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[GreatWyrmGold]

1. Abandoned Buildings and Populations
Currently, towns tend to be filled with randomly-placed abandoned buildings. An abandoned house with massive holes in the walls can be found right next to a bustling market. This is a problem. It might be realistic for a town to be at a population smaller than its current number of buildings hold, but not the way they do now.
Realisically, humans live close together. It might be because they want to be closer to the keep and walls in case of attack, it might be in order to be closer to markets to buy and sell goods in, or it might be just because being the only living being within several houses is kinda creepy.
The short version is, I suggest that, when buildings become abandoned, people resettle them, in ored of distance from important structures like the keep, non-abandoned temples, and non-abandoned markets, also preferring ones behind walls to ones not behind walls. It's just a start, but we can work from there.
Also, those abandoned houses? Districts of empty buildings would likely attract squatters, criminals, and animalpeople who want to be fairly close to a center of civilization without risking being found easily by the town guard. These inhabitants could attack players, making wandering around towns more interesting; or be the subjects of quests for early adventurers; or could be gathered easily as followers; or could be prey for adventuring thieves (once the law not caring about the murder of beggars and thieves gets implemented) or monsters, including vampires from within the town proper.

2. Urban Sprawl
I have often seen hamlets and towns very close to one another. As in, on the town fast travel map their roads came only a few tiles away from each other. Towns so close would easily become tightly knit. Friendships and marriages would go across town borders commonly. When merchants couldn't sell goods in one town, they'd see if there were any towns in the other. The roads which come so close would connect eventually, probably sooner rather than later. Eventually, the two towns would become intertwined into, effectively, a single community. Eventually, they'd integrate in name as well as in fact.
The short version is, communities that are sufficiently near would go through several stages of integration. First, people would start to travel frequently between them. Next, their streets would connect. The area between them would then fill up with houses and shops as the population of the towns increased (areas between the town would be prioritised above other areas when building new buildings). After the two towns had more or less filled in the gap between them, they would be considered a single community in all but name; at this point, they MIGHT separate if something happens to the middle of the combined community. Finally, after a while, the two towns would officially merge. Whichever town has more influence (based on residents, important figures in residence, possibly important people born there, important buildings, major events that occured there, etc; a civilization's capital always gets precedence) would "absorb" the other; maybe a new keep would be constructed in the middle if there was room, but probably not. The mayor/lord/whatever of the other settlement might get a special position in the new government, or might not.

[NW_Kohaku]

Never thought I'd say this but...

1. Is a bug, not a suggestion.  #5263, to be exact.

The problem is that abandoned shops are never reclaimed, and eventually, you have entirely abandoned towns even though there are thousands of people theoretically living in town.  The historicals all live on top of the castle walls because there is no room anywhere else.  The population pool civilians just don't exist outside of the market.

If goblins move into a human civ, they will never starve or die of old age, and you can get cities as they were meant to be: full and bustling and filled with shops.  (Not enough simple houses, though...)



2.
Urban sprawl is a modern phenomenon.  It is caused by private transportation methods.

The reason cities in the ancient world were built was because all the jobs were concentrated around a small point, and everyone who had to work there (say, the harbor of a port town) had to be within walking distance of the major source of employment.  That meant cramming buildings closer and closer together as population density rose.

Urban sprawl came about when things like cars became cheap and widely available.  Commutes could suddenly be from much further away, and so the middle class didn't want to live in cramped apartments anymore.

In order to accurately model cities, we need to have "Job Hotspots", around which the town will actually be formed.  Most cities in the ancient world were built on either places of great industrial activity that could not be moved elsewhere (like a particularly valuable mine or quarry), or more likely, upon the crossroads of major trade routes, or where trade routes changed type.  (For example, when river barges would have to unload at the mouths of major rivers to move their goods to sea-going vessels for export.  Places like London or even New York were started as river-to-ocean port towns.)

Towns could, naturally, have more than one job center, however.  A military fort could have plenty of satellite job opportunities regarding smiths, clothing and uniforms, and cooking, brewing, and otherwise servicing the troops, and that fort might be built very near the harbor of a major trade city that is a major trade line.  Both would be job centers that buildings would crowd around. 

Hamlets, meanwhile, only need to be cloistered close enough to be near the other members of your own village, while also within walking distance of your own fields.  Going to town easily would be nice, yes, especially when it's time to take the harvest to the tax collectors and debt collectors, but the key point is that you need to be within walking distance of your job center.

[GreatWyrmGold]

1. Ah, I was not aware of that.

2. Spoilering this for length.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Maybe "Urban Sprawl" wasn't the best name for that, but it was the best I could think of at the time. However, since the edges of several towns (defined as the ends of their roads, because obviously some people in town go there frequently enough to justify a road being built) I've seen have been within a few zoomed-in-travel-map tiles of each other, it seems likely that they'd be fairly close-knit communities, if only because of the ability of people to walk from one town to another quickly. If, say, New York City and Philadelphia had both been built within half a mile of each other in, say, New Jersey, New Yorkers could easily travel to Philadelphia and vise versa without much more effort than going somewhere else in their own town. There might well have been people who chose to build houses along that half-mile of road, once it had been built, in order to enjoy the best of both cities. Shops likely would have sprung up in that area to cater to the needs of those who lived there; eventually the boundary line between the cities would be more or less indistinct. After a while, the mayors of New Youk and Philadelphia might get together on some agreement to have a joint city council or something so that they could rule more fairly over the events and decisions that affected both groups, but something like this might be too complex to look through and understand in Legends Mode, so I suggested the simpler possibility that one city would "absorb" the other.
Now, I'm not sure how big a ZITM tile is, nor what exactly is out there, past the houses and such, that is so important that streets are built right out to it, but it seems probable that there would be nothing stopping these hamelts from joining in a fasion like that I described in the OP or above. Maybe they shouldn't put the hamlets so close together, but if they continue to do so, maybe something like this should be added. It certainly looks odd to me that two roads end so close to one another without actually joining, and it seems even odder that two communities so close to each other would be treated as completely separate.

[NW_Kohaku]

The thing about the job centers, though, is that people are primarily concerned with staying close to the places that they really need to be to get through their daily lives.  Most medieval peasants just plain didn't travel.  As in, ever. 

Yes, sure, tying together the roads between hamlet and town makes plenty of sense, but there is little reason towns would merge together when the cold hard facts on the ground is that the place where you live is determined by where you work, especially when you have to walk to your job.  In a city, being within 15 to 30 minutes of your job, when there are already 10,000 other people who want to be within that same radius means that whatever major job center there is, all residences have to be within a mile or so radius of that point (barring major terrain obstacles). 

Currently, towns have no economic center, and just pour out of a keep for arbitrary reasons, but in the future, it would make more sense to put towns in crossroads of major trading routes, like in mountain passes (which makes more sense for dwarves, as they make the undermountain roads, so a pair of mountainhomes that are "gateways" through a mountain would make great trading towns) or harbors or simply on top of mines of rare and valuable types of minerals (China's ancient monopoly of porcelain because they had kaolin when much of Europe didn't), and then basing town population clusters off of where the jobs are, and simply building the keeps in places where they can overlook and defend the national economic interests.

If there are more than one job centers that spawn a town, however, nearby, yes, it would make sense for these to be all a part of a single town, however, I don't believe that it should work from a mechanic of one town absorbing the other, but rather, of there only being one town to begin with - if they are that close, then just have a multi-job-center town at the start, with two different clusters of residences around those job centers.

[GreatWyrmGold]

...Well, when you look at it that way...

But I still believe that, if two twons are close enough that you could walk between them several times in one morning, then they would become so tightly intertwined that they would be, effectively, one town. I suppose that there's really not much reason to put two towns so close, except maybe gameplay, so the idea might not make much sense once we add that little grain o' common sense in there.

[Detoxicated]

Well if the society of humans and dwarves, etc. are not changed Greatwyrmgolds suggestion would make a lot of sense. I mean we don't have a true system of feudalism implemented yet, and there is no owned people, which was quite different during the middle age. I think it would be awesome if such a thing happened. Also I would like to see a city grudge against another city. So say two neighboring cities are next to each other, and their mayors insult one another, then those cities shall never integrate.

[Neonivek]

Most medieval peasants just plain didn't travel.  As in, ever

Mostly because unless you absolutely had to or were very rich... You NEVER wanted to travel if you could help it.

[Astramancer]

In many ways, dwarf fortress can never model real pre-gunpowder europe without massive overhauls.  For example, one grower working part time on a 16 tile farm (4 dwarves by 4 dwarves big) can, quite easily, feed 400+ dwarves, plus provide the raw materials for cloth and booze.  Even as recently as the late 1800s, it generally took one person to feed 2 people, in the best case scenario.  (wiki says in 1870 in the US 70-80% of the population was engaged in Agriculture - it's uncited, but matches up with what I remember from school).

Dwarf Fortress agriculture is closer to modern -- only 2-3% of americans are currently engaged in Agriculture.

This means that the average Dwarf settlement is much more productive than a human settlement of the appropriate time period, even assuming all other production figures are identical to humans.

[NW_Kohaku]

In many ways, dwarf fortress can never model real pre-gunpowder europe without massive overhauls.  For example, one grower working part time on a 16 tile farm (4 dwarves by 4 dwarves big) can, quite easily, feed 400+ dwarves, plus provide the raw materials for cloth and booze.  Even as recently as the late 1800s, it generally took one person to feed 2 people, in the best case scenario.  (wiki says in 1870 in the US 70-80% of the population was engaged in Agriculture - it's uncited, but matches up with what I remember from school).

Dwarf Fortress agriculture is closer to modern -- only 2-3% of americans are currently engaged in Agriculture.

This means that the average Dwarf settlement is much more productive than a human settlement of the appropriate time period, even assuming all other production figures are identical to humans.

That doesn't mean that we should give up on trying, it just means we should explain exactly what overhauls need to take place.

The situation you've described is the exact reason for the Improved Farming thread. 

Likewise, I will point out that most people in worldgen/adventurer mode actually are farmers.  It's just fortresses that are weird.

[MrWiggles]

This thread feels a little premature.

The Econ overhaul, improvement have just started. A lot of what we're currently seeing is frame work, without a lot of meat to it yet. The other Caravan Release should continue to fill it out, and providing more flexibility, and hopefully less oddness during actual play.

Yea, the empty building, and Store front oddities are all very odd, and shallow, but again at the same time, this last major release didn't promise us really functional cities, or functional economies. Just that trade was following routes, being moved and tracked between cities, and cities themselves were greatly expanded.

[NW_Kohaku]

This thread feels a little premature.

The Econ overhaul, improvement have just started. A lot of what we're currently seeing is frame work, without a lot of meat to it yet. The other Caravan Release should continue to fill it out, and providing more flexibility, and hopefully less oddness during actual play.

Yea, the empty building, and Store front oddities are all very odd, and shallow, but again at the same time, this last major release didn't promise us really functional cities, or functional economies. Just that trade was following routes, being moved and tracked between cities, and cities themselves were greatly expanded.

Nevertheless, unreclaimed shops and the fact that the cities actually aren't making most of those goods they are supposed to be tracking are bugs in a system that Toady thought was there, not one that simply is not implemented yet.  As far as things like job centers go, yes, that's something that's a suggestion for something to implement into the future, when he is further improving the system that is here now, but flaws in the systems that should be there are, again, bugs.

Furthermore, simply because something is a work in progress does not mean that there is no reason to suggest something - in fact, while Toady is gearing up to work on something, and we know what sorts of goals he wants to accomplish with that work is the perfect time to suggest things he can do that might be better than what he was planning on doing.

It's actually rather silly to say that the only time we should start suggesting how Toady should try to accomplish some goal or give him ideas on how he should change his goals is after he's already accomplished them.  That would be the worst time to suggest something.