How does 'Transfer' order work

[uzurpator]

So I've picked up a little OTTD recently. Coming from Transport Fever, I kind of decided to follow what TF does - which is cargo transfers and feeder services. Which makes me wonder - how does it work in OTTD? More specifically. I presume that the game tracks origin of cargo in each transfer and payment is determined on the distance/time traveled as if it was being moved by a single vehicle. True/false? My testing has shown such behavior.

Which is unlike TPF, where payment is done on every leg of the journey and you can zig-zag cargo to maximise profits.

However - how precise is this tracking? How many hops cargo can make?

Example - assume I have a long chain of transfers - A->B, B->C, C->D, D->E and so on. Which is my usual setup, BTW, at least on the server I'm playing. At some point a carrier vehicle will display itself carrying '20 stuff from C' in spite of that 'stuff' was from several feeders. Does this mean I get paid for this cargo to be from C for the entire carrier?

[jfs]

As far as I remember:
You can make as many hops as you like. The final payment is based on the Manhattan distance between the pick-up station and the final-delivery station, not the distance traveled. The time taken is measured as time spent on board a vehicle, time spent waiting in a station does not count.

[Pinstar]

Transfers have the best estimates when the goods are travelling in mostly a straight line.

A ------->B----------->C
If a bus picks up passengers at A, transfers them to a train at B which delivers them to C, the estimated transfer credit seen from A to B will be accurate.

However if you go

A--------->B
********/
*******/
C

The transfer credit won't be accurate as you only get paid based on the total distance between A and C, which in this case is shorter.

Edit: Added the ********s to make the diagram make sense.

[accipiter2000]

the color of money you got from transfer is yellow, that means, it is not real money. Actually you can see your money amount is unchanged when you got yellow money.
You will never get the real money unless when the cargo reach the destination and got the green money. That were counted by the distance and time from the very begining to the end.
So you can't get more money by moving around. The yellow money can only make the income beautiful for the vehicle that do the transfer, it can't do anything to your whole company.

[skc]

Each leg of the journey will receive a credit towards it's running costs, assuming that A--->B--->C is mostly a straight line.
As jfs points out, the final payment is the 'Manhattan distance' from A--->C, which can be vastly shorter than the distance via B.
There's a setting which apportions a percentage of the income to the 'transfer' leg(s), which will influence the reported profitability of each vehicle involved.

This also means that it's possible for the final delivery vehicle to report a negative income, as the final pay-out is less than the sum of the transfer credits.

I don't know the details of the inner workings of OTTD, but I think it does track where each unit of cargo was picked up from, to be able to handle the transfers properly.

I like playing on 2048x2048 maps, start pre-1900, with minimal industries. I often have to have multi-leg transfers just to keep trains making at least one delivery per year, so that my performance rating doesn't suffer.
After a few years, there's usually multiplies of each industry around, so I use the intermediate stations as collection points for specific cargoes, which keeps the secondary industries feed with cargo more regularly, so further links in the chains are more profitable as well.