NewTownGrowthSwitches

Control how towns grow.

Switch

Configuration file: towngrowthlimit

Command line: -Xt

Configuration file: largertowns

Command line: -XT

Configuration file: townminpopulationsnow

(No command line switch)

Configuration file: townminpopulationdesert

(No command line switch)

Configuration file: towngrowthratemode

Command line: -YT

Configuration file: towngrowthratemin

(No command line switch)

Configuration file: towngrowthratemax

(No command line switch)

Configuration file: tgr*

(No command line switch)

Description

These switches allow you to modify how fast, how much, and in what conditions cities grow. Because there are so many switches and so many possibilities of setting up town growth, they are explained in more detail in the next chapter, see New Town Growth Mechanism. A short description is provided below.

towngrowthlimit sets how far from the central point of a town (where you see the town name) new houses may be built. You can set the limit to anything between 12 and 128; with this switch turned off, it is 20. The effects of this switch are most visible when you expand towns in the scenario editor.

In TTD, activity at nearby stations boosts growth of towns, but not if a town has more than 71 buildings. If towngrowthlimit is turned on, this limitation is removed.

largertowns makes each one out of a specified number of towns grow twice as fast as others. For example, largertowns 4 (the default) makes every fourth town grow twice as fast. If you create a scenario, you can control which towns will grow faster: the doubled growth will always apply to the first town you create, then (assuming the switch is set to 4) to the 5th, 9th, 13th, and so on (this can get messy if you start deleting towns, so try not to do it). In random games, you cannot control to which towns this will apply.

If largertowns is enabled, towngrowthlimit is also enabled, but the parameter of the latter will apply only to towns that have the growth rate doubled; other towns will have growth limit of 20, the TTD default.

towngrowthratemode controls how the growth rate of towns is calculated. Briefly, use mode 0 (or turn the switch off) if you're traditionalist and want the original TTD algorithm (with bugs fixed, of course); use mode 1 if you want a slightly enhanced version of the TTD algorithm; or use mode 2 if you want the full power of all the new switches...

In TTD, towns above the snow line in the sub-arctic climate require delivery of food, or they don't grow at all. Similarly, towns in desert areas in the sub-tropical climate require food and water. If such town happens to have too few buildings to accept food, there's no way to make it grow. As a remedy, you can use the switches townminpopulationsnow and townminpopulationdesert to define minimum town populations, below which towns will grow even without food or water supplies, so you get a chance to transport food to them eventually. To use these two switches, you also have to enable at least one of the three switches mentioned above in this section (towngrowthlimit, largertowns, towngrowthratemode) or the generalfixes switch. The "on" defaults for these switches are 90 for townminpopulationsnow and 60 for townminpopulationdesert. If you don't want this feature, set both to zero; setting them to `off' won't work.

All the other new town growth switches are active only if towngrowthratemode is set to `2'. Again, specifying `on' as the parameter sets them to their default values, but specifying `off' has no effect.

All patches contributed by Marcin Grzegorczyk.