Optional engine power reduction

[jamikea]

After having played Simutrans for a while now, one thing I love about it is that you really have to care about whether an engine is capable of actually pulling a train or not.

Today I installed OTTD again. I use the American Transition set with freight weight set to x4. First line, pulling coal to a power plant with length 10 trains. There are no slopes on the track but with freight weight quadrupled (giving a total weight of ~1000t for eight fully loaded wagons) I'd expect that I have to choose an engine with reasonable power.

But I just took the very weakest engine (save the Doodlebug and the Shay), a 2-8-0 Consolidation with 1000 kW, and it takes only two squares to reach it's max speed. There are engines with many times the power of a Consolidation which I consider not very useful.

Also the increase in freight weight only applies to loaded trains.

I know that this is a matter of newgrfs for one thing and a matter of personal preference for the other. But I wonder if it wouldn't be easy and nice to have an option to reduce engine power by a constant factor? This would be an incentive to use stronger engines.
What would the ottd physics experts think about this, would it work out in the expected way?

[jamikea]

sorry, this should have gone in the "suggestions" forum...

[Dimme]

Sounds like a good idea. An alternative would be to include the weight of wagons in the freight multiplier, no reason to have two switches AFAIK.

You can of course increase the freight muliplier even more, I often set it to 10. But I suppose you know that...

[jamikea]

You are right, including wagon weight could improve the situation. But I'd also like to have it for passenger wagons then.

[audigex]

People don't weigh all that much on top of the carriage itself.

Make the train longer, or make your own version of the GRF (with permission of the author, naturally).

Try using a different GRF too - I find the US set to contain very powerful locomotives (on account of that's what actual american trains have) - with the UK set and a 10x multiplier you'll need to double-head all but the shortest freight trains, and with a 5+ tile pax train there's very little occurance of "too much accelleration"

[jamikea]

People don't weigh all that much on top of the carriage itself.

Yes, I meant the weight of the carriage, not the people. Still, I don't like the fact that only the freight weight is increased and there is such a vast difference between empty and loaded trains. Why not just multiply the overall weight of the train?

[audigex]

I think the idea is that an empty wagon is actually pretty light - most GRF sets have quite a low speed (<90mph) for freight wagons anyway.

[jungle]

But I just took the very weakest engine (save the Doodlebug and the Shay), a 2-8-0 Consolidation with 1000 kW, and it takes only two squares to reach it's max speed. There are engines with many times the power of a Consolidation which I consider not very useful.

This is true - but this fast acceleration an inevitable result of trying to compress activities (like pulling coal across a large country) which would take days in real life but need to fit into a few minutes (and therefore very short actual distances and waiting times) to make the game playable. If the trains took as long as real freight trains to accelerate, they wouldn't get even a tenth of the way to top speed before reaching the next stop.

[Eddi]

imho, there should be "scale factors", which control how to map certain real-world measures to in game measures.

this includes:

• amount of ticks per day (defines technological advance)
• amount of production per day (defines economical advance)
• amount of tiles for acceleration (amount of ticks (or tiles) a normed vehicle with power X and weight Y needs to accelerate to Z speed)
• amount of "real" vehicles that one game vehicle should represent (replaces freighttrain setting)

and probably a few more, like effect of slopes/curves, time/distance for payment rates, ...

[DJ Nekkid]

first of all, did you turn "realistic acceleration"?
second:
the game isnt realistic anyway...

an aircraft can accelerate to its takeoff speed in about 5-8x its own length, a fotball stadium is about as long and wide as four engines/wagons or about a airplane and a half, the largest skyscraper is as wide as two train wagons, a cities station may be about the same size as the city itself.

all in all, try to hook up with belugas, and talk to him about realizm

[Bilbo]

No, the game is not realistic, just look at http://wiki.openttd.org/Game_mechanics#Vehicle_speeds

.... for vehicle speed purposes, a tile is 429 miles (686km) on a side!

So aircrafts in OpenTTD are about 300-700 km long (pity that their capacity is so small considered that), runways are around 3000-4000 km.

And planes have probably unlimited range. I've seen aircraft in OpenTTD flying about 170 million km without landing or refueling.

Yep, the scales are completely "off". Engine needs two squares (=1372 km) to reach full speed? Wow, that's pretty weak engine...

[Eddi]

the game does not have to be "realistic". my suggestion is to clearly define the involved scales, and make them adjustable slightly to change their impact on gameplay.

you WILL care more about trying to prevent a train to stop if it needs 20 tiles to get to speed (~2-3 station lengths), so you need to design your network differently. daylength also has nothing to do with "realism", it slows down the introduction of new vehicles, so you can use the individual vehicle types longer.