How does this game really works? Logic? Beeing in Year 2200....

[TTdelicious]

Hi there

I love this game and I know the original game TTDLX. I remember the game speed was quite more slowly I don't remember that I played until the year 2200 but perhaps I just forget it. But what I wonder ....

why most of the ships are making just a loss in the year 2200. in 2050 they were great ?
why sometimes in a really big city there are fewer people waiting at the station than in a small city?
why trains in vacuum are so crazy expensive and don't give a profit? is this because my map is just 500?

So how does this work? What is the logic which I should know? F.eg. in the first year busses are the best, later trains, then ... from xxx to xxx you should not use ships ... what is the logic behind "making money"? Normally the transport way has to be loooooooooong. So what is normal in real life, here doesn't work (f.eg. tram each 6 fields a station).

etc.

I would be so happy to learn more about the logic because at the moment its not sooooooooooo funny!

[_dp_]

OpenTTD has a lot of settings and other ways to mod the game. Without knowing what exact config you play it's impossible to tell what is the best solution in your case. But here are some random notes that I figured may somewhat answer your questions.

1. If you have inflation enabled it increases cost faster than profits, so what makes you money in 2050 can easily kill you in 2200. So only build stuff that can survive 170 years of inflation or just disable it completely.
2. Amount of passengers and mail station gets depends on what houses it has in catchment area, not size of town.
3. In simple terms profit = distance. Transport far enough and you can make lots money with pretty much everything. Though I guess you can configure your game in a way that makes it completely impossible to make money with certain vehicles.
4. OpenTTD is not a realistic game and was never supposed to be. Trains go on rails, airplanes fly in the sky, and that's about where real-life logic stops applying to OpenTTD.

P.S. With so many questions, you should probably start by reading the wiki: https://wiki.openttd.org/Main_Page