"Replacing" Vehicles?

[JamesR]

Hey guys, just a quick query: I played a version of OpenTTD rather a long time ago where the replace vehicle tool more or less did what it said on the tin, but these days whenever I create a group of trains and instruct them to replace their engine they never actually do it - Even though the regularly check in to a depot for servicing.

Is there a working way to do this? Or am I simply doing it wrong?

Cheers in advance guys.

[Yexo]

Can you upload a savegame were it doesn't behave as you think it should?

[JamesR]

Sure, they're attached, but it's a problem I have in every game so I figure I'm doing something wrong.

[Yexo]

You don't have enough money to buy the new engine. If I borrow the maximum amount of money and wait until it goes servicing again, it's replaced just as I would expect.

[JamesR]

You don't have enough money to buy the new engine. If I borrow the maximum amount of money and wait until it goes servicing again, it's replaced just as I would expect.

Thats confusing, because I now realise I was getting a status message saying I didn't have the available funds - even though I clearly did. I pumped £100k into my bank through loans bringing my cash in hand to 200k and was still getting the error, only at about 300k did it let me buy it.

Veeeery confused.

Edit:: Ok i've got exactly the same problem again - The new engine is £17,638 and I have £50k in the bank and yet my auto-replace fails due to a money limit - What money limit?

[Lilman424]

There's a setting in the advanced settings windows for a minimum amount of money to have on hand before auto-replacing. I'd say change that to 0, and it'll replace as long as there's enough money.

[JamesR]

There's a setting in the advanced settings windows for a minimum amount of money to have on hand before auto-replacing. I'd say change that to 0, and it'll replace as long as there's enough money.

Seems like a bizarre thing to default away from zero, but thanks very much.

[Swansea Stu]

It's so you always have some money left over to build something, rather than have a train replace itself and take all your spare cash just as you were about to build a new line.

[JamesR]

It's so you always have some money left over to build something, rather than have a train replace itself and take all your spare cash just as you were about to build a new line.

I can see the logic there especially over vast networks, I guess the assumption is that most people will have more than 20 trains in their network.

[Bjarni]

Seems like a bizarre thing to default away from zero, but thanks very much.

There were some talk about this when I coded this. The final result is like it is because certain people argued that autoreplace should by default not be able to remove the last money you have. The scary scenario for setting the default value to 0 would be some player removing a bit of track and then the money is lost when he tries to rebuild and as a result the trains will be stuck and stop making money so the track can never be fixed. It is presumed that if people set it to 0 themself then they know what they are doing.

It's kind of like the same for the default value of wagon removal. People should manually allow automatic removal of wagons to prevent the issue where wagons started to disappear.


I think it's impossible to find default values that will make everybody happy but we will stick with the values we have to avoid causing even more confusion and everybody can change their settings if they like.