Complex track layouts - why?

[AdamW]

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but it's not that easy to search on.

I've been playing TT on and off for years, from the first boxed version long ago, and just started a new game with openttd under Linux (nice work, nice improvements). I've been looking through these forums at the screenshots and discussions about complex track layouts, and just had one question - why do people use these setups?

I've played the same style for a long time. In a mature game of mine, just about everything is done with trains, aside from a passenger plane network. And - seemingly different from what people discuss here - every train has its own line. I never have trains sharing routes. This is even easier with the huge stations openttd allows, but I did it the same way in the original TT and TTD. I'm very anal about getting the absolute most efficient line from point A to B - I place stations on the very edge of industries' catchment areas and try to keep every line level with, at most, a single corner. Also, I don't have long, sequential routes - all my trains go from one station to one other station all their lives. Occasionally, if there's a couple of, say, coal mines in a row, I'll have a station at each and a train will go to three stations, but that's about it. (I usually try and build a huge station in the middle of the two mines to catch them both in one catchment area instead).

This isn't particularly realistic, and it's sometimes rather ugly, but it's always struck me as the most efficient way to play the game. My question is, really, is there an actual advantage to the design which really uses an integrated network with lots of shared routes and signalling etc that I haven't figured out for myself, or do people do it for other reasons? Do you do it because it maximises profit, or just for the enjoyment and 'realism' of designing such a layout?

Thanks for looking at the question.

[Rob]

I build complex networks mostly because I like to look at the trains finding their way on it.
Especially with PBS it looks awsome how the trains manage not to crash into eachother.
But I also build it that way because it is more efficient, or at least it brings in more money when trains travel all across the map to deliver their goods.
Another advantage of a complete network is that if an industy (I mainly build industry routes) closes you can just send the trains to another station, change or refit the waggons and they can make money again.(specially usefull in TTO, because there the industries often closed just after building a station near them )

[AdamW]

Right, yeah, I always used to hate that in TTO . It's only a minor inconvenience, though, just a couple of months' work to redirect the line (or, in the later stages of the game, just pay to rebuild the industry).

As for distance, doesn't that come with a trade-off in rating? Or do you mix it up and have one short- and one long- distance train serve each industry? (Or more than one, obviously). Oh, and there's a related question that maybe a dev can answer, which I've always been curious about: how exactly does the game count distance? Does it count as the crow flies or the actual route the train travels, and does it count the distance between the _industries_ or between the _stations_? (In other words, are you penalised or rewarded for efficient building?)

[AdamW]

In case I didn't explain my set up well enough, here's my current save game. It's not really mature yet - later on I will have every town linked to at least two others and all industry runs except very short ones will have two trains, and when I convert to monorail / maglev I will optimise the track layout even more, some of the lines still turn a few too many corners - but it gives the basic idea. I'm running nightly r2890, if that makes a difference.

[AdamW]

No other opinions? I really want to know if I'm missing out on something...

[Patchman]

I'm not sure, but this isn't really OTTD specific, maybe you'd get more takers in the general TTD forum. If you like I can move your topic there.

[bobingabout]

there are many reasons. 1 of the first would be that you can have many trains going down the same lines. for example, if theres a farm next to a powerplant, and not to faraway, theres a factory next to a coal mine, wouldn't it me better to run both routes down 1 set of lines?

then you expand on it. as your network grows, you find that there is more traffic than the line can handle. in these situation, you might want to add a second line, hence the duel 2 way lines consisteing of 4 parallel tracks or improve your junctions, so the amount of line shared between routes is minimal, so trains turning left don't have to come anywhere near train turning right, or going stright up when they come to the point where other trains join in.

and more. part of it is the challenge of making it all work.

[AdamW]

patchman: sure, thanks. Do you know the answer to my question about distance?

bobing: "if theres a farm next to a powerplant, and not to faraway, theres a factory next to a coal mine, wouldn't it me better to run both routes down 1 set of lines?"

Ah, see, no, I don't . That's really the question. Intellectually, aesthetically? Sure. That's how you'd do it in real life, of course. But _practically_ speaking, in the game - I'm not so sure. Build two lines next to each other and each train can run perfectly all the time without needing to worry about signals - and for what cost? Trivial extra outlay - and capital is hardly difficult to come by in TTD - and equally trivial yearly maintenance. If the costs for inital track laying and maintenance were vastly higher, it would make more immediate practical sense to me to try and minimise the use of track, but the way it is now, the cost is too low to worry about.

I haven't played the original Railroad Tycoon for many, many years but I seem to remember it was much better at forcing you to reuse track resources, through the cost system and also by the limitation that you had to keep adding on to one line all the time, you couldn't just build separate lines all over the place as TTD allows...

"as your network grows, you find that there is more traffic than the line can handle"

That's another one; it would also force you to run multiple trains on a single track if production went way higher later in the game. However, I've yet to run into a situation where I can't shift all the resources produced and maintain a very high station rating with just two trains. And it's never a problem to give two trains an exclusive line each. Maybe if I built more industries late in the game? Dunno.

[Patchman]

At least regular (or patched) TTD, but probably also OTTD use the "Manhattan metric" for distance calculations, i.e. |x2-x1|+|y2-y1|. The only exception is town zones, which use the euclidian metric, sqrt((x2-x1)^2+(y2-y1)^2).

And the reason why I build complex track layouts is that it's the only way to have 50 or 100 trains going to one factory. Using PBS and well-designed junctions, you can have a very large number of trains in a dual-track line, and even more on quad-track.

I enjoy the challenge of building working layouts, with minimum delays for trains and maximum efficiency.

Just transporting things is easy, and building point-to-point connections is rather boring. It works, but there's no challenge.

[Prebral]

Also, sometimes you can not build large stations consisting of many tracks because of terrain configuration - I have recently built some heavy-traffic cargo stations by a factory enclosed tightly in a valley between two cities. I was able to serve around 20 trains at 5-7 platforms without having to demolish almost everything to make place for 20 platforms and it was easy to send even more trains in without having to do more demolishing and building more platforms. When output increased, I upgraded current trains or added a new train. When trains began to jam traffic because there were simply too many, I just added a piece of alternative-choice track anywhere in the system, added a waypoint (for example to prevent trains with "away" junction temporarily blocked by another train to return to the one-way waiting ring around the station) or rearranged junctions to be more effective.

Not too many demolitions were necessary, locals liked me and I did not have to flatten half of the country.

[RPharazon]

I build complex train networks because there can be a bigger maximum amount of trains.

If you build seperate lines for each train, you have up to 5 lines, 5 trains, where if you made those 5 lines into a network you could get about 10 or more trains on the network, thereby increasing income exponentionally.

[SpComb]

The largest advantage of networks is that that they are expandable. Once you've hooked up all the cites on the map to your network, You can easily change your routes between them, and introduce we 'Mainline' trains etc. Same with industries, to link that last coal mine in that corner, you can build 10 squares of track and then it'll be delivering coal to the other side of the map . You couldnt do that with dingle track, at least not in a hurry. The other reason is that the reason I play TTD anyways is for the networks. Its building the networks with their cool station configurations and planning the passanger routes that make me play TTD. Building lots of single lines sounds very boring, ugly, expensive, unrealistic (I hate lowering land) and... boo. There's no networking challange in it. I really, really recommend that you give networks a go, if only for something new. You're welcome to ask for help. Look at the 'Pictures of Your Game' topic for possible ideas. Try and make your junctions fit your track, and dont just use prebuilt ones.

[DanMacK]

I build networked layouts, but the large cloverleaf junctions and 4 track mainlines aren't my style. I prefer single track with passing sidings on lightly traveled lines, and the heavier the traffic either the longer or more frequent the sidings they get until I get double track. I have added third tracks on occasion, but that was for extensive coal traffic (Much like the Lackawanna Railroad in the PA Mountains)

I aim for realism in my Junctions, and yes, I have tie-ups and crossings, but it IS realsitic, and I don't have a problem making money

It all boils down to what YOU want to do, and how YOU play the game. Don't let somebody tell you their style's better than anyone elses. if you prefer realistic, then hey, we're not stopping you

[AdamW]

Thanks for all the opinions, guys . There's only one thing I'd take issue with up there:

"If you build seperate lines for each train, you have up to 5 lines, 5 trains, where if you made those 5 lines into a network you could get about 10 or more trains on the network, thereby increasing income exponentionally."

Doesn't work, because TTD has a limited amount of resources. If the extra five trains were magically filled up with cargo, sure, income would increase. If your existing five trains are already taking every available unit of cargo with a station rating at 90% or more, though, how do five extra trains help? There's no more cargo to shift and they just add running costs.

Again thanks for all the feedback, guys - maybe on my next game I'll try using a Spanky Network to run every single cargo on the map into a single factory, but at least now I know I wasn't being stupid all along, just different . I just finished converting to maglev, might upload another save game later so you can see a late stage game. And yeah, if you think single track everywhere and flattened land is ugly...it's ugly!

[Lightglobe]

That affects more when it comes to industries like the Factory and the Steel Mill where it depends on amount going in. I've had factories that produced insane amounts of goods. If I tried to do it by single trains it would just be way to much effort, with a network I can keep the station smaller and slightly less annoying. This is especially helpful when the industry is near a city cause then I won't get in the way of city expansion as much.

I'll throw up an image of one of my stations to show where single track would be entirely useless after I've had my dinner.

[Thief^]

My brother is nearing the end of one of his best saves ever, and he has a factory producing over 2000 crates of goods / month, and he's rated "Excellent" at transporting them. He has 60 or so trains visiting this factory (out of 200 trains total), which you just couldn't do with individual lines.
Most of the surrounding track is pbs'd dual-lane each way track, cross-overs every few squares, so that when a train breaks down others just overtake it on the free line.

Also, Mr 1-train-to-each-line, how long are the trains you use? Network setups function best with a lot of short (10 carriage or so) trains, but if you use really long trains then a dedicated track might be better.

[AdamW]

But you only get factories churning out huge numbers of goods _if_ you have a Spanky Network and run lots of raw materials into one factory. If you don't have a Spanky Network you use every factory on the map and your goods production is spread around between them all. It evens out either way.

I don't use very long trains, max. 14, usually 10 or 12. Anyway, here's my 2050 save game so you can take a look. A few stations are heavy on passengers and one's a little heavy on goods, but I was focussing on getting 1,000 rating so I didn't tidy that up.

[Thief^]

But you only get factories churning out huge numbers of goods _if_ you have a Spanky Network and run lots of raw materials into one factory. If you don't have a Spanky Network you use every factory on the map and your goods production is spread around between them all. It evens out either way.

Yeah, but you tend to get more money for transporting it a long way using a network. To be honest I wasn't expecting you to have done so well without using networks.

The production on industries in your game is suprisingly low, were you using "More, smaller changes" under patches->economy? It's just with that on productions seem to rise quite steadily. (eg. a over 1000 livestock/month farm).

Now that I'm not busy I'll grab you my brother's savegame:
Oh, and it wasn't over 2000 goods/month at the factory. It's over 5,000. He also has the same ammount of money as you, but 10 years earlier.

EDIT: It's an OTTD savegame, and it was in my custom subs+train replace+diag_clear build, but it should run under regular (svn, it uses pre-signals) OTTD. It's also on a larger (512x512 map I think) than you used.

[SpComb]

If you're only aiming to get 1000 points, then P2P tracks are probably the best. But yes it really does seem to be a matter of opinion, generally the whole reason of why one plays TTD. As came up in that topic lately, "How do you win?", the reason people play is totally different. So if all you care about is getting 1000 points, then yes, build P2P tracks. But I really do suggest that you sometime try something else too, namely looking at a reaslistic game, because you really could be missing something. Have you ever tried building a network? If not, then do, who cares about efficiency and scoring points. Just give it a go, it won't hurt.

And as to what DanMacK said, of course you dont start out the game by building double-track between a coal mine and a powerplant for that one BR92 of yours hauling 5 carriges of coal.

[Thief^]

Indeed. It is only worth building network track when you need to run 3 or more trains down a pair of lines. Even then, you could just make the trains longer. I have a game with 20-carriage trains, just because I wanted to see what they looked like. It turns out that with maglev the power is there to haul that much coal from Dieppe (France) Coal Mine to Hereford (England) power station across the channel bridge (about halfway across a 2048 map I think). Needed more than 4 trains too.