Suggestions for City Economics DLC

[kg79]

Hello!

It's long ago that I purchased the City Economcs DLC, and until now I hardly used it. Mainly because I like to play in some kind of real world evnviroment and in the DLC the enviroment is very fictional. You can play with more cities, but they are randomly spread across a fictional map. But on the other hand I really like the content and mechanics of the DLC. So I would appreciate if it would be possible not to play on the random map but on the world map from the base game, with cities picked from the database, having more realistic distances between them which impacts the fright costs. The point is simple: if you play on the world map and have let's say a factory in Berlin, you pretty well know that London and Paris are much closer to Berlin than Los Angeles, and you know directly where you have to expect higher fright costs. Next thing is that you can put the cities in the right order in the script and with this you can browse from east to west by using the arrow keys.

The problem would be a conceptional: in the DLCs are all cities one nation. Playing on the world map is more like each city representing a nation. But even then I wouild prefer to play on the world map and dealing with the world as it would be one nation and one economic system. Another possibility would be to be able to group some cities to a nation and having different nations in the game. Maybe this could be a part of a new DLC like "World Economics DLC" where several cities would be nation, maybe also with different political systems.

Another minor thing I'd like to mention is that the political parties do not really have a political agenda. I don't really see difference between socialist and conservative parties. Political agendas would meen that a party and its members follow different objectives in several areas like economy, enviroment, social life and so on. So persons in the game should also have attitudes in several areas making them to be attracted by parties which fit to their attitudes. This could be very enjoyable when you found a new political party.

[David]

One workaround is to use the modding capability and edit the file Fictional_Cities.DBF which stores the fictional names to be assigned to cities in the CES DLC. You may change them to real city names.

For more info about how to make a mod, please see: https://www.capitalismlab.com/mod/how-to-make-a-mod/

[kg79]

This would not really help, as the cities are always spread randomly across the fictional map. I use a script file where cities are listed, I think those cities are from the non-fictional cities database, as e.g. the real wage rates are always the same like in the database. So I can pick any real city, but the position is random. That's why I suggest to have an option to work with the world map where the original positions would be kept. Alternative maps like USA only or Europe only could also be a solution.

The main problem I see is: you know that Brussels and Berlin are much closer to each other than Berlin and Sydney. But randomly put on the map Sydney could be in the neighbourhood of Berlin, which irritates a lot when thinking about fright costs. Having the distances in mind makes it much easier, and I think when using a mod like RW with real company names and persons it would be much more realistic playing in a somehow realistic geographic enviroment and also use the benifits of the DLC like realistic money supply and other stuff.

[David]

That's why I suggest to have an option to work with the world map where the original positions would be kept. Alternative maps like USA only or Europe only could also be a solution.

However, all cities in the game under CES DLC belong to the same nation. So it will not look realistic if multiple nations in Europe are on the same map.

As for the case of USA, its total population in real world is 328M. But in the game, the population of the nation (which is the total population of all the cities in the game) would be less than 10M in most cases. The discrepancy would undermine the realism.

[kg79]

i see the problem with the nation concept, see my first post the second paragraph. But I think that such an option would still be better than the random map now. There will always be scaling problems with the population, and they exist also in a non-CE-DLC game: you just can't simulate the whole population of the world, so you have to pick some cities representing it. I always picked two US cities, one german, one french, one english, one russion, some asian cities, one indian and there I was with the limit of 10. Same I would do now, but with 15 cities. I don't mind that LA or NYC would start at a population of 1 million each.

The only thing I'm mot so sure about is that the cities in the database are already alligned to countries, so having NYC and LA in a setup on the world map without the CE DLC would mean that these two cities have the same central bank why others have their own? Or is the central bank always been a world bank?

With CE DLC I would play like this, but I think there would have to be something like world bank, as all cities would be treaten like one nation. The only thing I need would be a mode where the map looks again like the real world and the coordinates of the cities are taken from the main database. Also more regional scenarios would be possible, as in the data base many cities (not all) have real coordinates, there should just be some close up maps of some regions like Europe, Asia, USA and so on. this could be let up to the modders to provide that.

Right niow I have the luck that I got a seed where the cities were placed nearly bunched in the middle, so I got less irritated;-D

[sofrade]

I'm also wondering how the game calculates the distance for fictional cities. I opened the file and, to my surprise, no coordinates I cannot calculate the estimates of freight costs for these cities.

If I take David's suggestion of the workaround of replacing the fictional cities with real ones, will the game "randomly" pick Miami in Fictional Cities and in Cities ? I may end up with two cities called Miami in the game, no ?