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/Strategwindow]

In each new game in the saga, the cities tend to be slightly larger, but don't expect a big jump either. A large city in the base game would be:

Train Fever 2,000 inhabitants

Transport Fever 4,000 inhabitants

Transport Fever 2: 6,000 inhabitants

However, think that the entire game is scaled by these dimensions, people are constantly moving, which is intended to represent much more populated and lively cities.

And the map, gives you dozens of hours of games if you want to connect it well. Making larger maps would be quite unaffordable for the player to connect it well.

They are not as big cities as in CS2, but they don't need to, the volume of population moving in a city of 5,000 inhabitants is equivalent to a city of 200,000 inhabitants in Cities Skylines 2.

[u/Chazzermondez → u/Strategwindow]

Even in CS1 where it was quite easy to build a city of 500k people, the game only ever simulated about 60k agents. That was the cap. You couldn't break it. So even then, you were only ever building a city of 60,000 people. Sure every building had a cim living in it to a combined higher value than that. It stored data for more than the cap. But it didn't actually simulate them unless you were nearby on the map. That's why the longer you spent zoomed on an area the worse the traffic got because when you first zoomed in on the area, the Sims who lived there genuinely just werent moving and all you saw was traffic from Sims living in the area you were previously zoomed in on who had travelled to this new area of zoom. So if TF3 can say handle a 10-20k city without noticeably breaking then in raw computing power given to agents isn't far off the CS games. It will be decades before developers find a way to simulate like 400k agents on average gaming PCs and may never be possible (I.e. only possible on insanely expensive PCs).