Complex track layouts - why?

[AdamW]

thief: No, I don't know what happened with the industries, must have just been a fluke game. I didn't use any special settings, just left everything at openttd default. Ususally I'd expect something to bust out and hit like 500 / month, but this game everything stayed quite low. Weird...

[AdamW]

Seems I did have smaller changes enabled as openttd defaults to it, so that explains what happened to my industries . I'll turn that off for my next game.

[lobster]

you know, i used to play the game exactly like you did, simply laying direct lines. i loved the sight of 6 lines next to each other, and didn't really get how signals and in particular pre-signals worked. but after a while i got a wee bit curious about their functions, because i saw quite an amount of people using no other then large junctions and efficient systems. so i pumped some nights into learning the basic skills of railway systems, junctions and (pre-)signalling, and i never ever build anything that "old style". and this only got better when i "discovered" PBS, quite recently.

to be honest, i'm not really sure there's a point in my story, but hey, what the hell. what i'm trying to say is that you should consider getting to know the more complex railway building, and thén debate about the pros and cons of both building styles. so, just you know.

[Thief^]

Seems I did have smaller changes enabled as openttd defaults to it, so that explains what happened to my industries . I'll turn that off for my next game.

Actually I meant that you should have it on (setting economy messages off in the message options so you don't get bombarded). As I said, there's a couple of 1000 production industries in that game of my brother's I posted, so how yours is so low I'll never know.

[AdamW]

thief: don't know either *shrug*. I usually find you get 500+ at least for a couple of industries with the original, "double or half" output changes. Yeah, I really have no idea why all mine were so low. Oh well, just made my money on passengers instead.

[Thief^]

Indeed. I guess that that's the end of this thread.

Except one more thing: playing with network style layouts is much nicer in co-op multiplayer if you use the subs mod. As long as you're sensible and don't send 65% reliability trains down opponents tracks in a hard mode game, with none of your depots along the way to keep them serviced... (you could use the "shared depots" option, but then "go to depot" can send it to an opponents depot, where you can't do anything to the train.)

[AdamW]

oh, yes, it has a multiplayer mode too. I kinda forgot.

btw, this thread gave me a crazy idea - motorways! I wonder how well you could do attempting to do an entire game with nothing but trucks / buses. openttd's ability to use multiple bus stops / truck bays and NOT have road vehicles get randomly stuck "inside" each other while lining up at a stop would help hugely, of course. I was thinking of just running two huge multi-lane highways, one across the map and one from top to bottom, then hooking in feeder roads to all industries / towns...obviously you'd have to jack the road vehicles limit up to something huge (couple of thousand, maybe). Might be fun...