Optimal city growth

[bencze]

I am a fan of railroads, Openttd only worsened this. 🙂 In TF though, I find railroads aren’t easy to make profit. So I was thinking what would be the best way to grow cities.

In my current game I chosen 4 main cities at the corners of the map (that later I plan on connecting with trains). Made internal bus/tram lines to take people to work, shop etc. To each of these towns I connected 2 neighboring towns with buses or trams. Those cities have inner lines too, and all of these cities receive goods.

After setting up something like this sometimes I get 4 + signs to all areas of the city but it only lasts a quite short while and then growh is occasional, intermittent. Did anyone discover some better method? I’m in 1970 or so and my biggest city is just 500 people. Lines between cities are pretty good, often making 1m+ profit so I’m guessing a lot of people go from one town to another (usually 8-10 trams or 15 person buses).

On a related note, more and more people use cars. Is there any trick to create myself advantage over the cars? I am putting bus lanes virtually everywhere I have a line, so people use my lines instead of waiting in their traffic jams. 🙂

Does it help to create the road network of a town ourselves before they build it themselves or it’s the same if I wait for them to create it as they expand?

[strawman]

I’d like to know more about this too. It seems like higher line utilization leads to better growth. I wonder if higher fares also lead to higher growth – i.e., if more people take trips out of town on the train, growth happens faster.

[killkenny1]

You need to provide goods to ensure the groth of the city.

[Mordeth65]

Just an FYI, not sure if you all noticed this.    If you supply say just to 2 cities, your others start to lose people.  Quite frustrating.   This has caused several games for me to go from making decent dosh, to losing dosh.

 

[strawman]

You need to provide goods to ensure the groth of the city.

Goods do seem to provide a boost to growth as soon as you connect them. Growth stops after a little while, though – after providing goods, it feels like the town wants something more to grow further.

[bencze]

I made it to about 2050 when I got really tired of traffic jams, and I never got to 1k population. It sort of fluctuates, I can’t get a ‘perfect’ growth. I tried long lines that go everywhere, also shorter, specialized lines. Generally speaking coverage is good. Although maybe it’s just way too micromanagement to rebuild each city’s lines every 10 or 20 years 🙂

Maybe in my next game I’ll try more trains to connect cities instead of trams that I use now, these really struggle in traffic late game.

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