[pierreh]

(...) When I did large regions I had a lot of trouble maintaining the outer cities at times. Your entire developed area is very well completed across the board. I'm greatly impressed!

Actually, in the case of the Talaran cluster, it is the 4 cities in the extreme corners, that is, Desognes in the northwest corner, Cherenne in the northeast one, Prandergal in the southwest one, and Salveille in the southeast one, that have seen the best development and have the highest population counts.

It is possible that one reason for this is that each of those 4 cities has only one link to another city, and therefore its Sims tend to find work locally instead of commuting to other cities. But this is only conjecture on my part. The regional playing wasn't properly developed by Maxis, and we have to make do with its limitations and shortcomings.