road vehicle or train negative profit

[icmike5]

I don't see an easy fix other than bumping up the maintenance frequency. What are my other option besides selling it?

[Tafidis]

I am guessing you mean this (?):

Vehicles older than 2 years that make negative profit lower your performance rating. However, they are often useful (as part of feeder systems etc).

If you auto-renew (what you refer too as servicing-selling, I guess) every 2 years, you may alleviate this problem.

I don't know any other way, unfortunately.

[icmike5]

I don't see a auto-renew. I only see where I can adjust the service frequency from 150 days down to 30 days. So if I have a bus that is consistently losing money, my only option is to sell it?

Looking more into the details I see this bus is the only one in a town of 1683 population. Could the problem be I need more buses in that town?

[Tafidis]

Maybe I misunderstood you.

Could you try to explain it a bit more?

I don't understand how servicing interval has anything to do with negative profit.

If the bus is not making money you can sell it, OR try changing its orders to "full load" to make sure it is not travelling empty

[icmike5]

So servicing the vehicle more often has nothing to do with negative profit? I was thinking maybe because it was breaking down. Thanks for clearing that up.

So if a vehicle has a negative profit, all that means is to review it's orders and make sure they're full load, OR the other option is to sell it? Those are my only options? Are their any other details I can review for that vehicle?

[PikkaBird]

If the actual question is "Can someone explain why this vehicle is making negative profits?", a savegame or at least a screenshot would be immeasurably helpful.

[SquireJames]

Pikka speaks the truth, although I shall endeavour to aid you without one

The first thing is, is the route it's self profitable for the type of transport you are using? It may be that that route is too short to be economically viable for rail traffic. I find myself doing this a lot with UKRS2, not that Pikkas set is unbalanced, I just find that certain routes become unprofitable as technology advances and I have to close them down and run road vehicles on that route instead. (I was horrified when I realised I was basically the re-encarnation of Dr Beeching!)

Second thing is similar to the first, but rail specific. Are you running too short a train? While frequency is good (i.e 2 trains with 6 waggons will probably get a higher transport rating than 1 train with 12 waggons) sometimes in order to run at a profit you will need to reduce the number of trains and increase the length, so that for each locomotive you make more money.

Finally, mainly rail orientated but also road to an extent, are you using too powerful and expensive a locomotive/truck? In the UKRS2 case I mentioned, some routes are just too unproductive to increase train length, and if I keep the same train length, the locomotives running cost is too high to be profitable. You might want to downgrade to a cheaper to run locomotive (i.e don't use Deltics on cattle trains!) and see if that helps.

Sometimes however, you just need to close the route down. Pretty realistic when you think about it. As time marches on, sometimes formerly productive lines become untenable. You can always leave them in place and run them at a loss, offset by either a profit in a later part of the chain (i.e If your iron ore traffic is suddenly unprofitable, you can leave it in place if your steel mill traffic makes a good profit. You lose money on the iron to make money on the steel essentially) or by other services. Remember, in real life, Passenger services rarely made (or indeed still make) profit; they were a necessary evil and their costs were offset by the profit made in freight traffic (where the REAL money is in transport) and partially by the prestige that crack expresses brought.

[icmike5]

Thanks both for your help. Nice details Squire.

So with this screenshot, how can I determine what the actual problem is?

[planetmaker]

OMFG, you really only supply the least possible amount of information, and that only when asked by at least two people? Is it that you really want your question answered or are you just making an interesting psychological study on when the first person will complain about this unbearable behaviour of yours?

Check out the orders of your vehicle(s) and whether the stations in the order list accept the cargo actually where it tries to deliver it. Possibly add explicit depot orders.

[Yexo]

You can see in that screenshot already that your vehicle is currently full with 25 tons of grain and heading to the farm. Yes, it's transporting grain from the farm back to the same farm.

For next time: a savegame is 100x better than a single screenshot.

[icmike5]

planetmaker: I'm trying to figure out the right questions to ask. I've read the tutorials. I'm still trying to understand the GUI. You TELL me what data to supply and I'll post it! Why do you think I'm posting here?

To the others, thanks for your kind replies.

[Yexo]

icmike5: You were assuming way too much. You open a topic with as title "road vehicle or train negative profit", and the contents of your first post are "I don't see an easy fix other than bumping up the maintenance frequency. What are my other option besides selling it?". So you're assuming already that the negative profit has to do with the maintenance frequency. PikkaBird realized your actual question and SquireJames posted a nice general explanation about possible problems. The question PikkaBird posted should have been your own along with a savegame in your first post.

After being asked for more information you post a screenshot which includes the vehicle but not the orders and I don't see a factory in it either (where you have to move the grain too). As such the only conclusion can be "your orders are probably wrong", which planetmaker already gave you. You could've saved everyone here a lot of trouble by directly posting a savegame.

[icmike5]

Sorry I didn't realize what "post a savegame" was until now. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something in the road vehicle details screen.

http://wiki.openttd.org/FAQ_gameplay doesn't really cover some real basic stuff that you guys already know.

[Yexo]

http://wiki.openttd.org/FAQ_gameplay doesn't really cover some real basic stuff that you guys already know.

Which basic stuff is missing from that page? If you could list the things that are missing someone can add them.

[SquireJames]

As was touched upon above, it seems as if you are trying to deliver Grain to the town. This won't work. Grain has to be delivered to a Factory (in the vanilla game at least).

[fantom1979]

From what I am seeing the screenshot, I would advise two things.

1. Your raw material (in this case grain) has to be transported to a processing center (in this case a factory). Towns cannot use grain on their own. You have to transport the grain to a factory, which in turn produces goods, which then can be transported to towns.

See this for more information: http://wiki.openttd.org/Industries

2. Your road vehicle is 31 years old, buts its lifespan is only 15 years. This vehicle should be replaced to stop it from constantly breaking down. You can replace the vehicle manually by coping its orders to a new vehicle and retiring the older one, or you can turn on "Autorenew vehicle when it gets old" in the advanced settings.

http://wiki.openttd.org/Advanced_Settin ... t_gets_old

[Transportman]

Since some time (nightlies and testing have it for sure, stable I'm not sure of) you can choose to display the chain a certain industry needs to go from raw products to goods. Click the industry you want to know the chain of and search for the button Display Chain or something like that. For farms it is Farm->Factory->Town that accepts goods. Can be a good place to look if you are new and don't know where things need to go.

Like others said before: your orders are probably wrong, transporting grain from a farm to a city that doesn't accept grain on its own. It needs to go to a factory, so search for a nearby factory and send your vehicle there.