Transport Tycoon Forums

Immagine starting the game in the Arctic climate with a food processing plant miles away from the nearest farm, but close to several above-snowline towns. You think that this could be the cornerstone of your expansion-stratergy, but at the start of the game, you can't afford to build the route, so you decide to do it later. A few years later without any warning, a message apears saying that the industry is shutting down. It's too early to afford to fund a new industry, and despite there being a few other industries in the vicinity, it all of a sudden no longer becomes viable focus on building another node of your empire in that area.

How many times has something like that happened to you? Don't you wish there was some sort of advance warning for when an industry would close down?

What I propose is that a warning of the closure is given a year in advance, and you have a year to supply the industry or else it will shut down (this could be implemented in a similar way to subsidies). I beleve that with the New Industries that stockpile produced goods, the industries also close down if not enough goods are delivered (serviced). A message could pop up that says "Industry X will close down if it does not recieve a supply of Cargo Y within a year" or "Industry X will close down if it does not deliver a supply of Cargo Y within a year" (in the case of the latter, the cargo must be delivered at it's destination within the timelimit to stop the industry from closing doen).

In fact, if the industry does succeed in being supplied/serviced, the player could even be given a bonus or a mini-subsidy (the percentage-increase of the revenue is halved from the regular subsidy percentage-increase), but this is probably not a good idea as it will encourage players to deliberately starve industries so they can recieve a mini-subsidy, but on the other hand, it could compensate players for having to go out their way just to connect their preferred industry that is about to close (in this case, a cash-bonus (equivalent to approximately the price of a certain type of locomotive (eg. the locomotive used to deliver the goods)) is better than a subsidy).

Also, are industries that are part of a subsidy-offer prevented from closing down? I can't recall this happening recently, but I might have a vague memory of it from when playing TTDLX all those years ago.

I especially find it annoying when a factory or refinery suddenly closes down although I had already laid rail to it and my first train was about to arrive. So yes, I agree that there should be some kind of warning in advance. Maybe a player should be given the option to himself subsidise an industry (by paying a bit of money) in order to delay the industry from closing down by a year.

Done in ECS Vectors beta 4.

Thanks. I appreciate this . However, I was hoping this would have been built into the main game so that other industry sets don't have to duplicate George's ECS closure mechanism in their GRFs. Also, if this was part of the main game, the original industries would have this closure mechanism too.

AE.

electricmonk wrote:Thanks. I appreciate this . However, I was hoping this would have been built into the main game

The game can't predict whether or not newgrf industry will close in a year except by running the entire simulation forward by a year, even if the closure is entirely deterministic.

The same applies to original industries, plus the fact that they are heavily controlled by the RNG. Most user actions will change how many times the RNG gets called.