Who's in better shape?

[Baldy's Boss]

I've previously reported on the 2045 crash & burn of the Wardwood Western Railway.
My next game down the slipways is the Buborough & Penbourne,which has only reached the 1970s.Looks successful at the moment,could probably boost margins by shutting its airports.
But here they are at the same date...B&P has a bigger fleet and more cash than Wardwood did then,but margins aren't that good...do you see seeds of doom?
Which company is actually in better condition?

[Alberth]

Amount of cash is pretty much irrelevant. What is relevant, is yearly profit. Without profit, any amount of cash will just melt until bankrupt.

To make it fair, you probably have to scale profit against size of the company. I play without infra structure costs, and don't have trains with negative income, so I use total income as measure of the size. In your case, perhaps infra structure costs are a better measure of the company size. A third form is the vehicle count of your company.

I don't know which one works for you. Invent a few ways to compute 'health', load a few save games, compute all the numbers, and compare them. You can even make a nice graph of them if you like.


As for seeds of doom, yeah I see lots of it.
Small lines scattered over the entire map with only a few engines on them, and paying yearly 580,000 for totally useless infrastructure, seems a bit of a waste, throwing away 10% of your profit like that.

Oh, and you have interesting trains, they pull trucks:

wagon_trucks.png (153.7 KiB) Viewed 3290 times

Looks like a coding problem in the newgrf.

[PikkaBird]

I always get those in Baldy's games. I don't know what NewGRF causes it - probably old wagons new cargos or something, that GRF was never anything but trouble.

[Baldy's Boss]

I always get those in Baldy's games. I don't know what NewGRF causes it - probably old wagons new cargos or something, that GRF was never anything but trouble.

We established this when I spotted it in the Malberg game.UKRS overwrites the sprites for most default cargo vehicles WHEN EMPTY.Fill them up and the circled question marks become regular vehicles.

[Baldy's Boss]

Here they are at the start of 1975.
(Anyone want to buy used cabooses?)

The Buborough/Penbourne passenger service has been seeing passenger buildup,and more trains have been added to the route...it has not yet been electrified (unlike the nearby coal service from Sadingtown Mines,where the obsolete Challenger engines have been replaced by much more reliable,cheaper-to-run GG1s and the % Transported from the mine has doubled) but some new track is electric by Penbourne,where a third track has been added as part of an effort to straighten out the former situation (see older B&P saves in thread) where the incoming trains could stop at a signal that blocked outgoing trains.Still doesn't seem optimized.

Is B&P on a better path than WW was?

[Baldy's Boss]

Three years later.The B&P definitely seems behind the curve on electrification compared to Wardwood.
Cabooses are disappearing as old freight trains get replaced.
I've spent a lot on new vehicles,but in large part that's adding additional trains to lines that have been under-served.
What's the highest priority fix?

[Sylf]

What's the highest priority fix?

What's your biggest indicator of success?
If it's money, are you looking at income of the individual vehicles, or company as a whole? If both, which is more important to you?
Or is it the state of the game in year 2051? And how do you measure your success in 2051? The game score? Total money in the bank? Company value?

[Baldy's Boss]

What's the highest priority fix?

What's your biggest indicator of success?
If it's money, are you looking at income of the individual vehicles, or company as a whole? If both, which is more important to you?
Or is it the state of the game in year 2051? And how do you measure your success in 2051? The game score? Total money in the bank? Company value?

Right now the company appears to be in worse shape than one that ran out of money in 2045.I need to improve profitability.
The Buborough to Penbourne passenger line and the 'Gren-Gren Express" (Group 28) will need to be electrified soon.
But what gets the best return on investment?

[YNM]

If you play with infra, breakdown and inflation on, the best way to see "are doom coming to town ?" is to look for profits vs. infra requirement. At a point, your highest profit line might be a PTP spanning the whole map - that would change as soon as inflation catchs up. A dense network, while might be troublesome and a tiring job, is worth to invest in. While individual profits might be smaller there's less infrastructure required, which means higher net income percentage from each vehicle. And you know that many small things combined will emerge as a large one...

[Baldy's Boss]

Lately I've mainly been adding vehicles to many-trained passenger routes...the Buborogh-to-Penbourne,the Great Loop (long problematic but now heavily travelled) and Gren-Gren (Group 28).
Just added a second train to a long fast passenger train from the largest city of the moment.Electrification proceeds piecemeal but new steamers still make money.
But comparing to Wardwood at the same time,and knowing how Wardwood went bust...

[Eddi]

i completely do not understand these threads that you open.

it's like you ask "how am i getting in shape?" and people answer "you lose weight and work out". but what you do is "ok, i order a salad and a diet cola in addition to my 4 cheeseburgers". how is that supposed to help?

your companies are seriously overweight (track maintenance), and all you do is eat fast food (buy out AI competitors).

what you need to do is eat more organic food (develop a tightly connected network, instead of ever more single lines) and work out (put more vehicles on the infrastructure you have)

[Baldy's Boss]

i completely do not understand these threads that you open.

it's like you ask "how am i getting in shape?" and people answer "you lose weight and work out". but what you do is "ok, i order a salad and a diet cola in addition to my 4 cheeseburgers". how is that supposed to help?

your companies are seriously overweight (track maintenance), and all you do is eat fast food (buy out AI competitors).

what you need to do is eat more organic food (develop a tightly connected network, instead of ever more single lines) and work out (put more vehicles on the infrastructure you have)

Well,the point of THIS thread is to solicit comparisons between the Wardwood game (which went under in 2045) and the ongoing B&P game,to see if B&P can avoid Wardwood's pitfalls.
Also the occasional more specific query like straightening out the switches and signals at Penbourne.(When I built that line in the first place someone here redid it into one-way tracks for me,but the layout occasionally has inbound trains waiting at signals when track space is open at the station).And getting trains going different places not to be in each other's way if they share track is something I haven't really figured out yet.

[Alberth]

If you continue just buying competitors, and asking us for new ideas, it's going to take forever to get any better.

The only way to learn track building is by doing it, and doing it a lot.

I would suggest that you play one or more games without any competitors at all, at a much smaller map, say 256x256 or smaller.
Turn off infra structure, turn off inflation, turn off breakdowns, use a cheap train set, eg default set or NUTS, and fill that map with transport. Get more trains at one set of tracks, add a junction to another coal mine, etc etc. For simplicity, only use one-way path signals.


Don't be afraid to experiment. I spend ages getting a junction just right.

Build some tracks, watch the trains, understand why trains are waiting at unexpected spots, devise a cunning plan to improve, do the plan, watch trains to check it got better, and check for new unexpected spots, and make new cunning plans, etc.

[YNM]

Well,the point of THIS thread is to solicit comparisons between the Wardwood game (which went under in 2045) and the ongoing B&P game,to see if B&P can avoid Wardwood's pitfalls.
Also the occasional more specific query like straightening out the switches and signals at Penbourne.(When I built that line in the first place someone here redid it into one-way tracks for me,but the layout occasionally has inbound trains waiting at signals when track space is open at the station).And getting trains going different places not to be in each other's way if they share track is something I haven't really figured out yet.

Quite an improvement compared to that other save if I have to say. Your problem lies on the fact it's a huge map... Get on a smaller map (the maximum size I build on is only 512x1024, once I played in a 1024x1024 then I bored because it's huge and even I still expand my line on a very small portion of the map).

For comparison : my own game, 512x1024, infra and servicing on (but no breakdowns). Look at how many trains I have in the network, despite most of it is single-tracked.

[Baldy's Boss]

Well,the point of THIS thread is to solicit comparisons between the Wardwood game (which went under in 2045) and the ongoing B&P game,to see if B&P can avoid Wardwood's pitfalls.
Also the occasional more specific query like straightening out the switches and signals at Penbourne.(When I built that line in the first place someone here redid it into one-way tracks for me,but the layout occasionally has inbound trains waiting at signals when track space is open at the station).And getting trains going different places not to be in each other's way if they share track is something I haven't really figured out yet.

Quite an improvement compared to that other save if I have to say. Your problem lies on the fact it's a huge map... Get on a smaller map (the maximum size I build on is only 512x1024, once I played in a 1024x1024 then I bored because it's huge and even I still expand my line on a very small portion of the map).

For comparison : my own game, 512x1024, infra and servicing on (but no breakdowns). Look at how many trains I have in the network, despite most of it is single-tracked.

I do have a small-map game that I attach for comparison (started in 1901,so not comparable to my "mainstream").

But are you saying the latest B&P save is "quite an improvement" on the contemporary Wardwood(apparently not downloaded on this thread),or on the end-stage Wardwood?

[Dave]

I've been playing a Toyland game where I don't try and play to my usual style (very realistic, prototypical) and have just been integrating all my services into a rather messy network, adding where I need to.

Moral of the tale: Much like the multi-national corporate scumbags that are Nike... Just do it. Have a go and see what happens.

Here's my save (no GRFs are loaded, so you can definitely load it). See how messy it is, but note how trains to many destinations are sharing tracks, especially around the Spluttergate area.

That reduces my infrastructure costs - imagine how much I'd be paying out if every single service on there was point to point.

[Sylf]

I know you're looking for ways to improve the current game, but I feel the answer isn't there.

The best way to improve your game is to NOT to buy out the competitors.

After playing with some of commonly seen structures in your companies, I finally realized that vast majority of infrastructures you own are built by your competitors which you bought out. And all of them are in very bad condition.

I'm not saying to never buy out competitions. But when you do, you need to improve them, especially the company you bought out because of the competitor bankruptcy. If they went bankrupt, their performance was poor. On top of that, when you buy them out, you're gaining all the infrastructure they owned. And as others have pointed out, the cost of infrastructure maintenance increases exponentially with greater amount of infra you own. If you buy them out, you need to make vast amount of improvements to them to make it worth the investment.

And that improvement comes in the form of building a network of transportation, and move away from owning a vast collection of point-to-point connections. What Dave and YNM showed are examples of such network.

What Alberth is suggesting is the actual ways to get some practice done to hone your skills in building such networks. When you want to climb Mt Everest, you don't challenge Mt. Everest on your first trip. You start out by climbing a much smaller hill/mountain, get your practice in, and find some pitfalls etc. When you go for larger mountain (add a competitor, turn on break downs, turn on infra cost, use more expensive train set), you take smaller step up. You don't practice on 1000 meter mountain once before challenging Mt Everest in the winter. Turn one feature on, find more pitfalls, and remember how to avoid it in the future. Practice more on building networks. Build more junctions (but don't always copy off of that wiki page).

Playing on a small map is only a part of the practice you need to do.

[Baldy's Boss]

When I buy a competitor,before I even pull the trigger I go through all their stations looking for which are stranded,or lack trains,or are approached by tracks in a "corkscrew" pattern rather than directly.I learned this from experience.What new infrastructure is added is in use.What I have never yet accomplished is to take a competitor's network and integrate it,sharing track between my previous trains and the new ones,and so forth.

In the B&P game,the Gren-Gren express (profitable from the get-go,now with electrics replacing the older engines) and the Great Loop(previously a money pit,but now lucrative with increased passenger demand) are my own designs...do they run better than AI-built routes?(AIs seem to know some switches and signals better than I do,they use far more of them).

[Sylf]

What I have never yet accomplished is to take a competitor's network and integrate it,sharing track between my previous trains and the new ones,and so forth.

This is absolutely the essential part that you must do. If you don't there are always a good chance that infrastructure cost will be greater than income toward the end of the game. Just seeing that their infra are used, and are making some money, is not good enough. You must practice making a network. That point has been repeated over and over, in this thread and other threads. Please, please, please heed our words and practice building networks.

[Alberth]

What I have never yet accomplished is to take a competitor's network and integrate it,sharing track between my previous trains and the new ones,and so forth.

Your map is too big. As you can see in your save games, there are very few tracks running in parallel, reducing your chances for useful merging.

A second problem might be that you can only merge if you understand what end result you want. Modifying a road without knowing where it should go is very complicated. This also points to getting more practice yourself with networking, making connections, shifting connections, changing connections, experimenting!

You could try to have as few rail tracks as possible (never tried that, but it seems like a fun goal )

Another goal can be to move primary industry output to one secondary industry, eg all coal of the map (not too big) to one power plant, move all livestock to one factory, and all grain to another one. At the destination, one station (with several platforms probably) is sufficient.


As for signals, AIs typically build fixed signal patterns, and more is not always better. You probably do want to use a smaller blocksize (between signals), to make space for more trains on the same tracks.
Like track layout, you should try experimenting with signals too. Place them, see how it works, think of an improvement, make the change, and check if it works as you think. Then see again for further improvements.

Last but not least, don't be afraid to experiment. It's a good way of learning, and fun to do