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By joining a very late game most towns will have grown which is as you say, a clear advantage.

One could really question if growing a town to 500 then reset would actually be cheating. If you let 3 months go (letting the houses complete) then reset/pick the town. It would be the same as waiting for xx years for towns to self-grow.

Edit: Actually you would have a disadvantage of having slower trains doing this. Waiting for xx years to pass then play a record game would be more cheating than this.

As you cant see the year of each record you cant tell what games were cheated or not (i.e waiting for time to pass or growing to xx house then reset).

The automatic town growth is much slower so you don't get the same difference in house/pop as you can get by build/reset/reclaim. Even after many years the highest houses with <500 pop I usually see are 22/23, whereas with maximum growth rate you can get 28-30 houses and still be under 500. At 16 GR that's 2 houses per month - so you'd be 3-4 minutes ahead with build/reset than you would be by waiting (and the wait would be less). I would assume it's cheating because you are deliberately manipulating factors outside the official game mechanics to give yourself a headstart - but if the admins think it's OK..?

Note that towns only self-grow if there other players in the game, and you then run the risk of one of them winning before you finish. A good player who starts on day 1 will win over the same quality player who waits for a bigger town (and a player who builds/resets) - it takes 15-20min of not playing to get a 10min headstart on your personal time. The build/reset method works even if no-one else is playing - the game just pauses when you exit and you only lose a month or two rebuilding your stations/networks before your town is growing again.


Even when faster trains are available I think the best strategy is still to use the Floss 47 - it's cheaper so you don't max. out the loan as fast and it's still fast enough to meet all the demands, at least in 4k/8k games - 25k may be different I've never tried it.