[OTTD] A dream of skyscrapers. A daylength server AAR

[Korenn]

But let's not forget our main goal, how is Primrose doing?

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Well would you look at that. Those are some proper skyscrapers going up already. This is the Total Town Replacement Set you're seeing, and it has some bigger buildings still, but those will be a long time in showing up. We also have the North American Buildings Set and it had buildings dotted around the towns when we started - but during towngrowth those all seem to be replaced by TTRS and no new ones appear. A shame, but the towns look good this way too.

The trees along the streets in the picture indicate that Primrose has crossed the line from town to city, using different zoning.

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The suburb is doing nicely as well.

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A new engine has appeared that's interesting. It's faster and has even more horsepower. It's also more expensive, but the extra value it'll bring in from delivering cargo faster will compensate for that.

[Korenn]

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And finally there's a new flatbed wagon! We've been waiting for ages for this. The tank wagon appeared last session, but the flatbeds were still slowing down the other trains on the valley line. This will speed things up across the board. We will also have to replace our old cabooses with the more modern faster one. This has been available for over 30 years, but there was never any point because the wagons were too slow. The old-fashioned box wagons are replaced with faster versions as well, so that our slowest wagons now go 65 mph.

We'll have to keep an eye out for train jams, as these replacements will make our trains longer (the replacement order has 'replace wagons' set to 'on', but this doesn't seem to work correctly for the NARS wagons as the replaced trains all get longer). Some places in our network may not work with longer trains. The platforms were all built with length 5 from the start, so that should not be an issue.

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In June 1915, Doom visits us again. *queue music*. A world recession hits us. We'll need to avoid jams due to loading trains. A massive jam quickly forms because of timber trains blocking the sawmill. We send most of them to the depot, the same for our chemical trains.

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Due to quick action, there isn't much impact from the recession on our company.

[Korenn]

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Well, I wouldn't say zero impact, you can clearly see where it happened in the graphs.


There's an interlude of several years (we continue the next day).
Time to start building the Shismaref line. Something interesting has happened though... We have new tracks available! This will allow our express lines to go faster than 81 mph.

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How much would it be to upgrade though?

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Ok, that's a lot of dollars. But we have over $500 million in cash so we'll do it anyway. Onwards for progress.

[Korenn]

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The line to Stebbins cost about $70 million dollars. It's not even connected up to the town yet, they got too upset over us putting it all down to allow a bus station to connect to the train hub.

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About a year later and a bunch of trees planted, we connect up the tram to the train station and set up the express train.

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It's quite an impressive distance that our express trains now cover. A passenger can travel from Stebbins all the way up to Primrose, a distance of 1500 tiles and a height difference of 7000 feet.

[Korenn]

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Here we see the nice effect of cargodist on asymmetric. The passengers in this train come from all over the east side of our network and want to go to Stebbins. This is the train between Stebbins and Shismaref, it doesn't go further than that. So all these people have had a ton of transfers just to get here. This isn't the best way to make money from passengers with cargodist on - the best way would be non-branching point-to-point, possibly with a few feeder services. But that wouldn't be fun.

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West of Kenai valley and north of Shishmaref, there's a large valley of relatively level land, filled with industries and the town of Newhalen. We will be spending some time hooking up a 'small' local network to service industries here, and eventually ship the resulting produce to Newhalen.

As an experiment with the newer, stronger engines we make all the stations and trains here length 7. Using the strongest engine we now have, loaded trains of this size can *just* about make it up an incline. We hook up a bunch of oil wells to a refinery, a bunch of mines and two scrap yards to a steel mill, then ship the petroleum fuels and the metal to a machine shop to make engineering supplies that we ship to all the mines. Thus making a local production loop.

That's it for this session, our network now covers most of the landmass.

Join us next time as we connect our network up to the rest of the world and conclude this series!

[Botond P]

Hi, thanks for writing this all down. Was a great read. What heightmap are you playing on?

[Korenn]

Hi, thanks for writing this all down. Was a great read. What heightmap are you playing on?

The heightmap is mentioned in the first post: Cpt. K's Riverside Mountains.

[Botond P]

Hi, thanks for writing this all down. Was a great read. What heightmap are you playing on?

The heightmap is mentioned in the first post: Cpt. K's Riverside Mountains.

.
Thank you very much! I didn't look hard enough, it was in a screenshot...

[CrossSide]

A really nice read which inspired me to play the game again. Also helpful for some nice newgrf settings.
Thank you very much. This servergame must be a blast for you guys. How are you competitors doing?

[Korenn]

A really nice read which inspired me to play the game again. Also helpful for some nice newgrf settings.
Thank you very much. This servergame must be a blast for you guys. How are you competitors doing?

Thanks!

The game has been completed by now. I still have one update worth of pictures and story to tell, just need to find the time to write it all down
Several of the competitors gave up when they considered the medal too hard to achieve. Two kept going till the end, the yellow and green companies. Eventually, we all linked our maglev passenger lines (minor spoiler for last update) lines together for map-spanning passenger service using shared infrastructure.
We ended up as the most profitable company at the end, but because the goal wasn't money but achieving the medal, that wasn't a good indicator. Two others achieved a gold medal, the rest gave up or didn't bother.