Passanger cargodist overloaded

[MStarha]

I started playing with cargodist, which helps to make transfers automatically, and adds a bit of realism to the game which I like. However, now I am playing on my second map, because in the first one my company went to bankruptcy, because I could not keep up with the demand and passangers got to their destination late and thus paying too little (at least that's my theory).

On my second map I barely make any profit despite having multiple trains going throught the stations. I learned not to put more that 5 stations in a city, because the more stations you have, the more passanger want to travel to the city and thus increasing the problem.

I do not want to "just add more trains" because that is not the way I want to play.

And even whe I add more trains, it seems to help for a bit, but then the demand increases and the route is overloaded once again.

I like large hilly maps with long distances between cities so the travel times are usually somewhere between 30-60 days.

I tried making profit with industry but that help only on a small scale. (I want to build passenger network and then add industry servicing.

Could you guys give me some tips or tricks on how to play with cargodist? How to handle overloaded routes?

In the attachment you can find the most recent save of my second map. I am playing with Firs and CZTR graphics and some other NewGRFs, but I hope you can view it without the full list.

Thank you very much.

[LaChupacabra]

Hey MStarha
Without NewGRF with trains, I couldn't run the game (they didn't go), but I can see what the problem is.

1. Important: You have inflation on - this makes costs rise faster than revenues and can get really hard over time. Recently, Baldy's Boss reported a very similar problem. I also wrote him some tips and maybe they will help you (here). Soon inflation in OTTD will be turned off by default, which is good because many players have problems with it and it's need to build really efficient connections to keep generating profits.
In this game, after 140 years turning off inflation will do not much, but anyway if you want to continue, you should turn it off. You can also add a Base Cost Mod to the game with which you can cut costs, and for future games, just turn off inflation before you start them.

2. Less important: You don't have enough trains - OTTD is not a simulator, here it all has its mechanics simplified. So here it is important that connections are served frequently enough, even when it comes to a small village - the more often, the better your rating of the station and the more passengers will appear. Generally, one vehicle per month is sufficient for the connection. It is definitely less common on many lines.
If you would like to keep "realistic" train spacing, there is a version of the JGR game where you can slow down the passage of time (even 1/125). As a result, there will be fewer passengers at the stations, and connections will not require such frequent service.

3. See where the passengers want to go - Cargodist may designate any station as a target, but only one to which there is a connection. If you create, even by accident, a London - Paris connection, but with a change in Tokyo, the cargodist will send passengers this way, but you will receive a fee not much more than for a straight line connection. The second or last vehicle in transport chain can have a very large negative income - it is a refund of the overpaid amount for the previous part of the route. By subtracting the cost of such a route, you may find that you will only lose on it.
Information about the direction in which passengers "want" to go can be seen in the station window - next to the number of waiting passengers you have the + icon - press it.

[Eddi]

i haven't looked at your specific savegame, but there are in general multiple problems compounding each other that lead to problems like this.

1. when a passenger makes a transfer, or stays in a vehicle during a stop, that's the same as if it's leaving and a completely new passenger appears. thus when a passenger travels on average 4 stops, you need 4 times the capacity to transport them.
2. there are too many passengers generated. when towns grow, buildings of low density get replaced with buildings of higher density. for a long time, this caused a quadratic growth of the number of passengers generated. there is now a setting to switch this to linear growth.
3. capacity matters. without transfers, if you don't have enough capacity, the passengers will simply pile up at their origin station, which doesn't harm you in a significant way. your station rating drops slightly, and if it drops too low, some of them may leave. however, if you have transfers, then this may happen at intermediate stations, which means they already used up some of your transport capacity (i.e. caused costs to you), but have not yet paid anything. since passengers only pay on arrival at the final destination, it is really important to make sure all of them are transported at intermediate stations.
4. the weakest link will define the capacity of your whole network. if one link is overloaded, quickly that propagates to all nearby links, which makes it hard to determine which one is the real bottleneck

you have a number of ways to influence all of this

1. add more trains/trams/whatever
2. provide alternate travel routes to relieve overloaded ones
3. use newgrf vehicles that have higher capacity. some NewGRFs offer short-distance vehicles with higher capacity but lower payment rate
4. use newgrf house sets that have lower density (most of them tend to have higher density, though)
5. increase "effect of distance on demand" to reduce the number of stops that people travel (this tends to negatively impact industrial cargo networks, so handle with care)

[arikover]

[...]
I do not want to "just add more trains" because that is not the way I want to play.
[...]

In case you feel you have too many passengers, there are 3 solutions that I can think of:

1. If you didn't already: turn "Town Cargo Generation" to linear (that helps for big towns as Eddi stated)
2. You can try some vehicle NewGRFs that have higher capacities (Iron Horse and JapanSet have such a parameter)
3. If none of the above solves your problem (or if don't want to change your NewGRFs), you can give the daylength patch a try (it is in the JGR Patchpack). With a daylength factor of 10, time passes 10 times slower, which means you have 10 times more time to pick up passengers. That means you can work with 10 times less vehicles. But the running costs are 10 times higher.

[MStarha]

Thank you guys so much. I will try to keep your advice in mind while playing. For now I will leave NewGRFs intact, but I have turned off inflation and cargo town generation was already set to linear. Sadly I think I will need to start a new map, since this one is most likely beyond saving (or at least without much struggle).

If you have any more ideas, I will by gratefull, if you post them here.

[nihues]

Another 2 settings I change from default:

Put on symmetric mode for mail and pax, and use 75-90% of ammount of returning cargo symmetry
Reduce Saturation of short paths (now defaults to 80% (was 100%) but you can go 60-40% if needed, 80% seems ok now) lower will force cargo make alternate routes (if has one).

Another thing that helps a LOT is Effect of distance on demands on settings (already said), change it higher, I use 180% on my normal 1024x1024 maps and helps a lot (it will make more passagers prefer short routes instead of long ones).

And I always use 6+ daylength now, otherwise you end with 4 lines+ each way to handle all the trains needed, it will turn into a (messy) rail simulator (unless you see some openttdcoop games, that are messy very organized games), more daylength things are more realistic at least.

[JGR]

If you are using the JGR patchpack, there is a setting to control the rate of town cargo generation (passenger, mail), which you can use if you only want to reduce the quantity of those without affecting anything else. Using daylength is a less targetted change in that it affects the whole economy and you may need to tweak your playing style accordingly.

I tend to find myself gradually reducing the rate of passenger/mail generation as the size of my passenger network increases.