Station rating and industry growth
Posted: 08 Sep 2013 12:54
Hello
So I'm quite annoyed by the fact that some of my stations have a rating below 80% (around 75-77%). This means that less than 80% of the cargo is transported, which means that the industries are not growing as fast as possible. So I've looked into what affects the station rating and I found some of the mechanics quite unfair.
For instance, up to 17% more cargo can be transported if the max speed of the last vehicle entering the station is above 85 km/h, to a maximum of 255 km/h. This has a lot of negative effects:
- Firstly, using road vehicles becomes highly unfavorable as their max speed only rarely goes above 85 km/h. In my opinion, road vehicles should be a decent alternative to trains when making feeder stations. As it is right now, feeder stations with RV's are very ineffective.
- Secondly, during the first many years of the game (depending on the settings of course) all vehicles are rather slow. This leads to industries growing very slow at first, but then faster and faster. It would be much more logical if industries grew fast at first, but then slower and slower. By the time vehicles of high speed become available, a lot of industries have closed because they weren't serviced by fast enough vehicles.
- The max speed of the vehicle is a weird way of measuring how good a station is serviced. Say I use a train with a max speed of 255 km/h and a TE of 70 as a coal transporter. As long as enough of these were servicing the station, the rating would be very high, even though the vehicles would never reach their max speed. A vehicle with lower max speed but higher TE that would actually transport the coal a lot faster would result in a lower station rating. In classic OpenTTD this way of measuring is okay since new vehicles usually have higher speeds, but this is not the case for most train sets.
Another factor is the age of the last vehicle entering the station. Players are rewarded with 13%, 8% or 4%, depending on whether the vehicle is 0, 1 or 2 years old respectively. This is weird because no-one would ever replace their vehicles every two years. There is no setting to automatically replace vehicles with one of the same type (except for manually sending them all to the depot, selling them and buying new ones, and this gets quite bothersome after some time).
These two factors could be modified. Instead of max vehicle speed, the rating could be affected by how effective the vehicles were at carrying their cargo. Instead of giving such a large penalty for a vehicle that is only three years old it could be lengthened to maybe 10 or 20 years.
I'm alright with stations always having a vehicle ready to load and that there must be very little cargo lying behind to achieve a decent rating. I don't mind building statues, and these two factors only bother me when I'm using road vehicles for an industry that is too far away from the town center to be affected by an advertising campaign - in all other situations I find it easy to get above 80%. I agree with the fact that a constant rating of 100% should be very much impossible.
I know that FIRS is able to alter the way these numbers are calculated, but it doesn't allow for a balanced way. Is there a NewGRF that allows me to change the way station rating is calculated? Or one that changes the way industry growth relies so much on the station rating? A quick fix to this would be to remove the intervals that the chance for industry increase/decrease are in. Instead, they could be directly proportional, meaning that a slightly higher amount of cargo transported would always result in a slightly higher chance of production increase.
So I'm quite annoyed by the fact that some of my stations have a rating below 80% (around 75-77%). This means that less than 80% of the cargo is transported, which means that the industries are not growing as fast as possible. So I've looked into what affects the station rating and I found some of the mechanics quite unfair.
For instance, up to 17% more cargo can be transported if the max speed of the last vehicle entering the station is above 85 km/h, to a maximum of 255 km/h. This has a lot of negative effects:
- Firstly, using road vehicles becomes highly unfavorable as their max speed only rarely goes above 85 km/h. In my opinion, road vehicles should be a decent alternative to trains when making feeder stations. As it is right now, feeder stations with RV's are very ineffective.
- Secondly, during the first many years of the game (depending on the settings of course) all vehicles are rather slow. This leads to industries growing very slow at first, but then faster and faster. It would be much more logical if industries grew fast at first, but then slower and slower. By the time vehicles of high speed become available, a lot of industries have closed because they weren't serviced by fast enough vehicles.
- The max speed of the vehicle is a weird way of measuring how good a station is serviced. Say I use a train with a max speed of 255 km/h and a TE of 70 as a coal transporter. As long as enough of these were servicing the station, the rating would be very high, even though the vehicles would never reach their max speed. A vehicle with lower max speed but higher TE that would actually transport the coal a lot faster would result in a lower station rating. In classic OpenTTD this way of measuring is okay since new vehicles usually have higher speeds, but this is not the case for most train sets.
Another factor is the age of the last vehicle entering the station. Players are rewarded with 13%, 8% or 4%, depending on whether the vehicle is 0, 1 or 2 years old respectively. This is weird because no-one would ever replace their vehicles every two years. There is no setting to automatically replace vehicles with one of the same type (except for manually sending them all to the depot, selling them and buying new ones, and this gets quite bothersome after some time).
These two factors could be modified. Instead of max vehicle speed, the rating could be affected by how effective the vehicles were at carrying their cargo. Instead of giving such a large penalty for a vehicle that is only three years old it could be lengthened to maybe 10 or 20 years.
I'm alright with stations always having a vehicle ready to load and that there must be very little cargo lying behind to achieve a decent rating. I don't mind building statues, and these two factors only bother me when I'm using road vehicles for an industry that is too far away from the town center to be affected by an advertising campaign - in all other situations I find it easy to get above 80%. I agree with the fact that a constant rating of 100% should be very much impossible.
I know that FIRS is able to alter the way these numbers are calculated, but it doesn't allow for a balanced way. Is there a NewGRF that allows me to change the way station rating is calculated? Or one that changes the way industry growth relies so much on the station rating? A quick fix to this would be to remove the intervals that the chance for industry increase/decrease are in. Instead, they could be directly proportional, meaning that a slightly higher amount of cargo transported would always result in a slightly higher chance of production increase.