Project: Economy and Balancing

[Quark]

(MUCH higher maintenance costs for property, in particular, train tracks and airports).

It is implemented in my build

[Brianetta]

Finally, just another thought. Is there a way that a player could be penalised for having a station at every industry. IRL this does NOT happen, obviously there are processing industries, sawmills, refineries etc that are next to stations and so this should be allowed, but not every coal mine has its own platform!

Actually, during the industrial revolution, they did. Many were closed later on (especially in the UK), but having a dedicated line into a mine was far from out of the ordinary. In fact, having a spur line into your factory, workshop, cotton mill, whatever wasn't out of the question.

[Dave]

Finally, just another thought. Is there a way that a player could be penalised for having a station at every industry. IRL this does NOT happen, obviously there are processing industries, sawmills, refineries etc that are next to stations and so this should be allowed, but not every coal mine has its own platform!

Actually, during the industrial revolution, they did. Many were closed later on (especially in the UK), but having a dedicated line into a mine was far from out of the ordinary. In fact, having a spur line into your factory, workshop, cotton mill, whatever wasn't out of the question.

I can name at least 10 places within a ten mile radius of me that did indeed used to have such a spur. One was Cadburys at Bournville. The Rover car plant had one at Longbridge too. There are plenty of others.

[Sacro]

Hull has a huge spur, goes round most of the city, and about 50m from my house, quite often get Class 66s (i think) hailing coal (possibly) to and from the BP place up at Saltend.

[cabbit]

This is a good idea, long overdue, I would like to makesome observations (and hopefully they are not dated since I haven't place the new RC yet), hopefully of some help in this process:

There should be a maximum time between train visits that is allowed after which all cargo of a type should dissapear and the ratings be reset. This is more to take care of trains of the wrong cargo type accidently visiting a station than anything else.

Dis-qualifing non-track tiles from counting toward the catchment area of a station does not prevent station walking, it just makes it look uglier. I would argue against disqualifying non-track tiles from expanding the station area on the grounds that a commutter train with a better station building or a parking lot for commuters actually WILL atract more passangers and from farther away.

I think having a maximum acceptance for a given cargo is a very good idea, sending all the maps coal to a single power station is just not realistic.

I think that, in the balancing process, electric and non-electric rail types need to be differentiated, in the current game, there is little reason to build conventional rail, it would make more sense if e-rail was either much more expensive to build or more expensive to maintain to reserve e-rail for certain either high speed or high traffic lines.

I think there should be some expense related to the SIZE of your company, the larger your company gets, the more adminstrative personel you need aove and beyond personnel directly related to the transport services. This cost could help make a smaller company more competive and make it more challenging for larger companies to make a profit. Size could be computed by a weighted sum of stations owned, vehicles owned, depots owned, and perhaps also the total amount of cargo transported, the coefficient of the related expense could depend on difficulty settings.

The plans to adjust road vehicles, ships, and airplanes operating costs, initial costs sound very good to me.

Thankyou for all the work you developers do to maintain and improve one of the alltime classics of simulation gaming.[/quote]

[Celestar]

I have updated the PDF, add marked the modified places on the right margin.

Thanks all for your input

Celestar

[richk67]

a few questions, though:
- in the second post, there was the suggestion to have high transport rates lower the industry production - what would be the explanation for this behaviour? in my view it would be a punishment for the player setting up a good transport service

LOL - I think if you re-read my post, it is that effect in current OTTD I am *complaining* about

[richk67]

As long as your new formulae sort out the production nonsense, I will be happy. Personal gripes are:

1) Can be fixed in NFO
2) Can be fixed in NFO
5) Can be fixed in NFO

That makes Celestar's job far easier; just do 3 and 4, and leave the rest of the work to us GRF devs.

As long as the NFO fixes come with the core game, I do not mind. We should not have to coordinate 25 different economy .grfs just to get the game balance sensible.

[DaleStan]

I think having a maximum acceptance for a given cargo is a very good idea, sending all the maps coal to a single power station is just not realistic.
<...>
The plans to adjust road vehicles, ships, and airplanes operating costs, initial costs sound very good to me.

Again. NFO. Don't make Celestar's job harder than it needs to be.

As for the proposal itself:

From 2000 on, conventional railways were slowly replaced by maglev systems that offered lower infrastructural costs

This (specifically, the word "lower") disagrees with the table in section 9.1.3.

9.1.3: How do new routes figure into this section? Or is this something that should be relegated to NFO?

9.1.4: I would object that landing is not expensive. It takes almost no fuel to get a plane down out of the sky. Now putting one up in the sky, yes. That is expensive.

10.1: NFO. Specifically, callback 39.

10.6: This appears to be broken. If I'm reading correctly, an industry that produces ten units, and has three surrounding stations, with ratings 80%, 80%, and 90%, will give first two stations 8 units each, and the third 9 units, for a total distribution of 27 units, nearly three times as much as the ten actually produced. The correct way to do this would, IMO, be according to the formula in the attached PDF file. (It appears that either OO.o Math's PDF output or Acrobat Reader 7 is slightly broken. Paste the included code into OO Math if the text block comes out unreadable.)

[Celestar]

Again. NFO. Don't make Celestar's job harder than it needs to be.

I'm going to do a balanced game for the default data, but that stuff will be modified, I'm just not sure whether I modify the data itself or apply some offset/gain system

As for the proposal itself:

This (specifically, the word "lower") disagrees with the table in section 9.1.3.

Well maglevs have lower maintenance cost than its competitor, high-speed railway, but I'm lowering it to 2.20\.

9.1.3: How do new routes figure into this section? Or is this something that should be relegated to NFO?

Adding one type of railway is very simple, it takes just a handful of lines, once the graphics are there, so I'm looking for high-speed-rail graphics

9.1.4: I would object that landing is not expensive. It takes almost no fuel to get a plane down out of the sky. Now putting one up in the sky, yes. That is expensive.

You should be aware of the fact that fuel compromises only a small fraction of an aircraft's total operational cost. For short trips, this amount barely exceeds 15% with oil prices around $65. Landing and ATC fees can easily outnumber fuel costs. Plus with landing I was thinking of takeoff and landing, but as the number of landings is always equal to or one less than the number of takeoffs, it doesn't matter

10.1: NFO. Specifically, callback 39.

Maybe but it should/will be implemented as default, as all the ratings get an overhaul anyway

10.6: This appears to be broken. If I'm reading correctly, an industry that produces ten units, and has three surrounding stations, with ratings 80%, 80%, and 90%, will give first two stations 8 units each, and the third 9 units, for a total distribution of 27 units, nearly three times as much as the ten actually produced. The correct way to do this would, IMO, be according to the formula in the attached PDF file. (It appears that either OO.o Math's PDF output or Acrobat Reader 7 is slightly broken. Paste the included code into OO Math if the text block comes out unreadable.)

You read that slightly wrong, and I'm going to re-clarify it in the pdf later today. If you have cargo-specific ratings 80%, 90% and 80% and produce 100 units. However, the competitive ratings have to taken into account, and those do always accumulate to one, so no more than 100 units can be delivered.

Celestar

[Earl Sven]

I think having a maximum acceptance for a given cargo is a very good idea, sending all the maps coal to a single power station is just not realistic.

I agree with this. I feel that perhaps this suggests that a modification to the map generating algorithm to distribute industries better may be called for, i.e. considerably fewer manufacturing industries per producing industry, and a better spacing out of these manufacturing industries relative to the towns/cities on the map.

EDIT: Then again, maybe this isn't really relevant to this discussion

[brupje]

I think having a maximum acceptance for a given cargo is a very good idea, sending all the maps coal to a single power station is just not realistic.

I agree with this. I feel that perhaps this suggests that a modification to the map generating algorithm to distribute industries better may be called for, i.e. considerably fewer manufacturing industries per producing industry, and a better spacing out of these manufacturing industries relative to the towns/cities on the map.

or maybe by dropping prices when to much is delivered, allowing less profit.

I don't know if this limitation is implemented, but I don't think you should be getting a bonus by traveling coal around the map, while a power station is nearby the coal mine.

Also what about dropping your prices to be more competative?

[erdnis]

I don't know if this limitation is implemented, but I don't think you should be getting a bonus by traveling coal around the map, while a power station is nearby the coal mine.

I suggest that you only get paid to send the goods to the closest industry of the given type (i.e you only get paid to send the coal to the nearest power station, even if you send it to one further away). This means that you don't earn any more by sending the coal all over the map, but still, if a coal mine is straight next to a power station you'll get paid less than if it is far away from everything.

[Quark]

I don't know if this limitation is implemented, but I don't think you should be getting a bonus by traveling coal around the map, while a power station is nearby the coal mine.

I suggest that you only get paid to send the goods to the closest industry of the given type (i.e you only get paid to send the coal to the nearest power station, even if you send it to one further away). This means that you don't earn any more by sending the coal all over the map, but still, if a coal mine is straight next to a power station you'll get paid less than if it is far away from everything.

If you have power stations in 3 different directions — can you easily say which is closest?

[Brianetta]

If the difference is small, so is the difference in your transport fee.

[Earl Sven]

I don't know if this limitation is implemented, but I don't think you should be getting a bonus by traveling coal around the map, while a power station is nearby the coal mine.

I suggest that you only get paid to send the goods to the closest industry of the given type (i.e you only get paid to send the coal to the nearest power station, even if you send it to one further away). This means that you don't earn any more by sending the coal all over the map, but still, if a coal mine is straight next to a power station you'll get paid less than if it is far away from everything.

This makes sense, but again I think it would highlight the need for fewer recieving industries. If an OTTD map represents a region, surely there would be at most 2-3 power plants in that region? The map would need to be rebalanced to reflect this, rather than having the power station-every-few-towns effect that we have now.

[Aracirion]

concerning town rating: now if a town doesn't like you you start growing a forest around it, then bribe it if you have money until you are discovered by the investigator. I don't think this is particularly interesting.

I the real world a lot of work centres around noise reduction, so maybe not the fact of building an airport/train line itself, but building an airport too close to the city is bad, older planes (vs. newer ones) are bad, highspeed trains that are underground or in a trench are better than on the ground. This should also affect the reputation continually, not only at the moment of building. Dunno if that is possible though.

[DaleStan]

9.1.3: How do new routes figure into this section? Or is this something that should be relegated to NFO?

Adding one type of railway is very simple, it takes just a handful of lines, once the graphics are there, so I'm looking for high-speed-rail graphics

Sorry. I wasn't clear there. I meant the table of costs more than the addition of a track type.

[Psistorm]

a few questions, though:
- in the second post, there was the suggestion to have high transport rates lower the industry production - what would be the explanation for this behaviour? in my view it would be a punishment for the player setting up a good transport service

LOL - I think if you re-read my post, it is that effect in current OTTD I am *complaining* about

oops, indeed, I thought it was a suggestion, rather than a complaint - my bad

[Scia]

Hello all,

I have put down some brainstormed points you might think about or take into consideration.


1) For perishable goods another dimension in the cost calculation could be added. For example: a higher 'total days in transit' will have a negative effect on your income for delivering a for instance livestock. The current 'days per 20 tiles' rule will exist besides that. So you will be encouraged to have short routes for perishable goods.


2)

When a new vehicle
is purchased, reliability starts at 100 percent (90 percent for very new vehicles on the market).

New vehicles are not reliable in the beginning period with all their child diseases, but I understand/accept that this is easiest like this.


3) Would it be possible to have some kind of road infrastructure generator within the map generators, so that road vehicles can be more tempting to use?


4) Maybe some kind of urbanization could be simulated. Some towns will lose population in favor of one growing one or something like that.


5) Economic activity within a region (you transporting very good) could stimulate the appearance of new industries (the region gets richer with more population etc.)

6) New products are always very expensive in the beginning and get cheaper after some period (product life cycle). Does this apply to trains / railway systems / etc too?


7)

Diesel and electrical based engines were introduced
in the early 19th century which were able to reduce cost, weight and provide more power and velocity. also in the early 19th century, tram and subways were introduced for commuter distances.

Maybe you mean the 20th century or I should have paid more attention during my history classes ;)