A Second-Hand Market for older Vehicles.

[Ateltoni34]

It would be very nice to have some sort of second hand market, where you can sell your vehicles to other players if you do not need them. Maybe for the purpose of having a specific vehicle or maybe even because it would be cheaper to operate. This would be great if this got added to OpenTTD.

[ckdtram]

In my opinion this would be great as long as the original parameters of a sold vehicle are preserved (such as age and passenger capacity) since in some NewGRFs there are vehicles which get upgraded over time with changes in passenger capacity and some other minor stuff. The company should also be able to set a price for the vehicle for it to be somewhat more realistic.

[odisseus]

How would this benefit the typical player? Under the default settings, vehicles are so cheap that players just wouldn't bother buying the discounted ones.

[odalman]

Vehicles are so cheap and the resell value so high that I doubt that return trips are worthwhile.

When I start a game, I build a station at some productive coal mine(s), buy a train and let it load. When it is about to get full, I start building a track towards a power plant so that the train has somewhere to go. I keep building the track just-in-time in front of the train to avoid paying monthly maintenance for track before it is actually needed. I build the station at the power plant and the final connecting track pieces with the last money that I am allowed to borrow. That may not let me build the track as flat and straight as I would like, but it will allow the first few trains pass so that i get money to flatten the terrain and build the straighter final track that I have planned. The income from the first train gives more than enough money to build the second train and a depot right after the power plant's station. I let the train go in there and sell it, so I can buy the third train. I keep selling empty trains at the power plant to buy new trains at the coal mine(s) until money is coming in faster than I need for buying new trains and improving the track. Only then I build a return track just for the convenience of not having to buy and sell trains.

Having a line that generates income without much management, I start building the second line from another very productive coal mine (or mines). Since I now have an income stream and am therefore not constrained by the loan limit, I build the second line longer. The same way as before, I build tracks just-in-time in front of the first train, buy new trains as needed to load the coal and place signals to keep the trains from interfering with each other. The first few trains on the second line will also be sold after their first trip to finance more new trains sooner. When the income stream gets bigger, I build a return track to start reusing trains here as well.

When building the third line, the income stream is big enough that I can afford a return track immediately and do not have to sell trains.

The return tracks are mostly for convenience. I should probably implement some scripts that buy and sell trains automatically so I do not have to bother with return tracks and train reuse. That should make the exponential growth of the company faster. Also, since infrastructure cost grows over-proportional with the amount of infrastructure, eliminating the need for return tracks should double the amount of train lines that a player can afford to have when the equilibrium is reached.

[_dp_]

I should probably implement some scripts that buy and sell trains automatically so I do not have to bother with return tracks and train reuse. That should make the exponential growth of the company faster. Also, since infrastructure cost grows over-proportional with the amount of infrastructure, eliminating the need for return tracks should double the amount of train lines that a player can afford to have when the equilibrium is reached.

Why bother writing scripts to abuse game mechanics when you may as well just cheat yourself however much money you want?

[odalman]

To avoid cheating, of course.

[_dp_]

To avoid cheating, of course.

Writing scripts to abuse game mechanics is the very definition of cheating in my book xD Anyway, nobody cares what you do in your sp game and on all proper mp servers this selling exploit is blocked.

[odalman]

Selling vehicles is not cheating. Writing a script is not cheating. It is merely automation. If it was cheating it would desync the game. I never checked if selling vehicles is allowed or forbidden on any servers.

[_dp_]

You have a weird understanding of cheating. Look at CS fore example, jumping is not cheating yet bunny-hop is, aiming isn't either but aimbot is. And when it comes to OpenTTD it's mostly for historical reasons that some settings are put into a "cheat menu" and it is not rly a cheating in conventional sense to use them as you can't break the intended gameplay by doing that.

[odalman]

Never looked at CS and never will. Not eve Free Software.

[_dp_]

Well, whatever, in OpenTTD it ultimately is a server admin who decides what's cheating and what's not. But as CityMania admin I can definitely tell that you're welcome to try using "cheat menu" on our servers but stuff like automated selling can easily get you banned. Well, if it works ofc because this particular selling exploit won't as we have coded additional protection against it.

[odisseus]

Selling vehicles to avoid the return trip is a very old trick. One of the AIs had this trick implemented more than ten years ago, and used it to great success in an AI competition. As far as I know, it has been forbidden in AI competitions ever since.

I wouldn't call this cheating in the strict sense, because it is allowed by the game mechanics. But this surely is blatant abuse of said mechanics, and some servers go to great lengths to make this trick impossible.

Moreover, if you use this trick, you miss out on the key feature of the TTD-like games: after a proper initial setup, the game plays itself. User interaction is not needed to run the vehicles.

If you don't feel the challenge in building simple rail networks, try building more complicated ones. For example, arrange it so that the trains haul cargo on the return trip as well (yes, this is possible and no cheating is involved). If the default settings are not challenging for you, try mastering the harder servers.

[odalman]

Very interesting link. As usual, most ideas have already been suggested and often implemented around year 2008. Seems like the exploit that money was paid before the unloading was completed was fixed promptly. The rule that forbids one-way trains has only been implemented on some servers apparently. So the implementation is not yet good enough for trunk i assume. Would be interesting to see how it is implemented.

Without knowing, I would try to prevent it by simulating supply and demand. For example, if 100 farmers come to a small town and sell large quantities of apples, prices would go down drastically. Similarly, if a lot of trains are sold at a place, the price would drop very low. Of course, it would have to be an area effect, not just the tile with the depot. Otherwise the player could just build another depot nearby. So a price surface might look something like this (suppose that 5 trains were sold where the big pit is and 2 trains where the small pit is:

(created at https://www.geogebra.org/3d)

Of course the surface should be smoothed over time. Since this thread is about second-hand market for older vehicles, I want to point out that if one player sells a lot of vehicles somewhere, another player could build a depot nearby and buy such vehicles used really cheap.