Find the bottleneck in order
- Check the city's required goods and completed trips. A full vehicle or profitable route is not the same as a delivery to this city. Confirm passengers complete their journeys and required cargo reaches the receiving city.
- Look for growth experience. Urban Games says both passenger trips and required-goods deliveries earn XP. In-town passenger trips earn less than trips from other cities; more complex goods chains earn more XP per delivery. Use completed service as your first diagnostic, without assuming an unpublished XP number.
- Inspect the six ratings. Read reputation, satisfaction, Delivery, traffic, noise and pollution for the city. Low ratings limit the growth factor. Start with the weak rating you can actually improve.
- Change one cause and compare again. Reduce passenger waits or travel time for satisfaction; resolve late cargo for Delivery; improve traffic flow or public transport for traffic; keep noisy infrastructure away from homes; use infrastructure efficiently to limit pollution. Reputation can recover with time after disruptive construction, and planting trees is one developer example.
Which rating should you investigate?
| Low rating | First place to look |
|---|---|
| Reputation | Recent demolition, deforestation or major earthworks |
| Satisfaction | Passenger waits and journey times |
| Delivery | Goods arriving after their expected delivery time |
| Traffic | Congested streets and weak public transport |
| Noise | Noisy routes or hubs beside residential areas |
| Pollution | Industries, vehicles and infrastructure across the whole municipal area |
How to tell it worked
After completed passenger trips or required-goods deliveries, the city earns growth experience and the rating you targeted stops limiting it as severely. Population growth may take additional deliveries; the developer has not published exact XP thresholds or rating weights.
If population remains flat
- No completed service: trace the passenger destination or cargo route rather than changing environmental ratings. If a later supply chain is absent altogether, check when its industry appears.
- XP arrives but growth is weak: inspect all six ratings; adding more of the same delivery may have limited effect while a rating remains low.
- Delivery rating is low: follow the late-load checklist. For missing freight, start with the pickup check.
- You are in sandbox mode: check whether city growth was frozen or city size changed in your settings. Urban Games says sandbox can do both; the final menu path is not yet verified.