Central Cities not forming?

[Anderson]

I'm noticing a problem with Experimental: With one exception, where a city got "hemmed in" by a railroad line on a peninsula, there's a tendency for cities to almost exclusively grow "out" (often for many miles) instead of "up" during the 1930s and 1940s.  Is this supposed to be the case?

[sdog]

this is happening in pak128.britain at the moment, as there is a lack of high level buildings in this time period. Buildings from previous times are not available to city builder anymore and new tall buildings arrive only in the 50s. The city builder routine has only small houses available and has to spread out.

There is work going on to close this gap, check the regular pak128.britain board, but it takes some time before it is fixed.

There are two workarounds for you: a) You can either avoid the period from 1930 to 1950 as starting time. b) you can start in 1910, build the cities to about 2/3rd of the size you want to have at the end. Switch to "public player". When you do so a new "world editor" icon appears, click it. Now you can step forward time by single years. When you reached at that time, use the city grower tool to grow the cities to the desired size. They will have a dense core from 1910 and a large suburban area in the periphery.

[Anderson]

I think I started in 1880, actually (that's usually when I start: 1880-1890), prepping for the "housing boom" in the 1930s (I usually set things up to accommodate the boom so I can keep a semi-gridded patten going, and the latest time, I watched ridership rise from about 849k in 1929 to about 1.500 million in 1933 and 1.704 million in 1937).

I'm going to save and try that, see where things go.