Is there an easy way to switch off this phenomena. I looked around in cityrules.tab but without result.
I think no.
Try to use:
renovation_percentage = 100
Then it shouldn't build new houses. (Only renovation).
But I don't believe that there never would been a new house, but there should not build so much new houses.
Propably it helps... but I don't have tested it!
You can specify where the city will build new houses or even none with this:
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=286.0 (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=286.0)
I have already seen this post, I answered that I would give it a try but it didn't solve my problem.
I will try to explain the reason of my question and I like to know the opinion of other players about this subject. Maybe this topic should therefore be moved to General Discussions.
With the availability of the industry-buildertool and the city-buildingstool , the way I start a new game has changed considerably.
I now start with one or zero cities, immediately building the required number on the locations I prefer.
Then I carefully create the layout of the roads and the busstops, so that the stationcoverage is optimal (no uncovered areas, no overlap.)
Next step is building the houses, offices, industrial buildings, etc. I put most offices in the centre, large appartmenthouses somewhat further away, streets with identical houses in a row on various locations, cinema's, casino's, restaurants in a recreation area, villas and bungalows in the outskirts on the Southwest side, industrial buildings on the Northeast side. (This because of the dominating S-W winddirection!)
All this as “government player” and urban planner.
After the city layouts are completed I change to “human player” and start making the necessary railway and roadconnections and also the industries, supermarkets, shopping centres, etc.
What happens now is that after a few years the program made a mess of my carefully created world, houses of the wrong type are build, existing houses are replaced by other types, roads are made at places I don't want them and highspeed roads are replaced by lowspeed ones.
Hope to hear your comments!
I haven't found parameters in simuconf.tab/cityrules.tab that allow global control over automatic building, but I can be wrong (or they exist, but are not listed in the files).
Have you tried the combination of
1) setting renovation percentage to 0
2) commenting out all house rules?
For that, commenting out the road rules should help.
To prevent that, they need to be separated from city roads. Some people use fences or walls (not in pak-sets, but from add-ons) to accomplish that.
A global configuration parameter or several different ones (one for roads, other for buildings, etc.) wouldn't be difficult to implement to prevent all that.
That sounds nice! But will it ever happen ???
It doesn't depend on me. 8)
May this topic be moved to Extension requests?
@Whoami: thanks for moving this topic.
After moving this topic to Extension requests there have been no comments.
I tried all the suggestions but none of them stopped my cities from growing.
Must I consider this request as denied?
One option I have used in the past is to ban cities from building new roads (comment out all of the road-building rules in cityrules.tab). I think it will still upgrade buildings, but if no new roads are built, there is a limit on city sprawl. If you want to expand the city, lay new roads!
I think it's fairly easy to change if you can edit the sources and compile Simutrans yourself - well, ****uming the code there didn't change so much, there should be only one or two lines to comment out, so that the city code does not trigger the house and road building steps anymore.
It should be easy - if there is no repsonse, it just seems no developer is really interested in this change (must not mean denied, may just mean "not important/interesting enough").
It's a bit against the ideas of Simutrans ... I wouldn't mind that switch though, because I know how many people want to recreate areas or cities in a more realistic way, and therefore need more control.
That's exactly what I try to avoid. I build a number of houses of the same type in a certain area and I don't like that one of them will be replaced by a random, but mostly quite different type of house.
This request has now been implemented in the latest version of Simutrans-Experimental (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=1894.msg19644#msg19644). To use it, set city_weight_factor=0 in simuconf.tab when using the new version.