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Natural Town Growth

Towns grow more naturally. Your actions will influence the growth directly and can cause towns to grow asymmetrically, e.g. if you provide industrial cargo, the town's industry will grow, if you provide commercial cargo the town will gain more shopping facilities. Towns will start out smaller, but can grow much larger.

Details:

By default, the game randomly determines an initial size for each town roughly in the range of 80 - 220. This number does not change much over time (there are small random increases which may increase the initial size to roughly 330 at the year 2000) which means some towns will forever be stuck with a smaller size than others due to a "bad roll" at the start of the game. Your actions can only affect the size of a town through the percentage modifier based on the supply rating, reachability and environmental factors. This percentage modifier is applied evenly to residential, commercial, and industrial sizes, meaning those values will always be roughly equal.

This mod changes town growth to provide you with more control. Initially, each town still gets a random size but with less variance. In addition, residential, commercial, and industrial sizes are determined independently (the town details window shows only one "initial size" but each of the three areas does in fact have its own value). These "initial sizes" grow over time based on your actions. Industrial cargo causes more industrial buildings to spawn, and vice versa for commercial cargo. All sizes are also affected by the town's reachability. Residential size depends more on reachability while commercial and industrial sizes depend more on supply. The original percentage modifier still exists (since it is not possible to remove it) which means an increase in reachability, supply, or environmental factors still affects all sizes.

When you start a new game (or enable the mod for an existing game) it will take some time for towns to adjust to their new sizes (for a new game it should take about 1 year, for existing games longer depending on your progress). Please also note that the game seems to have a built-in limit to how large towns can grow, so at some point you may see a town stop growing regardless of the "target size".

See the last image above for a detailed look into the numbers. Note that the "scaling factors" are only used for the base capacity, meaning their impact decreases over time once you start connecting the city and supplying it with cargo.

The source code for this mod can be found here[github.com].