Runaway industry revisited, new information.

[Dutchman on Rails]

Hi James,

I'm sorry to say that the issue I've been having with the industry expansion (industry seemingly expanding immediately after reloading a save game) in my games resurfaced. But the good news is that a good game brought me a lot nearer to understanding the cause, and gave me a workaround.

The cause triggering that I have the population per town setting at very low to force the game to build townhalls only. Apparently Simutrans Experimental's industry growth is based on the total population requested at the start of the scenario. However, once you drop the population per town below 400, you actually get much more total population than you requested. So in a game of 30 towns with 10 population each, the requested total population is 300, but the actual one you get is around 8000 (!). So if you started with 1 industry chain, Simutrans Experimental concludes that there are about 25 too few. What I still don't understand is why the industry expands event only fires after loading a save game.

The workaround is simple. Create towns of 300, and immediately upon start of the game use the public player to trim the towns down to size.

I hope this helps.

[jamespetts]

Dutchman on Rails,

thank you for the report, although I have already coded a fix to this issue (which is caused by incorrectly saving certain values) for the forthcoming version 9.0. Apologies that I have not yet had time to release this version: I have been really rather busy, I am afraid. I have been working on it this week-end, though.

[Dutchman on Rails]

Hi James,

No problem. From the looks of it, the workaround works, and I now have a second one (setting the city population to 30 instead of 10 and opening just one industry chain gives me about 8-9 chains in two years, about the number I like for 8000 inhabitants. And in a way, I'd say that the whole issue is more the result of me pushing the setup to the limit than any bug...

But if 9.0 arrives quickly, I might want to hold off starting a new game.