Resources, industry, City Handling

[Juraj]

Hello,
As a long time TTD player I usualy like to play on CityBuilder servers recently. But after a while i noticed that farms are too much overpowered over the other resources, but admins say that it is not in their powers to change it, so im now here posting this.

I would like to see some better handle for Industry, resources and city numbers (how much they produce to be exact). On City builder multiplayer servers, this would be a good thing as it would enable better start for each player and make the gameplay more diverse.

What is city builder server? It is a server where you need to follow needs of a town of your choice to make it grow to city big enough to reach the population point set by server.
What do you need to make it grow? For the most basic part you need pax, mail and goods.

And this is where im heading. Pax and mail looks like they are working flawlessly but when you look at the pictures below, it makes it clear that in every round there is fight for Farms and only Farms exclusively. The point is to make the gameplay diverse so i would like to see option to check and/or TextBox to fill where you should be able to set some balance between resources generated and provided on each map.

Example: after enabling the function resources would be produced like listed below:
Farms- normaly 90+90, rare 80+80, exclusively 180+180
Forest- normaly 180, rare 160, exclusively 360 (the farm combinated)
Steel mine- normaly 200, rare 180, exclusively 400 (see? should produce more cause it take two trains to get the steel to factory where you get your good for the city)
Oil is absolute disaster until the water well spawn.
And so on i hope you get the point.

Then after you disable that function in options everything goes back to rng. You would only enable it for specific needs where you want to simulate near equal conditions for players and keep the diversity so it will be worth to aim for Forest over Farm, or Farm over Forest. So you do not overlook that Sawmill spawned near. So you do not pray that they will close the Steel Factory so you can build more stations for farms there but instead you will deliver that steel and send it to factory....

I would like to hear your toughts.

Thanks in advice.
Juraj

[Alberth]

The default industry-set was never designed for competitive play, so yeah, it's horribly broken if you try to use it that way. It is broken in many other ways too, but it's what the original game provided.

Any kind of code extension that only targets the default set is not likely to fly. Such code should work for all industry-sets, in particular it should include all the NewGRF industry sets.

The latter is likely also a better solution to your problem. Pick a better industry-set from the in-game content, or make one yourself with an open license, and upload it to the in-game content server, so all users can easily find it. I don't know what you exactly require, but you can program almost anything, from placement to production to closure behaviour.

[_dp_]

Alberth, in fact it's exactly the opposite. For competitive play and especially citybuilding default industry set is way better than anything else.
As for farms, it's not that big of an issue. Well, yeah, for short temperate CB game you do farms only (for goods). But that's just one game mode. In long games you still need all resources you can get, for money iron ore is better and everything is completely different in other climates.

[Alberth]

Alberth, in fact it's exactly the opposite. For competitive play and especially citybuilding default industry set is way better than anything else.

I don't believe CS has developed the default set such that you can play competitively in MP with a city-builder script.

I can however see that the other industry-sets are even less useful than the default set for competitive play, but that makes the default set the least worse, rather than the opposite of horribly broken, as you claim.


So I think my point still stands, default set is not really designed for competitive play, as also argued by the OP. Code extensions for just the default set are not really feasible, the direction for a solution is either make code extensions that address all industry newgrfs, or write a newgrf designed for competitive play.
I don't know the requirements, but if I compare NUTS against other train-sets, it's head and shoulders more useful for mass-transport of cargo than anything else. I don't see why that would be different if you design an industry-set dedicated for competitive MP city builder play.

[_dp_]

So I think my point still stands, default set is not really designed for competitive play, as also argued by the OP. Code extensions for just the default set are not really feasible, the direction for a solution is either make code extensions that address all industry newgrfs, or write a newgrf designed for competitive play.
I don't know the requirements, but if I compare NUTS against other train-sets, it's head and shoulders more useful for mass-transport of cargo than anything else. I don't see why that would be different if you design an industry-set dedicated for competitive MP city builder play.

I'd say openttd itself isn't designed for competitive play. It requires some specific server rules to provide at least somewhat acceptable competitive environment (competition on primary industries only, no self-competition, etc). And default set itself is ok, it may not be exceptionally good, but there is nothing in it to make it particularly bad for competitive either. Things like farm production are pretty minor, nowhere near terrible industry cargo distribution mechanics of openttd that no newgrf can change. Btw, I know at least one industry set made for competitive play, called "Luukland Special Event" and it's not that much different from default one, just enables all industries and changes cargo chains.

[Alberth]

Ah, makes sense.
Maybe opengfx+industries would work, it uses default set grapics and much behavior, but has a whole set of parameters for enabling/disabling cargo chains. Never looked into it too deeply, but I translated the newgrf once.