"Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

[audigex]

Possibly the only remaining frustration to me in OpenTTD is the need to constantly expand - no matter what you do, in a successful game passenger numbers will constantly increase.

This is great for the traditional gameplay type of "just keep expanding and getting faster/bigger trains until you've filled the map" - but for those of us who like building realistic networks it's not so much fun. What's the point of having a 2 car DMU on a branch line when you quickly have to add another, then double them up to 4 car, etc? Eventually everything ends up running with 14 car, 160mph expresses and my realistic network isn't very realistic.

I know Cargodist balances routes to an extent, but stations will, if the route capacity isn't expanded regularly, eventually have thousands of passengers. It would be nice if it never built up these significant super-backlogs, and rather showed a smaller backlog, or some other marker to indicate that routes were "overcrowded" and expansion would be possible.

Just a simple "Don't overwhelm networks" switch in the settings would do the job - let me (The government/company) decide when to expand the routes when they're at 100% capacity, don't just keep creating demand until I meet it.

[Emperor Jake]

+1 to this feature, or some other way of remedying this. I've run into this problem just about every time I've played with cargodist as well. I'm sure this "simple switch" would be difficult to implement though.

I've thought of using other features to minimise the overcrowding problem, such as adjusting "effect of distance on demand" and having fewer and smaller towns, with limited success. Anyone got any other suggestions?

[Wahazar]

Modern houses should produce less passengers and mail (people use their own cars, mail is replaced by IT).
IT should resolve issue with huge passengers streams.

[romazoon]

playing with competitors can help your problem guys, it will reduce the amount of passenger you receive in your station where there is competition (different station and company serving the same zone).

this is maybe a good reason why production of passenger should be switchable, so player can choose a "single player mode" or a "multiplayer mode". with competition it becomes much easier to cope with demand...reducing the production would be in a multiplayer game probably not a good idea (imagine some/many competitors serving the same area, it will reduce a lot the production at those competed station)

I also think that the setting "effect of distance on demand" would benefit from having "more effect", simply because it seems to use relativ distance, so the bigger the network (as in how far are the two farthest point from each other), the less effect has this settings it seems.
--> suggestion : make the effect of distance on demand goes higher than 255, or make it stronger effect (who plays with less than a 100% effect anyway )

[audigex]

Romazoon, although that does help, it doesn't really solve the problem - especially for those of us who don't want competition. My OpenTTD world is nationalized, and as the benevolent dictator for live, I don't allow competition.

EmperorJake, most changes aren't simple but I was more referring to "Simple switch" as being not adding lots of options for the user: eg other solutions include the "Reduce Passenger numbers" patch, which can set a multiplier to reduce pax numbers by, but that involves the user fiddling with it and works globally, which may not be what people want. It also requires the user to constantly return to amend it.

Presumably cargodist knows the route capacity and demand, as it's producing passengers and shows things in the link graph, while also deciding which routes to saturate first... so hopefully it's not THAT big a leap. I've no doubt it involves extra work, that's why I'm posting it in the suggestions topic in the hopes someone picks it up. It may never be picked up, if nobody has the interest, but I don't think it's quite in in "Oh wow, that's a horrible amount of work for such a small feature" territory

[romazoon]

yes you are right my solution is not really one to your problem, i also play a lot as monopole ruled by dictator .

The solution i use in this situation, is all about reducing density of buildings inside cities, you can easily reduce the amount produced in an area by bulldozing some buildings, and it gives very nice look to the city cause you would then need to add parks or other newobjects to make sure no building get built there again.

[andythenorth]

I don't understand how this would be achieved within OpenTTD.

Cargodist doesn't control passenger production, towns do, via houses. Towns choose to expand or not, building more/larger houses. The core mechanic of OpenTTD is that providing service to towns causes them to expand (assuming any required town cargos are also supplied). Changing that is a....big thing to change no?

[leifbk]

There are also several «Limit Town Growth» game scripts.

[audigex]

Cargodist, though, presumably knows (roughly) the capacity of the routes out of a station, and distributes passengers to those routes?

Would it be possible to assign those passengers to an invisible route back to the same station, instantly deliver them for no payment, and therefore essentially achieve the same thing?

Or since Cargodist does balance routes, could it not control town growth (like the "Limit Town Growth" scripts do) based on available capacity within/out of that town?

These might be silly and unworkable, but surely there's a way to do it? If not, well, it's a suggestion/feature request... it's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen.

[Eddi]

Would it be possible to assign those passengers to an invisible route back to the same station, instantly deliver them for no payment, and therefore essentially achieve the same thing?

no, cargo can never be delivered to the same station it came from.

Or since Cargodist does balance routes, could it not control town growth (like the "Limit Town Growth" scripts do) based on available capacity within/out of that town?

sure, and you can use a feather to push in a nail.

[roadrunner]

You could try playing with one of the patchpacks, such as "Spring 2013 Patchpack", or Hardpack. Some of them have a parameter in advanced settings to control the amount of passengers and mail produced by towns.

[Eddy Arfik]

Possibly the only remaining frustration to me in OpenTTD is the need to constantly expand - no matter what you do, in a successful game passenger numbers will constantly increase.

This is great for the traditional gameplay type of "just keep expanding and getting faster/bigger trains until you've filled the map" - but for those of us who like building realistic networks it's not so much fun. What's the point of having a 2 car DMU on a branch line when you quickly have to add another, then double them up to 4 car, etc? Eventually everything ends up running with 14 car, 160mph expresses and my realistic network isn't very realistic.

I know Cargodist balances routes to an extent, but stations will, if the route capacity isn't expanded regularly, eventually have thousands of passengers. It would be nice if it never built up these significant super-backlogs, and rather showed a smaller backlog, or some other marker to indicate that routes were "overcrowded" and expansion would be possible.

Just a simple "Don't overwhelm networks" switch in the settings would do the job - let me (The government/company) decide when to expand the routes when they're at 100% capacity, don't just keep creating demand until I meet it.

Like a few other people have suggested, one answer is in gamescripts which control town growth. Citybuilder is great for this, it allows the growth of "city" and "town" types to be controlled seperately. I have parameters set so that only cities grow, towns stay at their original size, allowing for a nice combination of urban transit and rural branch lines.

(who plays with less than a 100% effect anyway

I use 25% effect to allow long distance networks, I find setting it higher makes almost everyone want to go to the nearest station which is almost like playing without Cargodist

You could try playing with one of the patchpacks, such as "Spring 2013 Patchpack", or Hardpack. Some of them have a parameter in advanced settings to control the amount of passengers and mail produced by towns.

Also daylength setting can allow more trips per month to move the production. If set to appropriate level those 2 car DMU's can still be very useful.

[Aphid]

Couldn't we just get a 'production multiplier' setting incorporated into either the default game or the town newGRF?

E.g. in a connected cargodist network, a passenger will use on average several stations per trip, and lines are fairly easily overcrowded. A multiplier of maybe around 5-20% of regular passenger production would get us to a manageable passenger density. Just consider suburban sprawl with the normal temperate tileset, it'll have a density of around 15 people/tile, generating about 5 passengers per tile per month. A bus stop on a straight road covers 28 tiles, or has to have 140 passengers per month, or 4-5 busses. Due to the scale of the game (how quick the clock ticks), that means a bus every few seconds. In the center of the town, density can go up as high as 80 people/tile, where even a continuous stream of busses to a one-tile busstop will have problems keeping up with demand. Let alone if those busses have destionations...

I believe there is a patch which modifies this behaviour, the daytime patch. What you do then is effectively reduce all production per real-time second to more manageable amounts, by lengthening the scale of the game. See also this thread: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=42432. Try playing with that and see if it is to your wishes. Maybe you can vouch for getting it into trunk one day, and you can have scale adjustment without having to recompile the game.

[romazoon]

I use 25% effect to allow long distance networks, I find setting it higher makes almost everyone want to go to the nearest station which is almost like playing without Cargodist

may i ask if you tend to use small or big map size ? (or if you really make large distance interconnected network cause that s what matter in fact for cargodist)
I effectively forgot that distance is relativ to what is the farthest destination avalaible...so when playing on rather small map i guess it make sense to use under 100% settings.
thanks for making me think twice about what i said

and about the "almost like without cargo dist", since the passenger production can go up to insane numbers if you cover the all big city with "adequate" services, you may find yourself happy that only a small percentage of all those people don t try to go to the other side of the network. (in other words, i like to think that i can simulate reality, and in reality in a given town if 100 persons uses the "public transport" i m pretty sure at least 90 of them go in the near area (suburbs at the farthest)...so yes i don t expect cargodist to make it crazy with most of people trying to go at the other side of the country every single days. but i guess you like bigger challenge than i do )

[PikkaBird]

Couldn't we just get a 'production multiplier' setting incorporated into [...] the town newGRF?

Of course you could. You could also use newGRFs (or gamescripts) to stop every town growing so large as soon as it has any kind of service.

audigex's original suggestion seems to be simply to hide passengers who aren't transported. My question is what does this mechanism add versus, for example, just ignoring the extra passengers?

[Alberth]

Couldn't we just get a 'production multiplier' setting incorporated into [...] the town newGRF?

Of course you could. You could also use newGRFs (or gamescripts) to stop every town growing so large as soon as it has any kind of service.

audigex's original suggestion seems to be simply to hide passengers who aren't transported. My question is what does this mechanism add versus, for example, just ignoring the extra passengers?

The psychology of a clean working network, or rather, the positive feedback that you are capable of handling the demand in your network.

[leifbk]

The psychology of a clean working network, or rather, the positive feedback that you are capable of handling the demand in your network.

+1 to that. Playing TT shouldn't feel like a game of Tetris, where you're eventually overwhelmed by a torrent of falling bricks.

Passenger and mail production in TT always feels way too high, and I'd like to see a setting to reduce it, at least in single-player mode.

[Alberth]

Passenger and mail production in TT always feels way too high

It has always been that way, already in the original game, creating sufficient transport capacity for passengers was a lot of hard work. For some reason the mechanism that works with industries fails in towns. I don't understand why.

On the other hand, this behaviour does add to game play. Taking on a good pax network is very different from a good industry network. Afaik, pax is about peak transport capacity (but others are a lot more knowledgeable than me in that area). I wouldn't be surprised if CS planned it this way.

I'd like to see a setting to reduce it

I don't see that as a proper solution. Already, OpenTTD has a lots of such settings that you need to tune just right to get a playable map. Have a look at the world generation window, lots of combinations that you can make there (eg max map size and high density industries) are mostly useless (no way you're going to connect 10,000 industries ever). There are also a lot of other settings hidden elsewhere that need to have the right value too (eg plane speed which reduces the impact of larger maps). We don't need more tuning imho, we need less tuning. Every combination should give a nice map to play in one 'generate' click.

I think a better solution is to have a house set that is tuned to cargodist. Many (if not all) house sets are pre-cargodist. They have become all obsolete with the introduction of cargodist. Many (if not all) vehicle sets are pre-cargodist. They have become all obsolete with the introduction of cargodist. Cargodist changes the rules of transport. To get a good balance, all other game elements need to be adapted to it.

at least in single-player mode.

Special stuff for single-player (or multi-player) will cause chaos and confusion. Currently OpenTTD behaves the same in MP and SP, except for the lack of opponents. People expect that you can prepare a save game in SP and play it in MP, and vice versa. With special case settings, you either need some way of handling he special setting in the other context (ie handle that reduce setting in MP), or you block usage of such save games.
Since it's not blatantly obvious that there is a good reason why it fails or doesn't work the same in both cases, people will throw bug reports and complaints. (And I think they are right in doing that.)

[Eddi]

In Theory [tm] the station rating has the ability to adjust production down if you cannot transport everything, but the way the rating is calculated is just terrible for this to take effect, and with industries it has the nasty side effect of closing down the industries. plus you don't want your cargo to decay at intermediate stations.

[Eddy Arfik]

I use 25% effect to allow long distance networks, I find setting it higher makes almost everyone want to go to the nearest station which is almost like playing without Cargodist

may i ask if you tend to use small or big map size ? (or if you really make large distance interconnected network cause that s what matter in fact for cargodist)
I effectively forgot that distance is relativ to what is the farthest destination avalaible...so when playing on rather small map i guess it make sense to use under 100% settings.
thanks for making me think twice about what i said

and about the "almost like without cargo dist", since the passenger production can go up to insane numbers if you cover the all big city with "adequate" services, you may find yourself happy that only a small percentage of all those people don t try to go to the other side of the network. (in other words, i like to think that i can simulate reality, and in reality in a given town if 100 persons uses the "public transport" i m pretty sure at least 90 of them go in the near area (suburbs at the farthest)...so yes i don t expect cargodist to make it crazy with most of people trying to go at the other side of the country every single days. but i guess you like bigger challenge than i do )

I usually play on 2048x2048 maps with low town density, but then build up huge cities. Each city will have a few train stations that link to the other cities, and also a bus network between the city centre and the suburbs. The idea being that people will use the trains for intercity travel and the bus for local trips. If the distance effect is too high everyone uses the train to travel 1 or 2 stations within the same city and the trains run nearly empty between cities. I guess one trick to make this setup work is not actually joining the bus and train network, instead building adjacent stations so it is basically 2 separate systems but appears to be one (imagine the people getting off the bus, walking across the road then buying another ticket if they want to use the train). I also use a high station spread (32) to allow really long freight trains, a side effect of this it is quite easy to adjust catchment area of passenger stations to increase/decrease demand to suit capacity.