Request: make TTD a little harder and a little more realistic!

[joplus]

Hi!
I'm playing TTD really long time and I was thinking about one feature, that would make TTD more realistic and with expanding company harder to expand too. It is suplying chain for your vehicles - like cars or diesel trains need fuel to keep going, so you have to make an infrastructure from oil wells to refinery and then get pipes with fuel to at least one station (eg. by pipes). The same in case of electric trains.
I know it is really difficult to get this masive update to the game and keep everything working. Thanks for reading

[zifox]

I too has been looking for ways to make the game harder, I'm not sure that integrating supplies for your vehicles is the best way to do it. You can already change the running costs to make the game harder and it works, sometimes a bit too much: when playing on very large maps with a limited number of industries/cities, the running costs are going up pretty quickly and it's not easy to keep a balances and the first years. (i'm playing against a few AIs (admiralAI/SimpleAI), with average running costs, and they go regularly bankupt)

[odisseus]

The game was originally meant to be played with breakdowns. This meant that every vehicle had to visit a depot every now and then, at which point it was presumably also refuelled. The game was also meant to be played on much smaller maps (256x256 used to be the typical size), so every depot was in the vicinity of a town; it wasn't too big a stretch to imagine that fuel and supplies are delivered from the nearest town.

Some industry sets provide industries such as petrol stations that can appear in towns or next to a road. The petrol that they accept is presumably distributed to the passing vehicles.

It had been proposed a few times to add some kind of delivery process for vehicles purchased by the player. For example, it was proposed that depots should be only built around the edge of the map, or next to an industry that produces the Vehicles cargo (if defined by add-ons). However, these ideas didn't get any meaningful support, and nothing was implemented.

On the other hand, some servers only allow the player to build one depot, which becomes the origin of all vehicles subsequently purchased.

See also:
viewtopic.php?t=88278 — some thoughts about how the fuel supply system could work
viewtopic.php?t=88886 — discussion about the role of depot as a "factory" of vehicles

i'm playing against a few AIs (admiralAI/SimpleAI), with average running costs, and they go regularly bankupt

The AIs tend to build a lot of tracks and a lot of signals. Since the infrastructure costs grow non-linearly with size, a typical AI does very well at the start but goes bankrupt after 30 or so years.

[GarryG]

Many years ago I had idea to add Council Depot, Per-way Depot and Railway Workshops as Industries.

Council Depot - deliver cargoes that a council would need to repair and make roads such as Gravel, Building Supplies, Sand and petrol.
Per-Way Depot (repairing railway lines) .. deliver Gravel, timber, Steel, building Supplies.
Railway Workshop - deliver what ever would be needed to service trains including Coal and Petrol

Back when I first tried the idea games was restricted to the number of cargoes a Industry could handle so I gave up with those idea. But now we can have a lot more cargoes I wonder if we worth adding these to a industry set? It not really make a game harder but gives more places to deliver some cargoes. For the fun you could add your own rules. Before you can extend roads from a town, you must first build a council depot near and deliver what cargoes are needed for road extensions. Same applies to building a railway line .. first deliver all the cargoes needed to a Per-Way Depot.

Shame we can not code it so before you can make more roads and railway lines or any other infrastructure .. you have to deliver the cargoes needed first

Cheers