Rating stucks at 200 (Mediocre) for quite some time

[Jubilee]

@LaChupacabra

Hey, thanks for the image. I think it's pretty clear now how it works.

[ebla71]

From the game's point of view, a station is where its label is and the city considers that station if it is in one of the city's zones. You won't see the zones in the ordinary version of the game, therefore, in simple terms, the station should be built so that the label is close to the buildings. If you want to see the city zones, you need to use City Mania version for that. Then you will see this...

Thank you very much for the nice explanation together with the illustrative picture.

What is the compatibility of City Mania relative to orginal OTTD? Is it a lot ahead or behind the current OTTD version and can I "go back to original" or will I be "locked" to City Mania once used?

[LaChupacabra]

What is the compatibility of City Mania relative to orginal OTTD? Is it a lot ahead or behind the current OTTD version and can I "go back to original" or will I be "locked" to City Mania once used?

City Mania is a patched version of the regular OTTD, but it is fully compatible with it. This means you can launch OTTD City Mania Patch Pack and play online as usual with others playing the regular version. You can also run saves from the regular version and those from City Mania on the regular version. The current version has some bugs, but it also has many useful features not available in the ordinary OTTD.
In short: I recommend it

[ebla71]

City Mania is a patched version of the regular OTTD, but it is fully compatible with it. This means you can launch OTTD City Mania Patch Pack and play online as usual with others playing the regular version. You can also run saves from the regular version and those from City Mania on the regular version. The current version has some bugs, but it also has many useful features not available in the ordinary OTTD.
In short: I recommend it

After trying it, I fully agree that the extra features are really useful if you want more precise management of cities and stations, although some of the options are not exactly at intuitive positions in the menues, to put it mildly. For example, the "show city zones" is somewhere in the "general game options" pull down to the far left while other additional featrures are in the "blue question mark menue" at the very right, so you really have to play around quite a bit to find all of them.

And as much as I like the additional features, I'm still pretty reluctant to switch since I have really long-running games, often several months to years (real-life, not "game years") and I am still to much worried about getting stuck with a non-standard version, even if it is just by accident.

Another thing that I noticed is that City Mania identifies as OTTD v13.x and it is not clear that you are playing a patched version unless you come across the non-standard menues. Is that intentional?

[kamnet]

I'm still pretty reluctant to switch since I have really long-running games, often several months to years (real-life, not "game years") and I am still to much worried about getting stuck with a non-standard version, even if it is just by accident.

dp maintains the CityMania client meticulously to ensure that none of its featured patches are incompatible with the core OpenTTD client. The only patches included are ones that only make changes to the client itself, they are NOT intertwined with the data of the saved game.