We can get whether or not its articulated, but not the number of cars. This is what we have to go on...Zephyris wrote:It would be good if you can check the vehicle length (ie. number of articulated components) when buying the vehicle - can you do this currently? It may be a useful API feature...
http://noai.openttd.org/docs/classAIEngine.html
I have an algorithm which ranks engines based on an estimate of income they could generate over 5 years against their total cost of ownership over the same period. At the moment this favours fast vehicles except for very short routes where it goes for double-deckers or bendy buses. Normal buses never get built! This is because faster vehciles earn more per unit of cargo than slower ones.
This becomes problematic in the very early period with eGRVTS as it ALWAYS goes for the 6-horse carriage, because it is so much faster than everything else! However because they are very long and because the AI needs to build LOADS of them to carry enough passengers, the roads clog up. If I hack it to ignore articulated vehicles it goes for the internal combustion buses, which are very short and don't cause queues easily! It never builds steam vehicles, which is a shame 'cos I like them!!
I still need to tweak the system somewhat (I need to use the TCO of a whole fleet rather than of a single vehicle, to promote more capacious vehicles), but I'm thinking of scrapping this and going for a dumber approach that gives more variety.