YAIM - (Yet Another) Infrastructure Maintenance Patch (V3.1)

[Eddi]

i'd just rename it to "maintenance cost", that implies both vehicles and infrastructure

[Arie-]

So I'm playing with this now and there's two things I'm wondering about:
Station costs
I currently am playing a "aesthetics" game. I'm using station additional tiles for eye candy, however these do count towards station tiles, is it possible to split this? Or somehow make it beneficial to include eyecandy tiles (lessen the ammount of cargo which decays e.g.).

Infrastructure costs in the "big picture"
The infrastructure window contents I understand, however, where is this reflected in the finance window. My guess would be "Property maintenance" ("Eigendomsonderhoud" in Dutch), why not name these two fields the same?

[Yexo]

Or somehow make it beneficial to include eyecandy tiles (lessen the ammount of cargo which decays e.g.).

It already is beneficial: it improves the area over which your station can accept/get cargo.

[Arie-]

But I can also use station tiles with tracks for that.

[oberhümer]

As far as the GRF spec wiki goes, there's no NewGRF "maintenance cost" property for station tiles yet. (As far as the patch goes, ...)

[Eddi]

i think that's by design. station tiles are supposed to be visual only (not that i agree with that)

[michael blunck]

IMO, introducing different maintenance cost for station tiles would be over the top. In this case you´d like to have them not only for track tiles vs non-track tiles, but also for station hall tiles vs bare platform tiles, passenger station tiles vs freight station tiles, etc, pp.

regards
Michael

[oberhümer]

That's why I said "NewGRF".

[michael blunck]

But even then.

regards
Michael

[Michi_cc]

As far as the GRF spec wiki goes, there's no NewGRF "maintenance cost" property for station tiles yet. (As far as the patch goes, ...)

A maintenance factor per (station/airport/whatever) tile would be totally impractical. For calculating the infrastructure costs this would mean either (1) a complete map walk each time, or (2) an unlimited-sized array that stores the number of tiles per different maintenance factor.

-- Michael Lutz

[Ailure]

Instead of counting station tiles, why not make the maintenance costs based on the size of the catchment area? Wouldn't punish people as much who like use cosmetic tiles, but people who needlessly expand their reach of a station gets some expensive maintenance. Should also make people think twice before expanding their catchment area to cover a huge area.

I had a quick try with it in a nightly testgame. Adds a layer of challenge, but it quickly got way too expensive so I had to turn it off the combination of NewGRF's I used led to a stagnated economy. I really like the signal maintenance cost though, as the signalspam you see in the average OpenTTD game is actually slightly ugly. Forced me to space them apart a bit further in a more decent looking fashion.

[Supercheese]

W.r.t. signal maintenance, I use a signal tile spacing of 4. Would that be prohibitively expensive with this patch, or are only spaces of 1 or 2 massively expensive?

[Arie-]

My guess would be no, but I'm not sure whether this patch scales with the map dimensions. To give you an idea, in r23444 on a 128 * 512 map. The costs of the stations are waaaaaay higher than the costs of the signals: 160k vs 6k. Signals on approximately every 6 tiles.

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[Arie-]

Bug or feature, for you guys to decide. I've two types of tracks, maintenance is in that case lower than when I would convert all tracks to the lower cost type.

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[Michi_cc]

Bug or feature, for you guys to decide.

Not a bug per se, just a side effect because NuTracks isn't setting a custom maintenance factor, so all new types inherit the cost of plain rails.

-- Michael Lutz

[Kogut]

Bug or feature, for you guys to decide.

Not a bug per se, just a side effect because NuTracks isn't setting a custom maintenance factor, so all new types inherit the cost of plain rails.

-- Michael Lutz

But probably there is still small funny effect
1) 100k normal tracks, huge nonlinear effect
2) 50k normal tracks, 50k expensive tracks, with higher maintenance cost, smaller nonlinear effect, in result it may be less expensive.

[Frank327]

First of all, awesome patch! This is exactly the sort of economic balancing the game needed.

Now on the subject of balancing the early game vs. the late game, I think one of the best ways to do this would be by making maintenance costs dependent on distance from your HQ. Let's say a square of 40x40 around your HQ the maintenance is only 0.25 of what it would normally be. In a square of 80x80 it would be 0.5, in 160x160 it would be 0.75 and from then onwards it would be full price. That way you can make some good early money by building close to your HQ, and then later when you start building vast networks you feel the full force of maintenance costs. It would also balance out those ridiculous early coal lines that span half the map and earn you millions in the first few years of the game.

It would probably be either difficult to program, or difficult for the CPU to handle. But if it would be possible I think this would be the most organic solution. Keeping maintenance costs non-linear is probably still a good idea.

[Torrasque]

Bug or feature, for you guys to decide.

Not a bug per se, just a side effect because NuTracks isn't setting a custom maintenance factor, so all new types inherit the cost of plain rails.

-- Michael Lutz

But probably there is still small funny effect
1) 100k normal tracks, huge nonlinear effect
2) 50k normal tracks, 50k expensive tracks, with higher maintenance cost, smaller nonlinear effect, in result it may be less expensive.

Perhaps you could take the mean of the different maintenance cost, and then apply the nonlinear effect?

Exemple: if you have 300 tracks at 10$ and 700 at 20$, you calculate the nonlinear effect on 1000 tracks at 17$[1]

[1](0.3*10+0.7*20)/2 = 17

[Kogut]

It works, Ai with crazy duplication of tracks was changed from moneymaker into barely sustainable company.

[Andrew350]

First, let me say thank you for this patch! I've been playing the nightlies (currently r23591) for a few days now, and I have to say this is one of the best improvements to the gameplay so far. It adds the challenge the game has needed!

With that said, I found a little money exploit (bug?) with it too. If you build e.g. a rail depot, then convert it to maglev, it remains "seen" as a rail tile, but if you destroy it the game will deduct from the maglev tiles (resulting in a very large number), and the game will actually start paying you for these 'negative' tiles.

Don't know if it's known or not (couldn't find anything), just thought I'd mention it.

EDIT: Also, saving said game and re-loading seems to reset everything back to the correct values...untraceable money cheat?