controlled city growth

[grampybear]

 In the past there has been a lot of discussion about controlling city growth.
Are we there yet??  I play PAK128 latest version and spent 5 game years building a controlled zone living city with small single family houses in one area, limited industry, and high rise living in another area. Now I find parks, playgrounds and lakes appearing in the middle of my houseing areas :(

[wipi35]

Support! This was my post of 5 month ago.

With the availability of the industry-buildertool and  the city-buildingstool , the way I start a new game has changed considerably.
I now start with one or zero cities, immediately building the required number on the locations I prefer.
Then I carefully create the layout of the roads and the busstops, so that the stationcoverage  is optimal (no uncovered areas, no overlap.)
Next step is building the houses, offices, industrial buildings, etc.  I put most offices in the centre, large appartmenthouses somewhat further away, streets with identical houses in a row on various locations, cinema's, casino's, restaurants in a recreation area,  villas and bungalows in the outskirts on the Southwest side, industrial buildings on the Northeast side. (This because of the dominating S-W winddirection!)
All this as "government player" and urban planner.

After the city layouts are  completed I change to "human player" and start making the necessary railway and roadconnections and also the industries, supermarkets, shopping centres, etc.

What happens now is that after a few years the program made a mess of my carefully created world, houses of the wrong type are build, existing houses are replaced by other types, roads are made at places I don't want them and highspeed roads are replaced by lowspeed ones.

[jamespetts]

This is already possible in Simutrans-Experimental: the rate of city growth can be customised, and city growth can be disabled entirely.

[Severous]

But we need city population growth to trigger industry spawn ?

[wipi35]

But we need city population growth to trigger industry spawn ?

Not necessarily, I always set "industry_increase_every = 0" in cityrules.tab and create the industries myself (as government player) at the time and the place I like.

[grampybear]

Hi everyone,  I have been playing PAK128 v102 for some time now and find it just a wonderful game with new challenges every day recently I tried the experimental version with PAK128 and while it contains many new improvements and all new challenges there is one area that is still frustrating...after spending many hours ( even forgetting to eat at times ) building a city with housing zones,business areas and industries along with the proper roads to accommodate the type of trucks the computer kicks in and adds, deletes and totally changes the arrangement including downgrading the roads so the trucks are too heavy and show as"no route".   My thought is.. the human player should be allowed to be in controll of the game and if player wants to have computer help he should play in public service mode. I have talked about this topic here before along with many others.  Thank you for listening                 

[wipi35]

Completely agree with your remarks. Item was discussed earlier, see:

http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2928.0
modnote: topics merged - grampybear started both topics --whoami

[jamespetts]

Grampybear,

to turn off automatic city growth in Simutrans-Expeimental, just set city_weight_factor = 0 in the simuconf.tab file before creating the map.

[dannyman]

2c: Simutrans is a transport simulator.  If you want to build a transportation network you have to deal with the messy "real world" . . . but if city growth can be controlled to make some players happy, I hope they have fun.

-d

[Spike]

Maybe we should offer a SimCity implementation in Simutrans - once a player reaches a certain amount of wealth, he can become major of one city on the map, and use his money to build this city.

[dannyman]

Maybe we should offer a SimCity implementation in Simutrans - once a player reaches a certain amount of wealth, he can become major of one city on the map, and use his money to build this city.

Or, when multiplayer starts working, some players can be mayors and some can be transport tycoons.

To be sure, winning certain rights could be an aspect of game play.  Like, maybe you can build an airport only after you've connected five cities, for example.  Multiplayer you''d have to get the mayor's permission to clear land for your railway station, or to plop in a bus network.  Maybe negotiate a 10-year franchise . . .

[Fabio]

Maybe we should offer a SimCity implementation in Simutrans - once a player reaches a certain amount of wealth, he can become major of one city on the map, and use his money to build this city.

I love this idea! In Public services mode the game could be Simcity-wise.

[jamespetts]

Or, when multiplayer starts working, some players can be mayors and some can be transport tycoons

There may be something in this, although I rather saw the public service player as the Simunation's transport minister, rather than mayor of individual cities; thinking of it in those terms would actually require only minimal changes to the Simutrans code to make workable, and could make for fascinating (and highly realistic) multiplayer games, in which the public service player and the private players have different goals (the former to maximise the quality of transportation (measured by effect on city growth) in Simunation on a limited budget and with defined and limited powers, and the latter to make as much profit as possible), which goals would sometimes lead to co-operation and sometimes lead to conflict between the private and public service players - just as in real life between governments and private enterprise in the transport sector. It would be fascinating to see how, for example, the tension between the public service player building roads between cities to be used by private cars (in Simutrans-Experimental, in any event), and which could also be used by players' road transport, would balance against the desirability of having competitive rail transport. It would also be intriguing to see how different levels of intervention by the public service player affect the overall transport-related economy.

[dannyman]

An "Industry Tycoon" mode would also be cool.

Alas, the SimCity and Industry Tycoon aspects of the game aren't horribly exciting, at present.

And, anyway, we seem to have fairly modest dev resources so I'm not holding my breath.

-d

[grampybear]

Hi everyone, I am saddened to see that my original comments about city growth has turned this forum into so much sarcasm.  I thoroughly enjoy playing simutrans and it was never my intention to turn it into Simcity, Train Tycoon or even a political power platform.  I realize that city buildings are only for looks and have no real effect on the purpose of the game,however, the developers of each building go to great pains to be accurate same is true for the developers of transportation modes,( trucks, buses  etc). Why not allow some accuracy in  building a city? When developing a city placement of buildings does have an effect on what a player needs for public transportation ( heavy populated areas need more buses than urban areas) and when player pays to upgrade a road system to accommodate larger trucks this also effects game play and the ultimate goal of transporting people and goods from one place to another . Again thank you all for allowing me time and space here.
Grampybear

[dannyman]

Grampy,

I don't see much sarcasm here.  You got an answer: that you can turn off city growth in Experimental.  Much of the rest of the discussion is a collective fantasy about creating new aspects to the game, especially for multiplayer.  The fact is that at present, Simutrans is not Simcity, so allowing the player to spell out each city in painstaking detail and then freeze the zoning is not a priority.  (Although, the environmentalist in me has been watching his towns sprawl together, and thinks it might be neat if he could spell out a greenbelt or two.)

Another thought I had is that you might could girdle a town into specific confines by surrounding it with tracks arranged to make road crossings impossible.

-d

[Spike]

As a former SimCity fan, I just thought, now that we have so many buildings in Simutrans, it might be a good idea to make better use of them. And people keep asking for more SimCity'ish elements ... at some point it might be sensible to cater for those, too.

Overall I feel sad, that Simutrans turned into so much number crunching and profit maximizing for many players ... but this is also what many want, apparently.

Edit: My interests lie in other activities these days though, so like Dannyman perceived, it's just pondering and dreaming of what could be, what could be made of the assets that we have. And, who know, maybe some day it comes into existence.

[The Hood]

This boils down to whether simutrans is designed to be played as a transport operator or urban planner (or both).  Currently it is really intended as a game where you build the transport network and have to react to how the cities and industries change over time.  However the map editor mode allows players to delve into the realms of urban planners, i.e. beyond what a transport network operator/builder would normally do in real life.  Personally I feel that if you control both, it isn't very realistic, and if you want to control citybuilding only then there are better games for that than simutrans.  But for those that really do want to control both, for whatever reason, then I reckon the following would really help get over most of the problems:

(1) Ability to completely disable city growth, either upwards or outwards.  Being more sophisticated, there could be a factor linking city growth to transport supply, which if set at 0 = no growth at all, and the larger the number the more growth per given amount of transport.
(2) Ability to "protect" squares from AI interference, whether this is roads (so that protected roads cannot be upgraded/downgraded into city roads by the AI citybuilder as cities expand), or citybuildings (so you could protect a set of buildings that you particularly didn't want the AI to upgrade in citybuilding).  This could be set with a new special tool, and would work in a similar way to how you buy houses currently.

I think these two simple suggestions would go a long way to keeping everyone happy, or at least until prissi tells us how impossible they both are to code and how much of the rest of the game engine they would muck up

[prissi]

You can already protect city buildings by buying them. That is in the program. A switch to completely disable city growth is also quite possible and essentially three line of code (plus 50 for the UI ... )

[The Hood]

Oh right, I must have misunderstood the function of the buy citybuilding tool.  That just leaves the old chestnut of protecting cityroads...!

[jamespetts]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I was not being sarcastic.

[prissi]

Now there is a box to stop towns from growing in the trunk. But it will not be saved (yet), since this can only work after stepping up the savegame version (which may happen soon anyway).

[Fabio]

You can already protect city buildings by buying them. That is in the program.

This is interesting, i didn't know about it. has it already a UI? if not, there could be a button in the building info buy this building. Buying a building should imply paying its cost.

[wipi35]

I think these two simple suggestions would go a long way to keeping everyone happy, ........

These two options would make me verrrry happy indeed.