Transport Fever 3 City Growth: Find the Rating Holding a Town Back

Start by deciding which part is weak

The town manual calculates final growth XP from raw XP multiplied by a growth multiplier. Authority and Supplies affect that multiplier. Authority uses the lowest of six ratings, so five good ratings do not average away a poor sixth. Supplies combines passenger use and cargo provision; inspect both in its breakdown.

Open the town's growth breakdown rather than judging progress only by the skyline. Then ask two different questions: are useful journeys and deliveries reaching the town, and how much growth is the town getting from them? Those are different problems.

Our diagnostic order is activity, weakest rating, then supply gaps. If you begin with a new station before identifying the weak part, you may add transport spending without improving the factor holding growth back. Keep the town window open while you inspect the relevant service, and describe the problem in one sentence: ‘This town receives deliveries, but its lowest rating is noise,’ for example.

The sentence matters because it narrows the decision. ‘My city is not growing enough’ offers hundreds of possible changes; ‘noise is the weakest rating near these homes’ gives you a place and a measurement to investigate.

Choose a change that matches the rating

Use the table above to turn a low rating into a local inspection. The official tycoon explanation connects residential noise with nearby transport and warns that moving a hub outward trades lower exposure for extra travel and upkeep. Pollution is assessed across the municipality, so the edge of the visible buildings is not a reliable escape from it.

Do not automatically demolish a busy station because the noise score looks poor. First find the affected homes and the services passing them. Compare a quieter candidate, a changed approach or a different interchange position as separate proposals. Include the journeys each proposal makes longer. An improvement in one column that creates a new weak rating elsewhere may leave you with a different bottleneck rather than a better town.

For supply questions, open the Supplies breakdown: check passenger use as well as cargo provision. For cargo, compare demand with actual supply in the town statistics. Trace an apparent shortfall back through the service before adding production or vehicles. A large fleet beside the town is not the same observation as goods reaching the buildings that need them.

A small example: repair the weak link before expanding

Hypothetical situation, not a recorded playtest: you have a functioning delivery service, several healthy ratings and one notably poor noise rating. You could buy more trucks, move the terminal or investigate the homes affected by its approach road. Our first choice would be the inspection. Extra trucks address a capacity hypothesis; they do not explain the existing noise problem.

Write two alternatives with a trade-off each. Proposal A keeps the terminal but changes the vehicles serving it. Proposal B moves the terminal, adding a transfer. Record which expense, journey or affected area each proposal changes. Reject any proposal whose benefit you cannot connect to the observed problem.

Keep a save before making the selected change. Compare the same town over equivalent observation periods and note any new routes or setting changes. You are looking for the suspected rating to improve without creating a worse constraint elsewhere. If it does not, return to the diagnosis rather than counting money spent as progress. This process can narrow a decision, but it does not predict a universal growth rate or the best town layout.

Demand changes as a town grows

The official cargo blog describes town demand as something that moves in stages. Towns start by demanding simple cargo such as fish, vegetables or planks, and only the industries needed for that exist at the start. As towns grow they ask for larger quantities of basic cargo and up to six complex end products, and the industries needed for those multi-stage products appear on the map as demand arises. In sandbox mode this can be changed. The practical consequence: a freight line that looked sufficient early can fall behind later because the demand changed, not because the line broke. Re-read what the town currently asks for before adding vehicles.