more ship types

[andreasaspenberg]

i have been playing the game a lot and i have found out that near the end of the game, ships is practically useless because they are too slow. what i suggest is a series of faster ships that replace them later in the game. 40 kilometres per hour is not exactly fast compared to trains or buses. trains gets a lot more upgrades(monorail, maglev) while ships does not. they get one upgrade to 40 kilometres per hour and that is that. what they should do is add at least one more speed upgrade for ships, preferably 2.

[odisseus]

Add some NewGRFs, such as Squid or redFISH.

[Chrill]

i have been playing the game a lot and i have found out that near the end of the game, ships is practically useless because they are too slow. what i suggest is a series of faster ships that replace them later in the game. 40 kilometres per hour is not exactly fast compared to trains or buses. trains gets a lot more upgrades(monorail, maglev) while ships does not. they get one upgrade to 40 kilometres per hour and that is that. what they should do is add at least one more speed upgrade for ships, preferably 2.

How fast do you think an oil tanker is in 2020? How fast do you think a train is in 2020? Chances are, 100 km/h boats are not realistic unless they are some sort of hovercraft (which we do have in-game!)

[andreasaspenberg]

i was not suggesting that they get the same speed as trains either. only that they get more speed than what is already present. there is after all ships that is faster than 40 kilometres per hour. the LPGC Ayame for example have a speed of 47 kilometres.

[Redirect Left]

Boat speed hasn't increased that much in the last 100 years.

For example, the Titanic had a max safe speed of 23 knots, which is about 26mph or 43km/h, with a standard speed of 21knots, 39km/h, 24mph.. Let's have a look at 2 random modern day cruise liners, The Spectrum of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise liner launched in Feb of just last year, has a max rated speed of 22 knots, or 41km/h or about 25mph. Spectrum is about half the length the Titanic was. Let's find a ship closer to the size of Titanic, which brings us to the MS Queen Victoria, this is a ship delivered in late 2007 and operates for Cunard Line, It's slighter longer than the Titanic was, with an absolute maximum of 23.7 knots, 43.9kmh or 27.3mph, although its standard operating speed is 18knots, 33km/h or 21mph. So either longer or shorter, they're close to Titanics speed over 100 years ago.

Onto non passenger, a T2 oil tanker, that operated at about the same time as World War II, ranged from 15 to 17.5 knots, 30kmh / 17mph to 32.4kmh 20.1mph. Skip to modern day, a TI class supertanker, built around 2003 has a max speed of 16.5 knots, 30.6km/h, 19mph. Smaller containerships sometimes reach up to 26-27 knots, although this is pushing it, they often run slower to conserve fuel or to not get torn apart or lose cargo overboard in waves.

Also worth noting is Hovercraft. These are by far the fastest way of transporting passengers on oceans, although they're expensive to maintain vs the fairly low passenger capacity.
The SR.N4 type of hovercraft that ran in the English Channel between England & France, they ran at up to 70 knots, which is 130km/h, 80mph. The Channel tunnel killed this route off, as passengers preferred not getting shaken about uncomfortably on trains apparently.

Ultimately it all boils down to water, its a real pain to traverse through, and puts up a large fight to get through at any decent speed. A typical (modern) cruise liner would use about 30 to 50 gallons (136 to 227 litres) of fuel per mile and they don't go very fast for all that fuel used. This is why in the past 100 years, we've not got any faster at travelling through water. It's a barrier we've ultimately not solved yet.

[Eddi]

note that, since the introduction of intercontinental airplanes, there was never any commercial incentive to invest in faster ships, as they cannot possibly compete on the same level.

what the game is missing is a payment model that focuses less on speed for certain kinds of cargo.

[jfs]

what the game is missing is a payment model that focuses less on speed for certain kinds of cargo.

It's this.
If you got rewarded not for fast delivery of oil or coal (and other bulk cargo that doesn't deteriorate), but regular deliveries instead, then the speed of the vehicles wouldn't matter, and in fact ships might be preferable to trains. But there's some technical problems with detecting "regular deliveries", and also the built-in profitability calculations also sort of break for vehicles that may take more than an in-game year between deliveries.

[andythenorth]

Ships are seriously over-powered already.

They have
* a station rating bonus
* practically infinite capacity per tile as they can overlap
* very simple infrastructure requirements

There are plenty of NewGRF ships available that are faster than default ships.

Some newgrfs offer the option for even higher ship speeds as a player setting.

[odisseus]

I agree with the OP that the ships from the standard set are useless on long distance routes, but their deficiency is capacity, not speed. Any large scale shipping operation will need dozens if not hundreds of vehicles, and the server's vehicle limit will definitely become an obstacle. However, that problem is successfully solved by NewGRFs. Some of them provide ships with capacity for up to 4000 units of cargo.

It is also true that ships in general are overpowered on short distances, due to absence of collision detection. In particular, the hovercraft from the default set makes a perfect commuter vehicle.

[andreasaspenberg]

it is still a fact that no new ships is made available later on in the game. they should at least add ships available later on.

[LaChupacabra]

it is still a fact that no new ships is made available later on in the game. they should at least add ships available later on.

The latest ship in Squid ate Fish appears in 1985. In the redFISH set in 2009.

Of course it is possible to create a new ships. But someone would have to draw them, think through the parameters well, and then encode it all...
In terms of speed, there are a set of Martian ekranoplan's that should swim/fly at speeds over 500 km/h. Unfortunately, the game currently doen't allow ships to develop faster speeds than 127.5 km/h(?). Btw. Looking at the default set of planes, ekranoplan's would be an interesting development of the default set of ships.

what the game is missing is a payment model that focuses less on speed for certain kinds of cargo.

There is.... FIRS... where in the case of bulk cargo speed doesn't matter. In any case, extended subsidies could also change a lot in this matter - they could set a fixed rate for transport in advance.

If you got rewarded not for fast delivery of oil or coal (and other bulk cargo that doesn't deteriorate), but regular deliveries instead, then the speed of the vehicles wouldn't matter, and in fact ships might be preferable to trains.

Frequent oil supplies? And where does it make sense or reference to reality? Ships are better than trains in many situations today. Of course not default ships.

Ships are seriously over-powered already.

I think they are very well balanced. Especially Squid. But this does not mean that it couldn't be improved or developed.

[Master Trams]

what the game is missing is a payment model that focuses less on speed for certain kinds of cargo.

That could be done by using the current model as regular deliveries, and then have contracts. Contracts would be sort of similar to subsidies, but whilst subsidies are for any company and pay a percentage of the fee that would've been payed, contracts would be specific to one company, and maybe include negotiations over features such as price and which company will do it.

[gravelpit]

I dream about Emma maersk

[L. Spooner Inc]

Boat speed hasn't increased that much in the last 100 years.

No, but ship size has increased dramatically. The Titanic looks like a tugboat next to modern cruise ships. This is one way to keep improving ships without breaking reality. It makes ships more and more efficient to operate economically.

[Redirect Left]

Boat speed hasn't increased that much in the last 100 years.

No, but ship size has increased dramatically.

Indeed, for my laymans terms attempt, it was quite difficult to find a modern liner comparable to titanics size, and yet still be somewhat well known so i was pulling random unknown ships from thin air to make it sound like I was making it up. It was some interesting research I had to do for that post. But if it helped anyone, even remotely, it was worth it.

[Eddi]

the problem with increasing ship sizes is that the economic model of OpenTTD doesn't really need that kind of huge capacities. people already tried this.

[L. Spooner Inc]

the problem with increasing ship sizes is that the economic model of OpenTTD doesn't really need that kind of huge capacities. people already tried this.

Could just work it the other way. Nerf ship sizes in the early game and make them larger gradually.

[MagicBuzz]

the problem with increasing ship sizes is that the economic model of OpenTTD doesn't really need that kind of huge capacities. people already tried this.

Could just work it the other way. Nerf ship sizes in the early game and make them larger gradually.

Agreed.
I'm using sailing ships and smaller ships are very nice at early ages.
But the OTTD economy is aligned to trains capacities and speed.
So you must use the daylength patch (by exemple JGR patchpack) with a daylength > 5 to enjoy this small ships, or they will be too small and you'll need to build hundrends ships for each industry.

[L. Spooner Inc]

So you must use the daylength patch (by exemple JGR patchpack) with a daylength > 5 to enjoy this small ships, or they will be too small and you'll need to build hundrends ships for each industry.

Yeah, I recently tried a ships-only game, and despite starting with high seas and many rivers, it was Nintendo-hard for the first couple of decades because locks and canals are so expensive. Once oil rigs appeared, I was rolling in billions of course, but I had to repeatedly increase the number of allowed ships on the map because each primary industry would eventually need as many as 50 or 60 ships making round trips.

[LaChupacabra]

the problem with increasing ship sizes is that the economic model of OpenTTD doesn't really need that kind of huge capacities. people already tried this.

It depends what you mean when you write huge capacities. The economic model may and may not need it, but the game itself, for performance reasons, yes. I have a save where there are 150 ships on one connection with 1660 m3 capacities and a speed of 55 km/h. In total, there are about 1,000 ships on the entire map. If I wanted to replace them with the default ships, there would have to be 5-6 times more of them.

Yeah, I recently tried a ships-only game, and despite starting with high seas and many rivers, it was Nintendo-hard for the first couple of decades because locks and canals are so expensive. Once oil rigs appeared, I was rolling in billions of course, but I had to repeatedly increase the number of allowed ships on the map because each primary industry would eventually need as many as 50 or 60 ships making round trips.

You could use a Red Fish set with capacities in excess of 4,000 tons. There would be no problem then with having to send so many ships everywhere.

In my opinion, there is quite a large variety of ships now. However, there is no consistency between sets. I mean the FISH series (squid, red). A nice addition would be a set combining these three versions into one, consistent in terms of balance and without repetitive graphics. Possibly, one could add some other missing ships like some big container ship like the mentioned Emma Maersk, some ocean liner (Titanic, Queen Elizabeth) and some cruise ship (Allure of the Seas)...