cargodist, symmetric, asymmetric, spawn rate

[numbat]

Hi All,

I've been playing OTTD for just over 6 months and loving it, and have only just yesterday discovered cargodist and turned it on to symmetric.

So my question is, which do people suggest I use, symmetric, or asymmetric?

My other question is about the passenger spawn rate. I am finding that with cargodist on (just for passengers and mail) and set to symmetric, I am getting far more passengers than I ever got without using cargodist. Is there some way to turn down the spawn rate of passengers? For example, I started the game in 1925, it's now only 1933 and one of my more recent stations has over 1500 passengers waiting and the town is only 2,120 population. Those Kirby Paul steam engines have zero chance of keeping up with that demand.

Cheers,
Chris.

[skc]

*** CAVEAT: My knowledge about cargodist is minimal, I don't use it in my games ***

My understanding is that the 'symmetric' causes an equal (or nearly equal) amount of cargo to want to go in each direction, whereas 'asymmetric' doesn't attempt to balance the cargo flow.
So 'asymmetric' would be ideal for taking coal from a mine to a power plant, as there's no coal travelling the other way, and 'symmetric' is best for passengers and mail as it naturally flows both ways already.

[jfs]

Regardless of setting, the same amount of cargo (or passengers) is generated.
However the required capacity is much higher, because the cargo will travel for multiple stations before being delivered, and will transfer to other vehicles at stations, causing more cargo to be waiting at stations.

I tried making a crude illustration to show the effect.

cdist illustration.png (9 KiB) Viewed 758 times

In manual distribution, all cargo is unloaded and delivered at every stop, leaving the vehicle empty to load the full amount of cargo generated at each station.
In automatic distribution, some cargo remains on most stops, causing the vehicle to have less free capacity to load the cargo generated at each station.

[numbat]

Hi folks,

thanks for the responses.

@jfs, I think I understand what you're saying. Assuming I have 1 train with capacity 100 passengers, and 1 line with 10 stations each with 100 passengers waiting.

With no cargo dist, I only need 1 train, as it picks up 100 passengers, drops them all at the next stop, then picks up those 100 passengers, and so on. I can shift all 1000 passengers in 1 run.

However, with cargo dist, if all 100 passengers at each station wanted to go to the last station, then I can only shift 100 passengers per run, so I would either need 10 trains, or 10 runs to shift them all. So with cargo dist, my throughput per train is reduced depending upon the average distance my passengers want to travel.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Eddi]

you can adjust the average distance people travel by changing the "effect of distance on demand" setting.

as for asymmetric vs. symmetric, i would set passengers to symmetric, and mail/valuables to asymmetric. a passenger will usually go back to where they came from (except a few cases where they move house), whereas a houshold usually receives more mail and packages than it sends out.

[numbat]

Thanks Eddi, I will give that a try.

[numbat]

Hi All,

can anyone tell me if "assymetric (nearest)" means that passengers will only go to the nearest accepting station, or if it means that passengers are spread with more to the nearer stations and less to the more distant stations?

Cheers,
Chris.