Transport Tycoon Forums

Here's a screenshot from my latest game.

http://solumslekt.org/temp/1725_stats.png

The year is 1725, and I'm already on my merry way to making a fortune. (I was kind of lucky in the start and got a couple of subsidies on routes that I was about to set up anyway, but I'm not a habitual subsidy hunter.) The transport means is the horse carriage (from the eGRVTS2) carrying 8 tons (20 km/h for 2-horse and 26 km/h for 4-horse), and the measly brig (from the Sailing Ships) which freights 50 tons at 20 km/h. Yet, this is sufficient for doing major work and making good return on investments. Part of the success is due to andythenorth's Fish2 set, which makes it profitable to run those early sailing ships. Before that, I hardly was able to make the brigs pay for their annual costs and their lifespan investment. Note that the RVs barely return a 2:1 income over running costs, while the ships return a whopping 5:1. That may seem insane, but I think that it reflects the realities rather well: If you can afford to buy ships and have got the brains to use them, you're soon swimming in gold.

You can haul almost any amount of cargo with those humble means. True, you can only transport around 100 tons a month on a dedicated road filled with 2-horse lorries. In this screenshot I've got 4-horse carriages hauling grain from three farms, each yielding 63 tons of grain. That's 127 tons a month with a 67% station rating, and the transit isn't clogged. But that's about the limit of land transport capacity in that era. Any further increase in capacity will have to be in the form of canals rather than roads.

The ships, carrying the grain to a nearby brewery, are deployed according to the Stalin method: Just pour in enough of them, and things will sort themselves out. But, over time, you should of course trim the amount of ships to the least number required to do the job adequately. Not only do ships lying waiting for cargo make no money, but the longer the wait until they get their regular depot service, the more unreliable they become and hence they will break down too often and do a lousy job. It's absolutely required to set explicit depot service orders at regular intervals for these slow vehicles; I usually send them to the depot for each round-trip, and at trips exceeding the regular service interval, I will set up depots along the route and tell them to go there.

Further, this game style has taught me to think in general of transport as a pipeline: What is stuffed into one end, will eventually come out at the other end at about the same rate. For a given amount of cargo to reach its destination, you don't really have to think about the speed of transport at all; what matters is the amount that you feed into the pipeline, of course given the total capacity of the line as a limiting factor. For ships in OpenTTD, that kind of limit doesn't exist at all.

The speed will of course have an impact on the profit, and you'll soon learn about the burners; eg. you don't carry fruit at any distance in those circumstances. But stone, coal, clay, and stuff like that will give you good profits. Lumber and building materials will give you excellent profits over medium distances. But the sweet spot seems to be around 100-200 tiles for any kind of reasonably durable cargo. And, as andythenorth has observed, fishing is like printing money

Looks very promising, please keep us updated. It will be interesting to see how this develops when the iron horse is introduced.

Chrill wrote:Looks very promising, please keep us updated. It will be interesting to see how this develops when the iron horse is introduced.

I don't do iron horses

I've kind of specialized in ships and road vehicles, because I find trains too time-consuming. Ships and RVs don't crash, and are a lot more autonomous than trains.

BTW, I will try to keep my screenshots within the 800x600 limit from now. When you're on a 32" screen with 2560 by 1440 pixels, it's too easy to be carried away and post humongous screenshots.

Don't worry about posting those big screenies. As long as they show a lot of detail, people won't complain.

I use my own screen as comparison. If it doesn't fit for me, I usually change an image to a link. I'm on a 19" screen so it's a fairly small screen but by no means tiny.

It's 1750, and I'm waiting for the Merchantman. Because of that, I haven't been doing much for the last 10-15 game years but saving up money for the upgrade.
Here's my major moneygoround machine:
The Smithy forge is delivering 60-70 crates of supplies per month each for the mine and the forest, which of course is massive overkill. There are other places where I could have put some of those picks and axes to good use, but I prefer not to mess with multiple delivery sites.

What GRF do you use for the town set/houses?

it seems to be the swedish house set

aantono wrote:What GRF do you use for the town set/houses?

That's the Swedish Houses. It's a lovely house set.

Here's a complete list of my active NewGRFs:

Sailing Ships
eGRVTS2
Rock Replacement for Transmitter
HEQS
FIRS (custom version)
FISH2 (Squid)
My own Norwegian Alternate Town Names
Swedish Houses
Industrial Stations Renewal
American Road Replacement Set
Total Bridge Replacement Set - Modified for ARRS

Why a custom version for FIRS?

aantono wrote:Why a custom version for FIRS?

Because of a few grossly anachronistic buildings that make my eyes hurt

I have pushed the introduction dates of the Sugar Refinery and the Fertilizer plant into the 20th century, and the Hotels don't appear until 1870.

The year is 1775, and time for a new report. In the background is the town of Laskebekk, located almost dead centre in the map. I couldn't have placed the Smithy forge more strategically myself; in addition, there's the Grocer's next door to the forge, and a few years ago the neighbour across the street decided to open a Hardware store. Note the little "cheat" that I'm using quite a lot: The forge is just outside the catchment area of the harbour, so after setting up the harbour I Ctrl+click a lorry bay in the town center, joining it to the harbour.
Because of the upgrade from Brig to Merchantman, the number of ships has become drastically reduced. I'm still using a few Brigs, mostly for fishing and for small-volume transport. I haven't set up a lot of new routes. This is a small 256x256 map, and there aren't a lot of opportunities. I've set up a chain from my second forest to a Sawmill -> Furniture factory -> Hardware store, and the forest is fed with farming supplies from a Lime kiln that only has 80 tons of stone per month as input, thus the forest production goes Enhanced about half of the time. There's only one coal mine on the map, ideally located for land transport to a nearby brickwork, and I'm not going to disrupt that chain. And I can't afford to finance a coal mine yet.

I mentioned Fruit transport earlier, to the effect that it didn't pay off with those sluggish 18th century ships. I can't have tried it after the squid ate the fish. I've discovered that it now turns a decent profit (at an almost straight line, ca. 120 days in transit), and my brewery has doubled its output, much to the delight of the diligent Laskebekk blacksmiths. (The "fruit" in this context must actually be hops, one of the key ingredients of real beer. A blacksmith drinking sissy stuff like cider is too hard to imagine.)

Note that the Ship income over running costs now is down below 4:1. The Merchantman has comparably high running costs, so I don't know if the upgrade is really worth it - maybe except for a few key routes where the increase in speed from 20 to 23 km/h does make a difference. The Barque comes into the game in 1790. It carries 120 tons at 20 km/h, but its annual expenses are about 3/4 of the Merchantman's. I'll usually swap out the Merchantman for the Barque on the routes carrying high volume raw materials.

Here's a world map:
The water level is high, number of towns is low, number of industries is normal. Town growth is turned completely off, as is inflation of course.

It's the year 1800, and the Fommel family is celebrating the 100 years' jubilee of the company's inauguration by their great-grandfather.
The ships carrying coal, ore, clay, sand, stone, etc. have all been replaced by Barques, and the total Ship income over running costs has gone slightly up. There has been quite a few more ships and road vehicles, and the annual profit is on a steady rise.

Soon after my previous posting, I was blessed with a second coal mine, 10-15 tiles south-east of the Kreklingvarp Transit (cf. pic in first post). It was promptly set to serve the Daskegrend Lime kiln, which of course more than doubled its output, and the Svalstua forest is now going Gung ho most of the time. This was naturally a boost to the entire Forest -> Sawmill -> Furniture factory -> Hardware store line. The chemicals go to the Svalstua Glass works, which produce jars for the Omgrunn Fish Market.

I also got a new forest, conveniently placed 30-40 tiles from a hitherto unused Paper mill (by the lakeside to the N/W of my Stavskår HQ), so I decided to put it to use there. The Goods go by ship to Laskebekk through a new canal, and the Manufacturing Supplies (cardboard?) go to the Brewery by 4-horse flatbeds. With about 100 tons of wood per month the output wasn't much, only 2 or 3 carts each month. Nevertheless, the output at the brewery went up by 50 %, and I had to increase my beer flotilla from 8 to 12 ships. Later, another clay pit popped up, and I was suddenly able to double the output from the Paper mill. That doesn't appear to add much to the beer production, though. The lesson is clear: Even a very low input of a second, or third, source of cargo to an industry depending on multiple types of cargo, goes a long way. The most important factor is probably to keep the deliveries sufficiently frequent.

I don't know what they use cardboard for at a brewery, maybe it's just the small coasters that we used to get underneath our beer glasses when I was young.

I'm now pining for the Schooner. It's such a lovely little vessel, and its 32 km/h is greased lightning compared to the sea-going slugs of the century that we are now leaving behind us. I'm going to swap all my Brigs for Schooners, and maybe even the Merchantmen of the Fruit Route.

Moving this to the Screenshot section instead..!

leifbk wrote:I had to increase my beer flotilla from 8 to 12 ships.

I... I want a beer flotilla. (Although I immediately thought more like this...)

Supercheese wrote:I... I want a beer flotilla. (Although I immediately thought more like this...)

That was a nice one Hey andythenorth, any chance of getting anything like that into Squid?

A full view of the world in 1814, 1807x918 pixels. No, I won't try to place it inline.

leifbk wrote:I don't know what they use cardboard for at a brewery

I always assumed it was for cardboard 6-pack holders in that case - but does not seem that likely in 1800! Maybe they are putting the beer in cardboard cartons like with cheap boxed wine!

supermop wrote:

leifbk wrote:I don't know what they use cardboard for at a brewery

I always assumed it was for cardboard 6-pack holders in that case - but does not seem that likely in 1800! Maybe they are putting the beer in cardboard cartons like with cheap boxed wine!

Nope, you can't put beer into cardboard boxes, they won't keep the pressure. Maybe the workers at the paper mill were actually producing barrels out of all that wood, and the "paper" industry was only a cover-up to fool the tax collector. You never knew what people really were up to those days.

Personally I believe it was coasters, like this one from the 1966 Oslo World Ski Championship: