Future Tech

[Baldy's Boss]

One of the reasons I generally stop playing games in 2051 is that I never like to replace like with like,only an upgrade...and there are few opportunities after that.
Besides the EmperorJake and Brianum iterations of vacuum trains & tracks,what vehicles are there that carry on improvement past the Pegasus/Chimaera generation?

[kamnet]

Sadly, no there hasn't been much effort to develop a futuristic train set of any type. Most of the focus by NewGRF developers has been to backfill the game with older but popular steam and diesel engines, with some development on more trains in the 70s-2000s.

[supermop]

None really, but it would be fairly simple for someone who wanted them to make. I personally never play in that era or with those technologies, other than occasionally running a circa 1980 commuter network to the 2400s due to ceaseless tinkering with timetable optimization. If you just wanted a "n+1" train, that's x% better than what came before you could probably follow a beginner newgrf tutorial and knock one one in an evening. If you want to come up with interesting ways to balance or unbalance , or provoke disruptive innovation in the post game-era that could take years just on the thought experiments to inspire it. The vacuum tube trains are already so fast, I am unsure about what satisfaction one would get from another ever faster railtype with even faster trains another 100 years in the future - you'd probably want instead to look at something that works in a totally different way.

As a slightly related note, for years I loved the great balance among trams and busses in egrvts - you had single car trams, double decker trams, articulated trams, long haul coaches, bendy busses, and double deck buses, each with particular strengths and weaknesses: loading speed, capacity, density, top speed, comfort, etc. But in the late game you end up with the end point of the "progression" as generation after generation of incrementally bigger, faster, better double decker 5 car high speed trams. The need to always have a new vehicle objectively better than what you have now even past the logical end point of any one design results in a situation of an absurd vehicle that isn't meaningfully fun to play. ( maybe try things like NUTS or YETI for things that are absurd but do have a design focus on meaningful gameplay)

Neither here nor there, just some reflections...

[Eddi]

one obstacle for a far-future vehicle set is that you need to provide ALL vehicle types (trains, planes, road vehicles, ships), otherwise the existing vehicles will disappear at the end of their lifespan. (the game snapshots the lifespan of all vehicles at the point where none get introduced anymore, to keep them available. pushing this boundary for one vehicle type will affect all other vehicle types)

[mrjack2]

one obstacle for a far-future vehicle set is that you need to provide ALL vehicle types (trains, planes, road vehicles, ships), otherwise the existing vehicles will disappear at the end of their lifespan. (the game snapshots the lifespan of all vehicles at the point where none get introduced anymore, to keep them available. pushing this boundary for one vehicle type will affect all other vehicle types)

There's a setting for "vehicles never expire", which makes this less urgent.

[Eddi]

one obstacle for a far-future vehicle set is that you need to provide ALL vehicle types (trains, planes, road vehicles, ships), otherwise the existing vehicles will disappear at the end of their lifespan. (the game snapshots the lifespan of all vehicles at the point where none get introduced anymore, to keep them available. pushing this boundary for one vehicle type will affect all other vehicle types)

There's a setting for "vehicles never expire", which makes this less urgent.

that's a very shortsighted view. as the experience shows, this just results in repeated questions of "my vehicles disappeared, how do i get them back?"

[V453000 :)]

Since vast majority of vehicle sets are so poorly designed when talking about expiration dates, the only solution often is to have vehicles never expire on. I believe every vehicle set should have the best vehicles of each type never expire. The rest can expire, but just the vehicles that you don't need anymore.