Transport Tycoon Forums

Just a little tip based on one of my experiences with the game. It may not be your problem at all, but anyway here it is:

Some time ago I found the patch setting for town road algorithm, and I tried to change it. I think I changed it from "Standard" or something to "2x2 grid". It was well out in the game, and I had several large cities. Then the population quickly decreased. It seemed that the change in road algorithm ruined the city. It suddenly got a lot of exess roads, but also areas of just bare land. One went from 37000 to less than 10000 people in very short time.

So I just thought that maybe the new version has a new road algorithm as default. At least this could be a problem if towns are created with a different algorithm. Maybe you are loading an old scenario? That might be why your population is decreasing.

A decreasing population really doesn't make any sense indeed.
Recently, a change in the way your city rating is calculated has been made, see FS#1967 (local authority rating cannot be higher than Good). This has been fixed in revision 12929. Maybe this would explain the problem?

I have to agree with the parent. I played OpenTTD some time ago(0.4.0 or 0.5.0) and passengers were a lot more profitable. I also noticed that cities were growing at a high pace ending my game in 2050 with a bunch of 30k+ cities while I had boosted a 150 village to a 3k+ city. In 0.6.0 I tried the same strategy and failed thinking it was a loss of skill. Now it makes perfect sense.

You can adjust initial city size and growth rate in patch configuration, on economy tab.

CommanderZ wrote:You can adjust initial city size and growth rate in patch configuration, on economy tab.

It does not help! Passengers are less profitable even in this case...

I'm transporting passengers only (with exception of maybe 5 trains I build earlygame to boost profit) in my current game and I'm making profit of 1,500'000'000 per year. I know, I have almost 600 trains, but still...

Passenger were never meant to be more profitable than coal. Their advantage is quantity and possibility of vast growth.

Btw, if you want your cities to be even bigger, use North American City Set. It is beautiful and its houses have much larger ciizen capacity. When I started using it in my game, the cities (which most of them already reached their max size) over 10 years grew by 50-100%!

I once set up just a few buses in a small town, and then took a screenshot once a year. If you view them after each other, you can (literally) see it grow.

One train a year with the capacity for 1000 passengers = small growth

One train a week with capacity for 19 passengers = more growth.

As far as I can tell, about how regularly the stations are serviced (up to a max of 5 per year)

I've tried a map with all villages, and very regular train timings. Some trains make losses, but overall it makes a profit... 2 out of 3 trains serve to keep the town growing, while the third one makes enough money from the passengers to cover all 3 running costs and some profit with it.

Try making a bus system within the town, with 5 stops (one attached to the station) - run a bus from each of the 4 satellite stations to your train station (+transfer) and watch the profits roll in.

Also, try using your trains more like real trains. Instead of picking up pax and dropping them at the next station - pick up at each station, then transfer and full load at every subsequent station. That way, everyone goes to the end of the line. Not quite realistic, but it works well.

Futurix wrote:I found out what my problem is - for some reason most of large cities have slowly decreasing population! Yes, decreasing, even when they are actually shown as cities and settings for city growth is fast. I don't understand what's going on, but this is what's making my company unprofitable - since number of passengers is constantly decreasing with time (compared with 0.5.2 where it increased rather quickly).

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Town populations occasionally decrease, but provided that the stations in a town are relatively active, the town should grow significantly over time. Maybe there's something wrong with the "Fast" town growth option? I usually play with that on the default level. I'm not sure what patches you might be playing with, but your towns definitely should not steadily be losing people (Unless you're playing multiplayer and your competitors are sabotaging your business by dynamiting your town's buildings). Either that, or you're incredibly unlucky and that 1 in 10000000 chance that your town will have a lower population 50 years after service starts has actually happened. Maybe you should go buy a lottery ticket (...j/k, that's fallacious logic).

audigex wrote: Also, try using your trains more like real trains. Instead of picking up pax and dropping them at the next station - pick up at each station, then transfer and full load at every subsequent station. That way, everyone goes to the end of the line. Not quite realistic, but it works well.

I'm not understanding how that helps. If it does work because of some flaw in the feeder system mechanics, then it seems sorta cheap (like you said, not quite realistic, or balanced). If I understand the feeder system correctly, however, cargo picked up and delivered from the middle station is reduced in value by the amount which was paid to the feeding consist. So if Boat A delivers 120,000 liters of oil to Station B being serviced by Train B and Boat A is paid $100,000, then, when train B arrives at Station C, the final destination for the Oil, it might normally be paid $200,000, but because $100,000 was paid to Boat A, then in actuality Train B gets paid $100,000.

Isn't that how it works? Or have I somehow been watching my feeder vehicles working improperly and unrealistically without realizing it?

- Vox

Hi,

one more information on feeders:

B <---- A
|
|
|
V
C ----> D

If you transport from A to B and transfer and get paid 100,000$ ("yellow money")
Then transport from B to C and get paid 100,000$ ("yellow money" again)
then transport from C to D you lose 100,000$ (Red Money) because the distance between A and D is the same as between B and C, that only pays 100,000$ and you got 200,000$ already.

cu
Rainer

But if you unload, you only gain the money to that distance

Eg
A (100 picked up)
|
v
B (100 delivered)

or
A
|
v
B (100 transfer and loaded, 100 picked up)
|
V
C (200 delivered)

You just get to take every passenger a bit further, by assuming everyone wants to go to the last station on the route.

It's useful for at the start of the game (when station only deliver a few passengers each), then later on you can remove the transfer order to pick up all the passengers without ending up with a huge amount of passengers.

It's the same principle as using feeder stations - each station "feeds" the one further down the line.