Quick Questions - Quick Answers Thread

[Cool Loser]

I'll try to gather here all my newbie questions that may get answered with a couple of words, and stop flooding the forum with threads. For the record, I try to find my answers before I come here, but sometimes they're too specific... or I can't even use Google properly. Anyway:

-Do freighter trains serving stations inside a city annoy the local authorities?
-15 years into a game I try to replace old road vehicles but the replace window doesn't show me vehicles at all, or only show me a couple of them. Why? At the beginning of the game there was a road vehicle for X cargo; that particular model might be outdated but there should be a newer model. I'm using Heavy Equipment Road Vehicles but it happened to me in another game, iirc. And in any case the vehicle I'm trying to replace is vanilla I think.

Edit: nevermind the second question, I hadn't notice the difference the game does between replace (with a newer model) and renew (with the same model).

[Gwyd]

First question: towns and cities don't mind freight trains but with all the normal requirements of passenger trains.

Second question: vehicles bought from new are by default only available for some amount of time before they "expire" and it cannot be purchased. These vehicles can still be renewed (as you have found).

[Cool Loser]

Ok thanks, I was asking because there was this town in my game that hated me without apparent reason, and the only thing that came to my mind was that I had opened a freighter line taking goods. Eventually they got to love me so... yeah.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Cool Loser]

Hey.

What determines whether a town accepts food or not? I have several towns in a sub-artic map, with good train connections and high rated stations, but they need food in order to grow. The problem is they won't accept it, even if I try to build a new station and I hover over everywhere, the popup never shows food acceptance. Also, I'm providing livestock and wheat to nearby food processing plants.

[Chrill]

It depends on the buildings. Click a building and it should show something like (Accepts 1/8 Food). You need one full unit of acceptance within your station's catch area.

[Cool Loser]

Thanks for your quick answer! And how/when do buildings requiring food spawn? I've checked not only the small towns that concern me, but also the biggest cities in the map (30k+), and there are none. They accept passengers, mail, goods and even paper, but none of them require food.

I'm playing with the Japan set, in case that helps.

[Chrill]

That probably causes it. Is the Japan set compatible?

Whenever something happens with a NewGRF, always check the readme/guide first. I searched Japan Set Guide, and I found this:
download/file.php?id=189253

[Cool Loser]

Compatible with what? This is my current mods profile:

https://imgur.com/8B9AjXa

It doesn't seem to be any issues when you check the grf settings ingame. I just checked the pdf out and I don't find anything related.
Also, I read somewhere in the mod guidelines about sub-artic maps, so that's not the problem either.

[Cool Loser]

When does the variable "days in transit" begin to count? As soon as the cargo is loaded or as soon as the train departs? In other words: would always be convenient to use large trains so they spend more time loading at stations and less in transit, hence increasing station rating? I started my current game buying lots of small trains so there were almost always one of them loading but, as the game advances, I'm noticing that the same effect, or even bigger, in station rating is achieved by using less but larger trains that often have to spend considerable time idle while the industry produces enough cargo to fill them.

[jfs]

That's actually something I've been wondering myself, so just investigated:

Days in transit only counts when the cargo is loaded on a vehicle, so cargo waiting at a station does not age.
The value maxes out at 255 days in transit.
The rate the value increases at is defined by the vehicle/car it's loaded into. Most vehicles probably just has the cargo age period defined as 74 ticks (one day), but a vehicle can define the age period shorter or longer to make transport using that vehicle pay less or more. (E.g. a luxury passenger car may increase days in transit at a slower rate, resulting in larger payments.)

One takeaway from this is definitely that having vehicles sit at stations waiting for full load will pay less than if the vehicle is able to pick up all the cargo at once, even transporting the same amount of cargo over the same period of time.

[Cool Loser]

Nice, you've been very helpful... again.

I said I was getting the same or even higher station ratings using fewer, larger trains, but to be honest I didn't even check the income (in vanilla with default settings money is not a problem, so a few years into a game it stops being even a factor to consider when I make any decision).

In any case, according to your research is not enough to buy huge trains and just let them sit at stations; if you want to maximize income you need to find the sweet spot between too many days in transit/too many days in the station/trains loading too unfrequently... If I'm getting this right.

[Diesel Power]

How about this then...
A train pulls into the near end of a station 1 tile longer than the train and picks up cargo. If loaded to 100% it leaves to it's destination. If not, it goes to the far end of the platform, unloads all cargo and loops back around to load again. Is the cargo's decay timer reset if it's dropped back at it's original station? Is this a way of waiting for a full load without the time penalties of waiting at the station to load?

[jfs]

The days_in_transit counter is stored per cargo packet, and persistent as long as the cargo packet is not delivered. The only way to transport it without the counter going up is by picking it up and delivering it within a single day, and appropriately synced with the vehicle's cargo aging cycle. Theoretically possible, not probably not in practice.

[Cool Loser]

Hey. Does any of the world creation settings affect the presence and number of lakes? I'm trying to create a temperate map and I don't want it to have like 200 tiny lakes sparsed across every single corner.

[jfs]

Not directly, lakes and ocean are the same as far as world generation is concerned. Set Sea Level to Very Low and disable rivers.

[Cool Loser]

https://imgur.com/Ba408au

:/

Both were like that. Might any other parameter do?

[rowdog]

For the Sea Level, you can set it to Custom and use a value as low as 1%. You will still get a few lakes.

To really get no lakes at all, you can use a heightmap. There are a couple of flat ones on Bananas.

Another way would be to generate a map with few lakes, save it, then fill the lakes in with the Scenario Editor.
https://wiki.openttd.org/Scenario_editor

[Cool Loser]

I see...

It's not that I don't want lakes AT ALL, but temperate maps seem to generate always with like 30 or 40 lakes, I find it both ugly af and obviously harder to play, which I wouldn't mind with a nice looking map, for example a mountainous sub-artic one. I'd also like to play tropical maps more as desert maps, but again they always have several oasis...

Anyway, I guess I'll deal with it. Thanks for your help.

[Chrill]

I'd suggest you set the sea level to a bit higher. That way, you'll get larger lakes but there will be fewer of them. It can generate a game with islands, which I really enjoy.

Here's an example with the sea level set to maximum. If you opt for something less than that, you'll get smaller lakes but there will be more of them.

[Cool Loser]

That's a nice looking map indeed. Currently I'm playing one of StarRaid's heightmaps. Having discovered the wonders of user-made heightmaps, they'll be my first choice from now on.