Number of cities

[bigliettiperfavore]

Hi,
I am not sure whether this is me doing something wrong or intentional. I'm testing the Pak.192 on 120.4.1 Extended Nightly dev build 14.17 (pak192.comic-serverset-extended-nightly (RC2) from a couple of weeks ago).
I like to play with a lot of cities, so I test 450 but definitely a lot less are being generated. I tried 700 and 800 as well just to test it, but I guess 50-100 are generated.
Any advise on this? Version of either pak192 or extended issue? Perhaps I'm using one that is not ideal..

Thanks in advance

[jamespetts]

There are only so many cites that can fit on a map for any given value of the city spacing settings - if you are getting fewer cities than you requested, this is likely to be why. If you are getting fewer cities than you expected but there are large open spaces suitable for cities, you might want to check the pakset's city spacing settings.

[Ranran(retired)]

I have been struggling with this issue for a long time.
city_isolation_factor = 128
Setting this value to 1 seems to make little difference.
Also, sometimes strange metropolises are generated regardless of the settings

[bigliettiperfavore]

Ah, there's a setting for this.
city_isolation_factor was already at 1(lowest setting). I tried setting it to 32 and 2000 but that didn't make much of a difference.
The map size is 2048x2048 - any other setting I can change? I'm not too familiar with advanced settings to be honest.
Hmm might there be another simuconf.tab for the pakset that is overriding the value I input in the New Game settings perhaps?

In the simuconf.tab of the Pakset this value is present (minimum_city_distance = 32). Not sure if this is actual or even valid in Extended?

I set the minimum_city_distance=1 in the pakset and city_isolation_factor = 1 in the preferences for new game. Now it seems better.

[Ranran(retired)]

In the simuconf.tab of the Pakset this value is present (minimum_city_distance = 32). Not sure if this is actual or even valid in Extended?

Oh, I missed that. This seems to be effective.
It seems that extended has a long history of confusion regarding these two parameters.
After standard introduced minimum_city_distance, extended renamed it to city_isolation_factor when merging it.
However, minimum_city_distance does affect the current city generation algorithm and is present in the code. Of course, it also reflects the settings in simconf.tab.
However, it is commented out and only present in the game folder's one.

And the simconf.tab on pak.britain-EX ver 12 explains it this way.

Code Select Expand

# This setting determines the extent to which cities should be built far away from
# other cities when the map is first generated. The higher the number, the further
# away from each other that the cities are built. This is introduced in Simutrans-Experimental
# 9.0. It replaces Simutrans-Standard's setting of "minimum_city_distance".

city_isolation_factor = 48
Also there is no settings entry for it in settings_stats. Standard has it.
Therefore, city_isolation_factor seems to have a history of being intended to exist as an alternative to standard's minimum_city_distance.
However, judging from the current specifications, this does not seem to be the case.
I think these facts create a situation where this setting is easily overlooked in extended.