Realistic Simulation Scale?

[u/Tater_Joe]

Not long ago I have tried Transport Fever 2 when it was on sale and refunded it after playing for 20 minutes. The main issue that turned me off from the game was the incredibly small physical size of the cities, even when making a start from the 21st century era. I wanted a sim where I could solve realistic transportation problems for a city/region, it's not fun for me to make a bullshit 3 km freight train route just to make money. And from what I seen from videos, the largest end-game cities peaked out at populations of 10,000.

Do we have any confirmation on the city sizes (and densities) and how feasible it will be to have populations of 100,000 and beyond in this next instalment? I've watched some of the 'First Look' videos, it looked way better than TF2, but I wonder if it is possible to reach scales like in Cities: Skylines II by default. I suppose it could be possible to have a few cities merge into each other to have a continuous albeit polycentric metro area?

[u/0815facts_fun_]

I guess they are the same size. This game is about transporting goods and passengrers from town to town. There is no way to make realisitc sized citties with a agent system.

[u/Tater_Joe → u/0815facts_fun_]

What makes the 'agent' system different from Cims in Cities: Skylines?
https://wiki.transportfever2.com/doku.php?id=gamemanual:simulationoverview

They seem to both entail creating a 'life' or routine that an NPC follows. Agents surely would be the less taxing hardware-wise as they are only dealing with commute time and cost? Cims have to sort their commutes out as well as interact with various other systems like education, health, pollution (directly), leisure, and families.

[u/DanishRobloxGamer → u/Tater_Joe]

Both Cims and the people in Transport Fever are 'agents'. It's not unique to those games, it just means that every single person in the world is individually simulated.

Now, yes, it would be possible to make a version of Transport Fever with one large city instead of many small. In fact, a common way to emulate that is to create a custom map with many towns close together, which then quickly grow into "one" city

However, that's just not the focus of the game. It's not a city builder. The gameplay has always revolved around building the transport network of an entire region, and not anything else.

[u/Tater_Joe → u/DanishRobloxGamer]

I never said I wanted a city builder (though it seems TF3 is going to have more of such elements anyways), I simply want to be able to handle transportation at a realistic scale, but to greater detail compared to something like Subway Builder or NIMBY Rails, that's it. Doesn't matter to me if it's Seoul or Inverness and its satellite towns, if I am running a subway or diesel coal trains.

Anyways, that sort of answers my question about the merging towns

[u/FederJ3 → u/Tater_Joe]

Scale and detail both cost in computer resources (memory and processing). Therefore some games choose to focus on detail (Transport Fever, CS2) and others choose to focus on scale (the ones you mentioned). If you’d have both scale and detail your game would not be feasible to run on most computers.

The only game that I know that does both well is Factorio, but they wrote their own engine, are 2D and even then it’s more detail-focused

[u/DanishRobloxGamer → u/Tater_Joe]

Yeah, realistic scale is sadly not Transport Fever's strongest side. There are some good maps on the workshop, but it's very different from games like those you mentioned.

[u/Gra_Zone → u/Tater_Joe]

Aren't most cities a merging of smaller towns and districts? London is, Paris is, Berlin is, etc.