Maybe there are better ways to do things. Let me know

[SugarySnax]

I've been playing for about a hundred hours. Much of that has been starting over and over. Lately I'm quitting when I get to the aging vehicles problem which is handled so much better by Railroad Tycoon 3. TTD, if I'm correct requires you to send your vehicle to a garage in order to switch out vehicles. (I did find the sending for auto replacing vehicles but that only works until that vehicle becomes obsolete)

Its just so much micromanagement to upgrade 40 vehicles, and I'm so sick of it from the previous game when I had about 200 vehicles. It kills the fun for me. Is there something I missed where I can just hold down a button or something and the vehicle will drive itself to the garage and trade itself in for the latest version of itself and just charge while keeping the same orders? The way I'm doing it now I have to open a window for each vehicle and then click on go to depot for each one. I know I can close all those windows by pinning the ones I don't want to close and hitting delete. Then when they're in the depot I have to click on the depot or that other button and then I can start replacing vehicles through tedious process that is prone to error and includes quite a few steps. Its fine until you have thirty vehicles and then its quite a chore and gets in the way of planning. I feel that to improve my cities and airports I should be creating many more passenger and cargo deliveries in each city, bringing things to the airport (though I'm not sure stuff even gets put into line to be shipped by planes) Should I be transferring it to airports or should I be unloading it at airports?

Another thing I've run into that I don't like about the game is that I brought a lot of food to a processing plant and then shipped the food to a small city. It accepted the food but it accepts all the food all the time and it doesn't pay much. I set up a loop route, thinking the food would be dispersed to about six big cities as needed but this one tiny village is gobbling all of it and not showing any improvement as a result, which makes the whole process a little pointless. I make a lot of money just bringing food from the farm to the processor. I make decent money bringing coal to a power plant that doesn't appear to be doing anything for any city. Game play for me consists of laying out some money making loops and then setting up some roads and bridges for the AI to expand into. This last thing would be better if I could do it from a distant position but it doesn't work that well from very high. I make big mistakes. When I'm down low, I'm much more accurate but its hard to see the big picture of where I'm going and what I'm trying to do. The bottom line is that once my cities get to a certain size they are just a chore and a headache with lots of annoying distractions constantly interrupting my attempts at big picture planning.

On the other hand I just this last game got a little better with signals and found that satisfying. I cleverly used the scenario editor to create a perfectly flat, riverless, untreed situation that didn't screw me up like the varied terrain and trees do. I find it hard to see elevation differences and quite hard to deal with those problems.

Gold has been disappointing too and airports get drained of passengers and mail. Its like no one has realized that a game like this should let you design an algorithm that would analyze the situation in all the cities and decide where to take things. Why do I have to figure out a route, when I could be designing a route picking system that would be picking the next place to go and what to bring and what to pick up and where to go. Are there mods that do this? Are there mods you can recommend to improve gameplay? I thought gold would get turned into valuables and then that would get shipped all over to make even more money but instead I just get paid a small amount for gold and then it gets absorbed by a bank.

I also didn't get or can't find the scenarios that came with the game. I don't have any AI to play against in single player.

Thanks for reading. Hope you take it well. It may sound like a lot of complaints. I've been playing a pretty long while and I'm comparing to other gaming experiences and of course all those other games I've played like Patrician, RT, RCT , etc are years advanced from this game and in some ways building on what this game laid down.

Finally, thanks to Master Hellish and other tutorial makers You've been a big help and are obviously very civic minded people trying to better the plight of man (mostly gamers) in our quest to satisfy our need of mastery and other things.

[Kalen]

Regarding vehicle upgrading, what you're looking for is autoreplace, rather than autorenew. You can of course try to optimize your routes to avoid having a huge number of vehicles but autoreplace facilitates the process either way.

Regarding food and distributing loads among stations, you might be able to do that with conditional orders. Perhaps setting an order to jump to a different order (i.e. go to a different station) when load percentage is X would do the trick.

Trying to find the best profit really only matters in the early and mid game when money is an issue, but at some point the game stops being about money and starts being about optimization and playing around with strategies, like making complex networks using signals and that sort of thing. So I wouldn't worry too much about hunting for the best way to make a profit, try to do what seems fun to you or fits your style of play. It's essentially a sandbox, after all, and I mean, at the end of the day, if you really wanted quick legit cash, all you'd have to do is use a well-placed aircraft route and game the system, so...

Regarding city size, I find that turning off cities building roads and doing it myself, or strictly using the grid city road layout helps control city expansion a bit. It's also important to keep in mind that if you want to run a metropolitan train system, you have to plan ahead and place the stations before the city grows larger, as there's no underground in OpenTTD (the closest you have are tunnels but you'd still have to dig land inside the city for their entrances and you need space for the stations). That or you'll have to rely on trams and/or road vehicles. Alternatively, you can always go "creative" in an existing game with an existing city if you don't feel like restarting and just magic dynamite some space inside the city for stations, but that requires using the cheat menu. It's an option nonetheless.

Path signals really help make rail networks more efficient by dramatically reducing the amount of infrastructure and vehicles you need to use. You don't even need to go complex with it, either. A simple one-way circuit is already a huge improvement over several point-to-point independent rails for passengers and mail, for example. I find basic usage of path signals is fundamental to playing with trains properly in this game and actually enjoying it.

If you want the game to distribute cargo and give it destinations you could always enable cargodist in the settings.

AI are no longer included by default with the game, including old TTD AI. They've been redone entirely and you can now find them online to download and set them up in the menu. Check the in-game content download service and find some AIs (and their required libraries) in the list and try them out. You can also find community-made scenarios and heightmaps (to load in the editor as a blank generated map) in the service, by the way.

[SugarySnax]

Your first sentence......... At first I didn't know what you meant. Were you just saying that what I wanted is auto replace, a feature that doesn't exist but probably should, but now that I've looked it up, I found it actually already exists. This is great news! This is my main gripe with the game and I think it will make the game much more playable. This is on a par with the day I discovered the double jump. "You mean I can push off air to reach areas that were unreachable?"

I love it when I learn stuff.

later...
I tried it and it works. Its not that easy to find. Even though I know its there, when I went to use it again it took me awhile to find that feature. I've also been trying to make money transferring gold instead of unloading it because when I unload it it just disappears. If I transfer it I can ship it again and again. Is that how that is supposed to work?

I tried fiddling with timing but I'll have to look into that more deeply.

Setting up multiple bus and truck stations in big towns is not so much fun. Its hard to see the actual stations and every thing looks the same. There aren't any overlays hidden in the game are there? maybe showing areas that are covered by stations accepting or moving mail or gold or passengers or whatever? That would be nice. I'd know where to put new stations. Its a little cheesy to just have everything go to air travel.

Some of my towns are expanding daily. Is that the pinnacle?

[Kalen]

[edited to clarify part about transfer virtual profit]
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That's why I linked you to the wiki pages, so you could read about it. xD

If I transfer it I can ship it again and again. Is that how that is supposed to work?

The point of transfer orders is to move cargo around without finishing the delivery so that another vehicle can take it elsewhere to deliver it properly. You can read more about that here and here. Regarding transfer "income", you can read more about that here. You don't get paid any money until you deliver cargo properly; transfer credit is just virtual profit added to your feeder/transfer vehicles' statistics so they don't constantly show negative income/losses and nag you about it. So no infinite transfer income. : P

To see stations inside cities better, you might want to play around with transparency settings. The invisibility option for houses should greatly help with that, and if you use locks and a hotkey, you could quickly hide everything but stations at the press of a button and back, for example. As for checking station catchment area/radius for already built stations, as far as I'm aware there's no option to toggle that, you'd have to check it manually, by hovering a same size station above it with catchment showing turned on, for example.

Towns can grow rather fast depending on your settings. You can change town growth speed in them if you find they're growing too fast.

[leifbk]

Towns can grow rather fast depending on your settings. You can change town growth speed in them if you find they're growing too fast, but it will only affect new games.

Changes in town growth take effect immediately, as do most settings. I'll always start in the 18th century with town growth completely off, and then turn it to slow in late 20th century.

[Kalen]

Are you certain about that? The town growth speed setting reads: "game setting (stored in saves; affects only new games)" so I assumed it'd be as such.

EDIT: Never mind, you're right, if altered in an active game it affects the current game; the former only applies to changing it in the main menu. My bad! : )

[leifbk]

EDIT: Never mind, you're right, if altered in an active game it affects the current game; the former only applies to changing it in the main menu.

The wording "Game setting (stored in saves; affects only new games)" is a little cryptic IMO.

As you note in your edit, there's an important point here. Changes in the Game settings when you access it from the Main Menu (title screen) are written to the openttd.cfg, and will become the default settings for every game started afterwards. On the other hand, changing those settings in-game will affect only the current game. Those changes are not written to the openttd.cfg, but will be stored in the save file.

The other group of settings is labelled "Client setting (not stored in saves; affects all games)". Those changes will always be written to the openttd.cfg regardless of whether you change them from the main menu screen or in-game.