Regarding town growth limitations and timetables

[SuedKAT]

Hello,

Grew up playing TTD and have been playing OpenTTD since it came out and somehow I always find new ways to improve my scenarios. The ability to add GRF's to your game and more have really made this game fun for me.

However two things still bug me and it makes me wonder if there ain't some solutions to them and I therefore decided to register here to ask.

1.) Is there anyway I can prevent a town/city to grow, or rather place it's houses at certain spots. For example I have a city and a bit from it I got an "industry area" where loads of stuff gets delivered and processed, between the two there is a road for trucks to bring in food, goods, alcohol etc into the city. I don't want the city to build houses around that road and at my little "industry area", can I prevent it somehow?

I guess I can place signs all over the place to prevent the city from growing at those specific tiles, but then I have signs everywhere and it looks just as realistic as having a house next to a coal mine. Perhaps there is a GRF I've missed which makes the signs invisible?


2.) I place my vehicles in groups so they are easy to manage, to keep track of and when I create a line and add X number of vehicles to it I always release them from the depot with quite a bit of space in between them so they are effective. At first they tend to keep the space between them, but after a while they all tends to group up, especially due to everyone needing to be replaced at the same time since they where created at the same time. I've tried working around this with timetables, but haven't got it to work properly. The best I've managed is "only leave when fully loaded" but since I quite regularly have stations on the same line which differ quite a bit with their output (mainly thinking of passengers and mail) it tends to result in a traffic pileup at the station which have the smallest amount of things to pickup and I'm back to square one again.

This is an issues which mostly affect buses, but more importantly mail trucks, since they tend to lose money when they pile up, something buses don't do as frequently. For some reason it also affect boats quite frequently as well, my ferries can start all over the map, but eventually they are all on top of each other anyhow.

How can I fix or work around this? It don't have to be super efficient, I'm more after a solution on a cosmetic level since I find 8 ferries on top of each other and 16 mail trucks driving after each other in a worm to be rather ugly. Right now I spend quite some time mashing the "Skip" button for my vehicles, rather then doing what I want.

// SuedKAT

[Brumi]

1) You can turn off the growth of towns entirely in Settings / Environment / Towns / Town growth speed. Or you can forbid them to build roads in Settings / Environment / Towns / Towns are allowed to build roads. That way towns will only grow along roads that you build.
Alternatively, you can use the EmptyGRF (downloadable from the ingame content downloader). This NewGRF allows you to build empty looking tiles, which can be used to prevent town growth.

2) You can do that using timetables:

• Make your vehicles use shared orders. This can be done by pressing ctrl while cloning the vehicles, or if the vehicles are already there, clicking "Go To" and then ctrl+clicking the other vehicle you want to share orders with. This way if you change the orders of one vehicle, the orders of all the others will change.
• Go to the timetable mode and click "Autofill" for one of your vehicles.
• After your vehicles have completed a full trip, add some slack to the timetable to accomodate delays.
• In the timetable view, ctrl+click (the ctrl is very important) "Start date" and set a future date. This way your vehicles belonging to the sae order sharing group will be evenly distributed. Ctrl+clicking "Start date" sets the start date for the timetable of the other vehicles as well, but for example, if you have 5 vehicles, and a full trip takes 60 days, the start dates of the vehicles will be 12 days apart.

Tip: using timetables mostly works with regular servicing or no servicing at all. If breakdowns are enabled, make sure that the vehicles are given enough time even in case of a breakdown. Putting a "go to depot" order in the orders list will make your life easier, as random depot visits may mess up your timetable quite badly.

[SuedKAT]

Thanks a lot, that GRF was exactly what I was looking for!

Will have to try out the timetables again and thanks for the tip to put a depot in the order list, I suspect that it's what have been causing issues for me now since I either use the setting for automatic renewal or send the entire group for renewal at the same time.

Time to start a new scenario to try all this out, not to mention that I just also upgraded from 1.4.4 to 1.5 as well

Thanks yet again!

// SuedKAT

[Alberth]

The pile-up happens automagically. If you have 2 vehicles after each other, the first takes more time as it loads more cargo or passengers.
The second is done faster (as the first one loaded most already), so it leaves faster as well (so at the next station it is even closer to the first one, and loads even less, etc. The only times that this does not happen is when both vehicles stay empty, or are both loaded full. At those times, they both take equal time, and the second one doesn't catchup with the first one.

Time tables work quite nicely, if you give enough slack to catchup due to delays (breakdown, but also eg waiting for a platform or before a junction).


Edit: Good point by TimeLapse1357, "loaded full" here means there is more cargo at the station than the train capacity, so it loads as fast as possible until full.

[TimeLapse1357]

One more very important thing.
Avoid using 'full load' orders with timetabled vehicles.