Is it possible to increase the mean population density?

[Donald C.]

I've found that ALL of my cities are having a population density (around 50/km^2 for capital cities, even in 2022) way lower than that of the whole UK (281/km^2). There is currently no way to fix this, and increasing the passenger multiplier won't compensate the loss of passengers, since the maximum passenger multiplier is only 100 (default 40).

This issue may cause my early cities to generate very few passengers, making passenger transport unprofitable in all means in the early era.

[jamespetts]

Thank you for noting the issue. The current development plan is to look into town growth and related matters after completing work on the Ex-15 branch. That is an especially challenging branch technically, and I have not been able to work on that lately for a variety of reasons, including some very disruptive house renovation works that have not yet been completed.

[Donald C.]

Anyway, it's good to hear that there's still progress in Extended. I hope they'll update the pak192.comic-Ex pakset though.

Most buildings generated in pak128.Britain are suburban, which contributes to this issue. I'd like to see more skyscraper and modern buildings in large cities.

Another 'issue' with town generation is that all cities are rectangle-shaped unless they're blocked by water. (Though this also happens to large cities in Standard)

[neroden]

I had a long-standing plan to completely change the city code so that as the cities grew, each individual tile was city-owned or not (this is *already being tracked*) so that cities could have weird organic shapes instead of rectangular borders.  Never got around to it because there's always higher-priority code cleanups to do.  Would have to replace the code for showing city boundaries in the minimap entirely.

[neroden]

If someone wants to replace the code for city boundaries in the minimap so that it handles oddly-shaped cities (by checking the city status of each tile), that's the hard part.  If that's gone I know how to fix the rest of it... though there are some decisions to make to avoid cities with lots of "holes" in them which look like cheesecloth