Grow a Town: 50 Years

Goal

How it goes

Things to think about

How population is decided

• Houses closer to the station fill better. A road shortens the way to the station
• Jobs = town jobs (shopping streets / factories) plus people commuting to the city center, divided by the jobs residents need. At 100%, houses fill best; at 0%, 40% stay empty
• Houses near a park or a shopping street fill well and lose fewer people in the era of population decline
• Houses next to a factory get more empty homes

Reading the screen

• Marks and hatching: hill / forest / river / town squares have a mark, and squares without a mark are flat land. Hatching marks squares where the current tool cannot go
• Breakdown: one sentence shows closeness / jobs / environment / roads / crowding / wave for the square you placed. Good points are blue and costly points are red (for jobs and the fix arrow, the red is the same single item as the red on the status line). If there is red, "→ What helps next" comes last
• Plan: at the start of a turn, the 3 moves that pay off in those 10 years appear with numbers and costs (in parentheses). They stay under the timeline even after you close them with "OK". From your second game on the same board, they appear only when you press "Show the plan"
• First time: the full budget is yours from the start, and you move on just by pressing the glowing squares
• Timeline: you can see the 5 waves ahead. What the next wave brings is in the line under the timeline
• Zoom: two fingers, the wheel, or + − zoom up to ×3. While zoomed, move with one finger

Terrain

Tools

Tax income: you get half the budget at the start of each 10 years, and the rest comes in at 1 per hour (until full). The plan and the model play assume the full budget

The 10-year waves