How to increase City growth?

[andre2]

Hi,

what is the fastest way to get a city from 3 houses to 4 houses?

[jeffryfisher]

I can't guarantee speed (because there is a random factor built in) but my order of priorities is:

 

1) Feed industry in the village

2) Deliver cargoes created by the village (to somewhere demanding those cargoes)

3) Feed any other demands

 

I think the barracks demands alcohol and passengers. The depot demands diesel, weapons and troops. If your station encompasses a rural enterprise like a farm, then it might demand fertilizer or grain. In my modded version of the game, each house demands goods.

 

Once a village grows into a town, it will demand things like food, alcohol and goods (and maybe milk, produce etc depending on the date).

[MaglevForever]

andre2, I am glad you asked this question. I am curious about this too.

Quoting from the RT2STRATGUIDE:

"In Railroad Tycoon II, a city has the potential to grow to roughly 3 times its original size, if it is well served by the rail industry, with plenty of cargo hauled both into and out of the town. It won’t happen instantly, but over the course of 10 to 15 years, you’ll definitely see the growth. A city with no rail service will generally not disappear, but it certainly won’t grow, and it will often shrink by 10 to 30 percent over the course of a decade or two."

This seems a bit obscure to me. I assume that demanded cargo is required, but it doesn't say that.

I agree with Jeffry, if the village has an industry, servicing it gives a greater chance of fast growth.

But I am assuming you mean a village without industry, and there aren't any supply industries or other towns close by. This is hard. Especially one-house villages. I have been trying to grow Springfield Missouri for 30+ years. It started as one house, around year 25 It doubled in size and now has two houses. Good luck.

[jeffryfisher]

One more thing: Villages seem to "shift gears". One at a time will blossom, and when it does, it can go on a tear. Meanwhile, others being treated the same way can languish for decades. I just wish that a scenario writer like myself could control which villages blossom when (using events for suppressing, forcing or randomizing the blossoming of villages into cities). Then I'd be able to better model America's westward expansion and development.

 

Growth reflects economic strength (and the map's average economic growth rate setting). I'm not sure, but I think that all building placements and deletions occur on Dec 31/Jan 1 (i.e. as part of the year-end or year-start).

 

BTW, If you play a long campaign map like mine (~180 years), a one-horse (1-house) village can do much more than "triple" in size. It can completely fill its city limits with over a dozen houses plus some industries hanging over the edges.

[MaglevForever]

Jeffry, I have noticed these "tears" too. In fact, quite a few of my villages have grown from two to five houses. Somehow, there is something for growing in threes on your map. For example, Indianapolis was a three house village for almost 20 years. I had two stations that both said "connected". One had covered a produce farm, the other I was feeding the Textile Mill with. Then, after all that time, one year it had grown to six houses! Amazing.

I agree that growth occurs at the beginning of the year. Hence, I look at all my villages at the start of every year in the hope that I can start a new lucrative passenger service. At the moment, only station revenue is making my express worth more than my freight, in the year 1872! Have you observed that more growth occurs not only in boom times, but at the end, at the end of the year when the economic cycle changes? Just like you get stations full of passengers who have lost their jobs and are leaving the cities. I am always watching passenger generation and trying to figure out if the game is going to change the economic cycle. Useful when playing with big margins. Sometimes I am right!

I remember reading in one of the forums that someone thought that revenue was a factor in growth. I wonder if that is a factor. Together with cargo hauled to and from and the amount that houses and industries have their demands satisfied. In my game I snuck into Memphis early on, it was a three house village with a meat packing plant at the start. I serviced the meat packing plant and then after 10-12 years it grew to six houses. This was great, but I think the game credited the growth on the amount I serviced the meat packing plant. Why? Because I was not supplying the houses with goods only a little food. When a cannery "grew" there, I didn't have any way to service it practically. I didn't change any routes because of it, so I thought the houses should stay. One disappeared after 8-10 years reducing its demand drastically. So my theory is that the meat packing plant being well serviced influenced the growth of the town more when it had only 4 objects and caused it to grow. When it had doubled to 8 objects it no longer had enough effect on the total to keep all the houses.

Another question for your opinion, please. Say you have Cincinnati and Columbus, neither of them have four houses, but you can't make a town with either of them "connected". Will you grow them faster by just covering the houses?

[jeffryfisher]

To answer your question: I would build from NYC to SF and make a mint. I'd just ignore Columbus and Cincinnati. There's little reason to fuss with villages east of the rocky mountains when there are plenty of transcontinental routes beckoning.

[MaglevForever]

Well, yes, I agree that transcontinental routes are the way to big revenue. Are there sub-territories that increase passenger generation in NYC and SF? Vancouver always seems to pump out more passengers than other towns its size.

But my question wasn't about transcontinental routes. I used to always try to get as many houses as possible in my stations whether they said "connected" or not. Then I thought that with a long term scenario I should focus more on building up the individual towns than trying to get the short term results of having a few more houses in one stations radius. I am sure that "connected" towns are more likely to grow than just covered ones with no "connected" appearing.

PS. I am waiting for the introduction of the 8-wheeler before I switch a few more routes to transcontinental.

[jeffryfisher]

As far as I know, "connected" only matters for collecting prize money and maybe setting off city-connection triggers.

 

Nurturing villages is indeed a long-term strategy, but I would do that work out west where there's less population than there is back east. If you build up more of an imbalance in the east, then what have you gained?

[MaglevForever]

Ok, thanks for your take on it, I just had a niggling suspicion that maybe it does matter. The main problem with stations covering two cities is you cant cover both their "footprints". (San Diego and Tijuana are an exception). Then when a house grows outside your station, it has a negative effective on subsequent growth. This is long-term too.

I am still trying to figure out a good strategy to get all that cargo through Ohio and Illinois. Those Great Lakes are more like choke points or bottlenecks. I am really glad you opened up West Virgina to help a little with this problem. Maybe with some really good track work I can do okay. Right now I am torn what to do with LA and San Diego. I am doing some West Coast runs out of LA and then just simple running from SD to SF. I want to eventually do a run out to somewhere in the South like New Orleans. Should I wait for the South to open and then build up New Orleans till it can handle the traffic? If I run it to the North somewhere I would have to do heaps of re-routing and that is not the funnest part of the game! Right now in between Minneapolis and Wichita, and right on the West Coast I only have three towns. Salt Lake City, Denver and Boise. Las Vegas is not counted since I "snuck" into it. Sacramento isn't even a town yet. Choices, choices, choices, much work to do.

PS. I have two cotton farms and two houses in Fresno right now. I am happily receiving a base rate of just over $50,000 a car right now. Nice.

[jeffryfisher]

The main problem with stations covering two cities is you cant cover both their "footprints". (San Diego and Tijuana are an exception). Then when a house grows outside your station, it has a negative effective on subsequent growth. This is long-term too.

 

You might want to span towns/cities early when pressed for cash, pressed by borders, or looking at villages needing to be combined. However, when growth and company cash fix some of those early problems, you can build more stations. Remember, every station creates its own demand. Assuming you play the advanced economy, it's easy to zero-out pax demand in some places, so having an overlapping station is a good thing.

 

I am really glad you opened up West Virgina to help a little with this problem.

 

Don't thank me, thank General McClellan.

 

 

Should I wait for the South to open

 

 

Never. If you serve LA and SD now, then they'll grow enough that you can add trains to the South.