Many of the medieval attractions increase the size of cities by huge amount (up to 20,000 population increase for a building that appears in a city that can have as few as 5000 before the building is built)
I wasn't aware attractions increased population - probably I'm wrong here. I had set the level of the new attractions high in order to make them popular destinations, but clearly that has had a side effect. Can anyone clarify the link here - it seems sensible to me that attraction level dictates how popular an attraction is to visit but that it has no effect on population. Is it possible to alter one without the other?
No, I don't think that it is - the level of the attraction is what sets its effect on the population. Certainly, cathedrals and castles would have had a profound effect on a town's population in their time, but not as much as is set here! Perhaps the levels can be turned down somewhat to moderate the effect.
(I am not sure of the exact ratio between the level and the attraction's increase in population).
Hmmm, it still strikes me as odd that attractions increase population - no-one sleeps in them surely? But they may have an effect on population growth in the city (ie more residential blocks built). Either way I've noticed this in a rare bit of game-testing I indulged in and the cathedrals have too large an effect on passenger flows - I will cut these down.
I have been doing some checking. Attractions do not have a direct effect on the city size, but monuments do. If these buildings were coded as attractions instead of monuments they would work much better, but due to the number of attractions in most cities in pak128.britain, they would hve much less passengers.
OK. I'm just worried that coding cathedrals and castles as attractions means even more of them, and therefore even more chance several appear in the same city.
Can't you deal with this by using the "chance" setting, and have the "chance" for cathedrals, say, 5% of that for churches?