Municipal buildings: are added demands worthwhile?

[Gumboots]

I was just thinking about this while testing some high-density seeding for Riga and other cities. If you wind up the building density slider for a large city, it will tend to seed with a lot of municipal buildings. The Commercial Building, Department Store, and Retail are fine because at least they do something (they demand Paper, Clothing and Goods respectively) and their footprints are reasonable. The rest of them (Church, Cinema, Museum, Radio Station, School House and Stadium) do absolutely nothing AFAICT, except add a bit of eye candy and chew up a lot of valuable real estate that could be used for other things.

Edit: Aha! Just found out that the Commercial Building supplies and demands pax and mail, while the Cinema, Church, Department Store, Museum and Stadium supply and demand pax. That leaves the Radio Station and School House being the ones that do nothing, which I suppose is ok.

It's the latter that bugs me, since with a high building density you can easily get a seed which has two stadiums and two museums, as well as a department store and whatever else. This not only looks a bit over the top, but it chews an awful lot of useful building space within the city's restricted building region.* This leads me to thinking that if these things are going to infest your city they should at least do something useful. It would also be handy to be able to fine tune their seeding rates (I've had a look at this thread).

I know Jim modded the department store, but his added demands may be a bit much for more common buildings like stadiums and museums. I was thinking that demand levels similar to a large house might be more suitable for integration into a large range of existing scenarios, but not with all the same cargoes as houses. It doesn't make sense for a museum to demand Diesel, but OTOH it would make sense for it to demand Paper and Furniture. A stadium could demand Furniture and Alcohol. Etc, etc. Something like this might work well:

Church: 0.03 Alcohol*(= 1 Small House), 0.01 Furniture (= 1 Small House), 0.01 Paper (= 1 Small House).
*For communion wine.

Cinema: 0.08 Furniture (= 2 Large Houses), 0.24 Milk* (= 2 Large Houses), 0.04 Paper (= 1 Large House), 0.24 Produce (= 2 Large Houses).
*For milk shakes.

Museum: 0.04 Furniture (= 1 Large House), 0.10 Goods (= 2 Small Houses), 0.04 Paper (= 1 Large House).

Radio Station: 0.04 Furniture (= I Large House).

School House: 0.08 Furniture (= 2 Large Houses), 0.08 Paper (= 2 Large Houses), 0.10 Goods (= 2 Small Houses), 0.08 Toys (= 1 Large House).

Stadium: 0.08 Paper (= 2 Large Houses), 0.16 Furniture (= 4 Large Houses), 0.20 Goods (= 1 Large House), 0.24 Alcohol (= 2 Large Houses), 0.24 Meat (= 2 Large Houses), 0.16 Cheese (= 2 Large Houses).

Has anyone ever played around with editing these buildings to include small demands of common cargoes?

*This is always 32 economic cells, sometimes minus a bit depending on exactly where the city centre marker is in relation to the economic grid. The base shape is a 6x6 square with the four corners cells removed, but the generated shape will distort to some extent depending on the exact terrain and city marker placement.

[Blackhawk]

It's been a long time since I touched Trainmaster but I thought Ned had all the municipal buildings demanding or producing something. It seemed to create a small demand for some cargoes but it also could create the problem of the municipal building potentially using up that bit of cargo before the industry you were attempting to supply had a chance to use it. Of course that may just be a TM issue with all its fractional cargo amounts and cargoes being demanded all over.

[Gumboots]

Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at the TM buildings. I think it would be ok, in RT3 at least, if municipals were only similar in draw to large houses. Cities are often full of those, and they don't seem to cause any issues. Worth trying anyway. Nothing to lose by throwing a few custom files in and seeing what happens.

[RulerofRails]

There is no problem in adding any demand you want to these buildings, but I will give a note of warning about their display. It's impossible to display any other building demands in the same style (small icon, no name) as the houses. At least nobody ever found out how, and I know I've tried to trick the game. This is the reason why TM's buildings have some items "running off the page," more were added than can be displayed. But, if the demands are "hidden" it's no issue. A lot of these buildings are using "funny" messages, so maybe you were planning to have them "hidden"?

Two more notes, that may be helpful (or not):
When modding the files, the seeding rate for the munis can be controlled in the footer of the bca. There's 4 settings, for period starting in: 1800, 1850, 1900, and lastly 1950.

One time I worked out that by increasing the density (overall) on the map and correspondingly decreasing city and region sliders, the ratio of munis/houses was reduced.

[Gumboots]

Yeah hidden sounds fine. Their pax demand and supply is already hidden, which is why I initially didn't know about it. I don't care if other demands are hidden too.

[Cash on Wheels]

Back when I was out of work I tried to change just a few cargos, but it snowballed into an entire Building/Cargo Mod! http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 7&start=20 Every single building under went massive changes to their chain. I even brought Trainmaster buildings & cargos into the mix. Plus wp&p's railyard structures! though I still brought that entire "1.16" version to the new computer but have no plans as of now to continue.
Good thing you brought this up Gumboots, Because I was starting to notice the unusual amount Museums & stadiums. On my old system I reworked 1.06 to a more reasonable seeding for municipal buildings. Too bad that's gone. But with my system now geared for RT3 I can get to work on some of these projects.

[Gumboots]

I know what you mean about the museums and stadiums. Saner seeding rates for those would be a good thing. No need to make massive changes to the entire building chain though. Generally it works well, IMO.