It is much better to have 10 times 10,000 cities than 1 times 100,000 since the ten cities will grow 10 times faster.

Growth is further slowed unless there is at least 1 consumer industry nearby that is well serviced. If there is no consumer industry nearby you lose industry related growth completely.