Transport Tycoon Forums

Hamilton2007 wrote:How did you make money so early on? Cause i'm in debt all over the place starting in 1700..

Usually, the very first thing I do is to set up a mail route between 2 towns with 1000+ pop. and 20-30 tiles apart. 10 to 16 4-horse mail carriages wil usually be sufficient. Set them on a shared timetable, and they will run perfectly for 200 years. You should use one-way signs to make the route totally deterministic, so the order won't get messed up.

Then, you just have to be patient. Don't invest in anything more until you have a sound economy. Watch the profit graph.

After a few years, when you've paid the initial debt, move on to fishing. If the routes are straight it's like printing money. Use the bank; max out the loan, and pay back quickly. If you're lucky, you may catch some subsidies too.

And as I've said several times in this thread: It's important that you use the Squid ship set, as it tweaks some game parameters to make these slow ships profitable. Before Squid, it was very hard to make a decent profit on the Brigs.

Thanks for the replay.

Never understand the concept of timetable's and how it works so gave up on that long ago.

Allready using the squid ships, for fishing and passengers.

Probably i'm not patient enough cause i allready loaned the max at the bank..

Some subsidies help for a little while, untill they are finished.

Patience is the name of the game when you start this early. Profits aren't huge, so you just have to sit it out and watch the money slowly accumulate. Normally, it takes at least 20 years before they really start rolling in. Personally, I find those early years to be the most rewarding part of the game.

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting.. Wonder when i get some other vehicles. Only have horses (max 6) and the Merchantman ship..

Hamilton2007 wrote:Waiting, Waiting, Waiting.. Wonder when i get some other vehicles. Only have horses (max 6) and the Merchantman ship..

The Barque is coming in 1790. It carries 120 tons @ 20 km/h and thus it's roughly equivalent in capacity to the Merchantman, but it's got a lot lower running costs. In my later games, I've kept the brigs for cheap commodities transport until 1790, and only upgraded to Merchantmen after 1750 for the cargoes where speed matters, like food and goods.

In 1800 the Schooner is coming, with its 40 tons @ 32 km/h. Swap your fishing brigs for schooners, and you'll see a formidable increase in profits

Very interesting thread.
I also love to play early games and its great to see others enjoying it too.
I mostly use early trains and daylenght patches (thats why I never become a tycoon ). Watching paint dry also works with some trainsets, also you could dabble with some settings in the BaseCost Mod grf (i.e. increase 'removeTrees' or 'raise land' to simulate difficulte terrain).
Problem is that the many aspects (and grf´s) are designed with the timeframe of the original game in mind. Vehicle sets try to reflect technological change but this is difficult with industry. Balancing is broke and starting with early vehicles therefore comparably difficult.

American Roadset may look better with the horses (later changes to bitumen, you have to save and reload the game).

Coxx wrote:Very interesting thread.
I also love to play early games and its great to see others enjoying it too.
I mostly use early trains and daylenght patches (thats why I never become a tycoon ). Watching paint dry also works with some trainsets, also you could dabble with some settings in the BaseCost Mod grf (i.e. increase 'removeTrees' or 'raise land' to simulate difficulte terrain).
Problem is that the many aspects (and grf´s) are designed with the timeframe of the original game in mind. Vehicle sets try to reflect technological change but this is difficult with industry. Balancing is broke and starting with early vehicles therefore comparably difficult.

Coxx, thanks for your input. As said earlier in this thread, I'm customising FIRS a bit, to avoid some gross anachronisms. I haven't ventured into tweaking base costs yet, but I might try it later.

Coxx wrote:American Roadset may look better with the horses (later changes to bitumen, you have to save and reload the game).

I couldn't find that road set. I had the Canadian (International) Roads installed, but was dumb enough to replace my working version with the last borked one. Since then, ARRS 2 has implemented dirt roads, and I'm now happily trotting my horses along dirt roads again

In my current game, I started in 1760 right off with fishing and still haven't laid one tile of road. Now it's 1772, and I've already got a fence around my shack. I've got 27 brigs fishing, and 7 merchantmen carrying the food to town (Manhattan distance between docks: 34+66=100). I love these early years with their exponential growth curve.

Very nice screenshots. Many ships. Super.

leifbk wrote:

Coxx wrote:American Roadset ...

I couldn't find that road set. ....

Its rather old (2008) - pre-Ottd+ and pre-banana, bonus were a number of american streetcars by DanMacK and a lovely tramdepot. Now it seems it was also affected by the trouble that befell the range of Canadian sets and now is not publically available any longer, sad !
The streets of TTRS are also nice, particullarily the tunnel and road bridges and come with a nice roadvehicle depot, a solo TTRS roadset is on my wishlist for a long time ... .
My attempts to draw something to expand FISH into the past were not very successfull so far, sails are pita ...

Coxx wrote:My attempts to draw something to expand FISH into the past were not very successfull so far, sails are pita ...

Nice try I'd say keep up that work and think about publishing your own GRF. The sails should be a little earthy off-white.

Mouse's Sailing Ships are beautiful. They're tall and appear to run right through bridges, but I can live with that. The game's graphics aren't that realistic anyway. I'd like to have the offsets fixed though, those ships are a pain to drag to the garbage can.

I've come to realise that there are a couple of flaws with my "income over annual costs" statistics.

First, transit from one transport medium to another doesn't show up as income in the Finances screen for any but the last stage. That is, eg. the horses carrying grain to the Kreklingvarp transit harbour shown in the very first screenshot of this thread, are never accredited for their income. This means that the income over annual costs is way too little for the RVs.

Second, the "Golden days of the Clipper" weren't that golden after all. The clipper has a very short lifespan, only 20 years. It's also a very expensive ship, so if you add the purchase cost over lifetime to the annual expenses, the latter should be roughly doubled. No other ship (whether in Sailing Ships or Squid) has anywhere near that life-cycle cost.

[...] If anybody can explain to me what this "Min. profit" is supposed to be about, then maybe I can do better next time. Or maybe not [...]

If any vehicle of at least 2 years old got a profit of less than 10000 and over 0 in the last year, then you get (100*profit/10000) points, otherwise you get the full 100 points (min profit over 10000) or 0 points (min profit is negative) (Source: https://wiki.openttd.org/Detailed_Performance_Rating)

Thats is the reason why the colors of profitability values are shown in openttd (first in ttdpatch). Vehicles with negative value show red, between 0 and 10000 are yellow and over 10000 are green

Workaround (maybe a cheat): if you have any route with vehicles with less than 10000 of profit, force them to renew, even maybe to replace for other model when the last year starts. Profitability of renewed/replaced vehicles will not be taken in account because their are less than 2 years old

BTW, I enjoyed very much your thread. I always play OpenTTD from 1700 since I discovered eGVTRS and SailShips a few years ago. I do not like the shifting of some carriage entry dates up to 1800, and the first steam bus looks like bugged (very slow and expensive). Actually none of the steam buses and trucks are profitable, they seems to be there only for eyecandy purposes. And before the arrival of Squid, the only way to get money with ships before 1800 was opening a passenger/mail line between two big cities.

Historically, steam-powered road vehicles never were able to compete commercially with horse carts. They were slow and expensive, just as they are in eGRVTS. Basically, they're just dead weight in the vehicle set, but I guess that they are included for completeness.

All in all, eGRVTS is an extraordinarily well balanced vehicle set, and it represents a quite accurate simulation of the actual development of road vehicles.

Lately I've been playing a bit with Andy's Road Hog, but so far I'm not very impressed with it. The Griff in theory has a decent capacity, but I find the idea of hauling 40 tons of wood at 32 km/h along bumpy forest roads with a steam juggernaut utterly unrealistic. Without shock absorbers and pneumatic tires (both of which were developed around 1900), it would probably have been shaken to pieces in short order. And that is essentially the reason why steam-powered road vehicles never caught on. With its high weight and moderate energy yield, the steam engine was adequate for ships and for trains running on smooth steel rails. But it was way too heavy for the roads at the time.

leifbk wrote:I find the idea of hauling 40 tons of wood at 32 km/h along bumpy forest roads with a steam juggernaut utterly unrealistic.

Actually I'm preparing to include similar "steam powered tractor engine" in my road set, it would haul similar load, however with speed limited to 10 km/h. It is not only realistic, but also better balanced and can be used as short feeder service to nearby railway station or dock, instead of horde of horse carriages.

Something else to consider is the fact that steam-powered vehicles very quickly drew the wrath of politicians who disliked them either for the noise, the pollution, or the damage they caused to roads that were not constructed for them. Various controls such as high taxes for ownership, per-mile and per-ton haulage fees, restrictions on engine sizes and speed limits all played a part in making them largely unprofitable for anything other than field work.

Sorry the offtopic. I found in Wikipedia: History of steam road vehicles the reason for the "bug":

Harsh legislation virtually eliminated mechanically propelled vehicles from the roads of Great Britain for 30 years, the Locomotive Act of 1861 imposing restrictive speed limits on "road locomotives" of 5 mph (8 km/h) in towns and cities, and 10 mph (16 km/h) in the country. In 1865 the Locomotives Act of that year (the famous Red Flag Act) further reduced the speed limits to 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and just 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in towns and cities, additionally requiring a man bearing a red flag to precede every vehicle.

But I still do not understand why Zephyris changed the introduction date of the 4 and 6 horse carriages from 1700 to 1800.

HGus wrote:Sorry the offtopic. I found in Wikipedia: History of steam road vehicles the reason for the "bug":

I think this is an interesting discussion, and I don't mind the offtopicity at all

IMO, the "adverse legislation" is being somewhat over-emphasized as the cause of the poor performance of steam RVs. As far as I know, no other countries followed the strict legal course set by British authorities. Had engineers abroad developed hugely successful steam RVs, and thereby given their countries a technological edge, the Brits would probably soon have reconsidered their strategy.

From the same Wikipedia article:

Progress was dogged by many problems inherent to road vehicles in general, such as suitable power-plant giving steady rotative motion, suspension, braking, steering, adequate road surfaces, tyres, and vibration-resistant bodywork, among other issues. The extreme complexity of these issues can be said to have hampered progress over more than a hundred years, as much as hostile legislation.

Hopefully the world is "flat and diamond-shaped"

Here's my savegame, which includes few grfs from Openttdcoop NewGrf package.
Review: I've included NUTS, and first train arrives in 1665(but i began in 1700), i know that's not realistic, but the grf isn't called NRTS.
Anyway, trains isn't imbalance, because of BaseCost . There were AIs and GS(BeeRewards). NoCab managed the company better than others(better than me too). It's RV income was 140000£ in 1702. AdmiralAI became bankrupt once or twice in 1700-1702. NoNoCab got 13000£ RV income, and WormAI wasted all money on building and then destroying rail pieces(it designed to use aircraft, so that's not strange). I'll try to reach 1920, then new train will be introduced every two years.