Transport Tycoon Forums

I have this savegame in the year 1936 after playing since 1800. The inflation added up a bit to the costs in general, but the cost of a small airport maintenance of $25M is just too big compared to other infrastructures maintenance costs:



The construction cost of the small airport at this point of the game is about $3.7M. Is this normal? What could have happened?

The reason why airport maintenance is expensive has been recently explained. In your particular case, 136 years of inflation also must have had a large effect — even with 2% inflation rate it would give an almost 15-fold increase in prices.

gabrieldiego wrote: ↑26 Mar 2017 20:24 I have this savegame in the year 1936 after playing since 1800. The inflation added up a bit to the costs in general, but the cost of a small airport maintenance of $25M is just too big compared to other infrastructures maintenance costs:



The construction cost of the small airport at this point of the game is about $3.7M. Is this normal? What could have happened?

From the code:
/* The cargo payment inflation differs from the normal inflation, so the
* relative amount of money you make with a transport decreases slowly over
* the 170 years. After a few hundred years we reach a level in which the
* games will become unplayable as the maximum income will be less than
* the minimum running cost.
*
* Furthermore there are a lot of inflation related overflows all over the
* place. Solving them is hardly possible because inflation will always
* reach the overflow threshold some day. So we'll just perform the
* inflation mechanism during the first 170 years (the amount of years that
* one had in the original TTD) and stop doing the inflation after that
* because it only causes problems that can't be solved nicely and the
* inflation doesn't add anything after that either; it even makes playing
* it impossible due to the diverging cost and income rates.
*/

Inflation is just a fixed variable and is best disabled, unless a better inflation system is introduced. Personally, I see no benefit to adding inflation to the game because all it does is drive up income and expanses.

Indeed, both infrastructure maintenance and inflation are broken, anti-gameplay mechanics which are best switched off. At least inflation has the excuse of being an original TTD "feature".

I think that both inflation and maintenance costs are conceptually useful, but I agree that both are broken in their current state. Fortunately it seems that both features can be easily fixed.

The inflation serves an important purpose in the game: it depreciates capital that was earned in the past, thus eliminating stagnant companies. The fact that costs increase faster than revenues can indeed lead to a situation when making any profit is impossible, but the solution is as simple as making these rates equal.

Advanced maintenance costs serve another important purpose: they force the player to use infrastructure efficiently. I have seen many a player build huge stations and epic junctions which were barely utilized. Or, even worse, build a parallel stretch of track for every single train. The only flaw of the maintenance costs is that maintenance of signals is very expensive — but then again, that's my personal point of view, and I tend to place signals rather densely. Anyway, tweaking costs for different object types could fix both this and the OP's problem with the airports.

If inflation rates for costs and income increase with the same rate, you effectively have no inflation, except the numbers of money grow.
If I earn 200 and pay 100, and the rate is 100%, then tomorrow I earn 400 and pay 200. With the 200 that I get as profit tomorrow I can buy the same things as I could buy with 100 yesterday.
It seems simpler to just disable inflation in that case.

This is suddenly becoming an Inflation topic instead, but if the inflation was made more dynamic (such that the ratio of cost inflation to income inflation could vary, and deflation even might become possible), it might be more interesting. Additionally, as a protection against "stupidly large numbers", it might be possible to introduce a "currency re-valuation" event where all currency and cost (factor) figures were reduced by a factor 1000 or such, including the companies' bank balances. This has probably been suggested before.

that was some nice gravedigging here ^^