Land Buying

[glimmer]

Bloody hell its frustrating in multiplayer when u get some noob that signposts around ur track to stop u from building because he knows ur going to kick his ass at transporting the resource...

i think if u buy land u can only buy it 3 squares away from opposition track roads stations whatever, then if you build up to it you can buy land back at double cost.

[teeone]

Or make is more expensive like in real life (buying a lot would NOT cost 3,000)....atleast 10 times....

[Archonix]

Depends where you're buying it.

[Eddy]

But that would result in enrmous expenses at just buying land on which you will build tracks, roads etc. etc.

[Sionide]

this issue of sabotage has definately got to be looked at in more detail.

[teeone]

The problem is if you make land buying more expensive people will just use rail tracks everywhere, instead of land buying the squares.

[glimmer]

haha i thought of that too but thats fine because they will either use the track or we can always have track sharing enabled somehow...

[Kumagoro]

Bots, maybe?

[Lizard]

Bloody hell its frustrating in multiplayer when u get some noob that signposts around ur track to stop u from building because he knows ur going to kick his ass at transporting the resource...

i think if u buy land u can only buy it 3 squares away from opposition track roads stations whatever, then if you build up to it you can buy land back at double cost.

It is necessary to enter the tax to the ground!!!
It should lower profit of trains on which basically and business is done;)

[Unlucky]

I've kicked people from my servers for this. One of them even made a long line of bought land tiles down the middle of the map and around whole cities. I think servers should be able to disable buying land, or have a maximum number of bought tiles option.

[DaleStan]

That solution still makes buying land more expensive. Not monetarily, but still more expensive.

The problem is if you make land buying more expensive people will just use rail tracks everywhere, instead of land buying the squares.

[teeone]

I've kicked people from my servers for this. One of them even made a long line of bought land tiles down the middle of the map and around whole cities. I think servers should be able to disable buying land, or have a maximum number of bought tiles option.

This sounds like a good idea until you think of the consequences:

Lameguy joins server
Lameguy wants to ruin game, so tries to buy land everywhere
Lameguy can't buy land (or is heavily penalized for doing so)
Lameguy gets out his rail tool and "buys" the squares he wants to takeover

I'm not entirely sure what the solution is for this...........Other than the server making rules (aka "play nice") and if somebody doesn't they get kicked or penalized somehow........

That solution still makes buying land more expensive. Not monetarily, but still more expensive.

The problem is if you make land buying more expensive people will just use rail tracks everywhere, instead of land buying the squares.

I'm not sure what you mean more expensive than using the buy land tool. Do you mean that it is more expensive because you are taxed on the "rail" tracks you own, and you're not taxed on the purchased land?

[DaleStan]

What I meant was exactly what you just said. Implementing this

I think servers should be able to disable buying land, or have a maximum number of bought tiles option.

causes (in effect) the monetary cost of buying a square of land to suddendly jump to infinity. At this point $LUSER will simply switch to some other method of blocking the land.

There is always the kick and the ban to penalize such actions. In the few games I played, it didn't take more than a couple years before I had the money to buy out any other company on the map, and before the bug was fixed, the threat "behave, or I buy you out" could be levied.

And I did, too. Threatened and followed through. Of course, the immediately following action was to sell the inappropriately purchased land.

Would it be appropriate to allow the server to lift the no-buy-out lock on misbehaving companies?

[Jakal]

another thing is that you can simply build rails around an industry at sea-level along with signals on every piece of them... others cant reach the industry then...

Lets just hope signals under bridges will be possible somewhen soon...

[Alltaken]

what about a "moderator" who can simply take control of any company they wish.

this means if someone is buyign stuff inapropriatly the mod can just sell it (perhaps an option to sell it without any profit back to the person)

or even a freeze option, so that the moderator can freeze the offender for a period of time from doing anything.

i.e. they misbehave and they get a 5 min freeze of money...


opinions.

Alltaken

[Lizard]

i repeat- how about to enter the tax to the ground?

[Sionide]

enter the tax to the ground?

doesn't make any sense... you mean, make buying land more expensive by taxing it?? well yeah, but they'll just their railway tool won't they?? ...prats

i think the moderator is a good idea, kinda like an op in the IRC channel, but Op of the ottd game..

[Kebabrov]

+1 for the moderator idea. freezing is good too.. kinda like a yellow card before being banned.

[Jakal]

Hrm, i have to say... please put exploits higher on your todo list, maybe even bring a small update out before finishing the map array.

I just returned from a game. in the beginning it looked fun, there were many unconnected industries, one big company i had to compete against, and i love challenges like that. So i started to build up a very long part of my new system connecting 3 farms with a factory. When i had it finished i wondered why my trains wouldnt load anything, until i recognized that this "Bugs Bunny" guy bought exclusive transport rights all over the map. He also bought land all around factories and oil processing plants.
The chat was disabled, i placed a sign over the city where he bought the exclusive transport rights tho saying "please dont buy exclusive transport rights". Well, he did it again (of course) and i changed the sign to "well, go play with yourself then" and left the server.

Pretty frustrating, i wudnt have cared if i hadnt built all of that stuff in first place... but *sigh* I guess its just another one of these exploit stories, nothing special... too sad.

Well anyways.. be warned, that "Bugs Bunny" guy seems to be a plague. And the exploiting has got to stop.

[DaleStan]

Idea on that one:
The cost of exclusive rights is linked to your rating.
It will also reduce your rating to x% of it's original value, where x is 0 if you are the only company that LA has rated, otherwise, it's some function of the rating of the highest rating granted to a company other than yours.

So if there are three companies in a town,
A (90%)
B (50%)
C (30%)

It would cost A $1.1M to purchase exclusive rights, and its rating would drop to 67.5%.
B would pay $2M, and its rating would drop to 27.5%.
C would pay $3.3M, and its rating would drop to 16.5%.
This uses cost=1M/rating, and newrating=rating*(1-bestcompetitor/2). It might work better to use newrating=rating*(1-bestcompetitor*(1-rating)). This would reduce the ratings to 85.5%, 27.5%, and 11.1%

The monetary costs are probably too low, but other than that, is this reasonable/workable?

The theory is that cities that like you will let exclusive rights go cheaply, and cities that don't will jack up the price. Also, if $FOO_CORP comes along and says "we'd like to transport here", and the city has to say "No, $BAR_CORP has exclusive rights now", then the city won't like $BAR_CORP as well, because they've lost services. However, if $BAR_CORP is doing an excellent job, and $FOO_CORP has no history or a bad history, then $BAR_CORP won't be penalized as badly as if $FOO_CORP has a history of providing good service to this town.