Airplanes In Multiplayer are not balanced

[LSky]

So, maybe we must be more specific.
....
I think game can be balanced with only few little but smart changes. No need in major reconstruction of whole cargo system.

I'm still waiting for those "few little but smart" changes that can be done to make the game more balanced. Than we'd finally have something to discuss.

Why are you waiting for those? The game is fundamentally unbalanced. Now we're just waiting on random people to come with changes? To what end?

[Yexo]

Why are you waiting for those? The game is fundamentally unbalanced. Now we're just waiting on random people to come with small changes?

Pho-Enix keeps saying in this topic that multiplayer balance can be fixed with a few small changes. I'm very curious to hear what kind of changes that would be exactly, as I don't believe it's that easy.

Of course I'm not waiting in the sense that I'm sitting here not doing anything else until he comes up with those changes.

[LSky]

Maybe this is an answer?

[Ailure]

Part of the unbalance is the bigger airports. Originally there was just a small airport and a large airport (now called city airport) so while airports was highly profitable they would choke up rather quickly. To the point I think they were designed inefficiently by Chris Sawyer on purpose. To my surprise there is no way to turn off those larger airport, at least from what I can judge from the wiki (can't check the actual game right now). Personally I do find those new airports fun to use though, so I'd rather balance the aircraft in other ways.

Using the new noise system seems to be the most drastic way to make airports require more effort (you have to put the larger airports quite a distance from cities, and use trains/buses to feed the airport with passengers).

[Yexo]

To my surprise there is no way to turn off those larger airport

The only way to do so would be via a NewGRF. Only currently there is no NewGRF that does that.

[mauried]

Whilst I agree with the above, a player who plays with just ships for example, will never beat a player who uses just trains, so by the same token trains are grossly
unbalanced.
Games like this can never be totally balanced, but its silly to exclude parts of the game because of this.
A better solution to the planes problem would be to make the towns far more reluctant to allow the building of large airports near them
so the actual cost of building a large airport would also include vary large sums of bribe money to the town to allow the airport to be built.

[adf88]

A bunch of servers turn off airplanes at all or hardly reduce allowed number of machines. It shows that something is not right and that changes are needed.

The easiest solution is to refine various constants:

• airplane prices, running costs, release dates and capacities
• crash frequency
• airport prices, release dates and catchment areas

Perhaps a general "airplane refinement" NewGRF could do the trick so server maintainers would have a ready all-in-one solution available.

[PikkaBird]

I've said it before many times; the biggest unbalancing factor with aircraft is large maps and unbridled passenger growth. If coal mines increased production as constantly and reliably as towns do, would you complain that coal-carrying trains were unbalanced and needed fixing?

Try playing a game with at least some of a smaller map size, av8 aircraft, infrastructure costs, and a building set like TaI that restricts town growth. See how you fare with aircraft in that environment.

[adf88]

the biggest unbalancing factor with aircraft is large maps and unbridled passenger growth

So why not reduce maximal efficiency of a single airport?

Try playing a game with at least some of a smaller map size, av8 aircraft, infrastructure costs, and a building set like TaI that restricts town growth. See how you fare with aircraft in that environment.

That's not a solution for server maintainers.

[Frank327]

Actually, in the 1.2.0 beta-1 there's already a way to balance it out. With infrastructure costs enabled (from advanced settings), just 2 small airports will cost you some 100k every year in maintenance. Infrastructure for ships (docks, canals, shipyard) costs almost nothing, and roads/rails cost a bit more.

[Wasila]

I'm pretty sure that certain aircraft newGRFs bring the price of purchasing/running planes way up. av8?

[Frank327]

Another thing that has been added in 1.2.0 is that aircraft can now have limited range (new parameter for Newgrfs). That way the whole flying to the other side of the map won't be such a problem anymore. However, first we'll have to wait until there's actual newgrfs with aircraft ranges.

[JGR]

The problem with aircraft is that they are (by default) far too cheap.

Aircraft sets like AV8 have high running costs and high initial costs.
Infrastructure maintenance comes down on airport spam like a tonne of bricks.
Cargo destinations tend to encourage more "realistic" aircraft use, and discourage silly (but profitable) passenger routing.

I don't think that range-limiting all aircraft is the answer, as the primary purpose of air transport is relatively long-distance routes.

[Zeddor]

Problem is that they have way to low depth...

u place 2 ports and start flying... its easy and its profitable..

if u wanna change airplanes you need to do some in depth changes, that forces people to make decissions.


Ive been a developer for dota for a few years helping icefrog make cursial balance changes, and ive been involved in legion/squad td, aswell @ sc2/wc3.

this is not important but I do know what i´m talking about. OTTD is a really nice game, and I have a lot of ideas for it allthough Ive only been playing it for a few months now, so my knowledge is surely somewhat limited.

anyway....

if u wanna change the airplanes in a fasionable way, so that players actually have a challenge and in which it does not hurt the gameplay for vets ect.

1. make manual flypaths.. like trains... drag ur fly routes... it might seem stupid, but time is really a limiting factor in this game. this looks stupid but it would work.
add wind velocity on higher areas ect... the higher the mountains are the slower the planes will go... these are factors that could improve the gameplay, to drag your own route through the terrain as you like

2. make an increasing semi exponential cost for airplanes. like 200k for the first. 300k the next 420k the third and so on. - this would add complexity for players on large maps to rethink how deep they should use airplanes... this would still be profitable on small maps since u would go with a low number of airplanes... this also challenges plaeyrs to make more decissions compared to winning conditions on maps.... e.g. how high CV winnings conditions which is set..

anyway, i have a lot more ideas... if someone are interested.. i am surely new to this community, but ive seen the potential of OTTD for a lot more potential players.

regards. Zed

[XeryusTC]

Ive been a developer for dota for a few years helping icefrog make cursial balance changes, and ive been involved in legion/squad td, aswell @ sc2/wc3.

For such a professional you sure do not know how to type English

Anyway, I don't think that airplanes are inbalanced, they are balanced perfectly fine along the rest of the game with the exception of trains. Trains networks are the thing that are hard to build and manage while all other forms of transport are mainly just about putting down the stops/docks/airports and off you go. If you want to balance the game then you should take that into account.

You should also take into account that the map size has increased since TTD has been released and the economy has been set around a 256x256 area, therefore bigger distances lead to a bigger profit. If you'd really want to balance the game you should take speed as the main factor, not distance. You should also take into account that vehicles and infrastructure have a constant cost of keeping them operating. Within the current economy this is almost negligible. There are NewGRFs which change this ofcourse (try UKRS with running costs and building costs on high and Pikka's basecost newgrf for example, you'll cry). A few games back on the #openttdcoop welcome server there was a basecost newgrf which raised terraforming costs by a factor of 20 IIRC and planes did usually cost several million.

It really isn't the planes which are unbalanced, the entire game is.

[Frank327]

As I said earlier, 1.2.0 already has the infrastructure costs down. It's 50k/year for a small airport already.

But what I think will balance airplanes most of all is cargo/passenger destinations. The difficulty of airplanes wouldn't be placing the airports or making the planes, but creating a big enough network of towns/cities so that the planes actually fill up with passengers/mail. After all, people from one side of the map don't necessarily need to get to that other specific city. But if you create a bus network throughout the region of both airports, it will add a lot more traffic to the airports.

Then maybe we'll see two clearly different building styles with players. One group that goes with classic freight trains first, then expands into a train network. The other would focus on early buses with subsidy, maybe a few passenger trains. Make two small passenger networks, then once you've got the money, build two small airports and start getting the big money.

[Jagg]

You simply could create two baseformulars for each airplane, one that calculates costs/range and another crash/range (120% of maxrange=100% crash ).
e.g. you set an very long distance (like in inbalanced games) your airplane will have a high crash+costs probability or you set a very short distance which will result in very low crash+profit probability.
If you manage to set the distances in an optimal area, then you get a similar profit like a trainsetup. Airplanes have to be more expensive than trains, but the setup is ways easier (build 2 airports and combine them with airplanes, no railways).

[Mini Reddish]

Hmm, one thing that Zeddor mentioned has given me a bit of an idea on how to balance a certain degree, or at least emulate some realism. The use of flight paths, I would think that when creating a flight path as such, it could be a predefined route (Which you have to purchase rights to) that can be assigned to a plane, but it has costs which are based on the distance between airports and the town population. So now, not only do you have the maintenance costs of the plane, you need to make sure that the route can be kept profitable.

Plus, instead of allowing the ability to have as many planes as you'd like on the route, give it a capacity so that only so many can actually use it, it could make it more of a challenge if only so many planes can make it from A to B and there's more than one player attempting the route.

[TERdON]

A further factor which reduces the usability of airplanes is the town noise limits...

[Sabre_Justice]

Airplanes have been Easy Money Mode ever since the original TTD due to how the whole game's set up. But honestly, it's not hard to end up with more money than you know what to do with eventually anyway, once you set up enough routes and businesses. This ain't a hard game, at least by default.

That and did competitive multiplayer ever really work in this game? I thought the point of multiplayer was basically a 'let's see what we can do!' sandbox.