[Suggestion] Coal, Power Plants and Electrified Rails

[aantono]

Basically here is the gist:
I've been reading a lot of posts where people were asking "What's the point of transporting Coal to Power Plants". Besides getting insanely rich very quick, there isn't currently any motivation to do that. (Unless you are using FIRS and there is no PP, and Coal gets delivered to Still Mill instead). Not sure if the GRF spec allows this to be implemented, but how about making ability of trains to use Electrified Tracks to be dependent on Power Stations (if they exist) to be delivered Coal to and thus produce electricity. The details can be worked out if the general feasibility of this exist. (One could also follow this through even further and say that before you can have Diesel locomotives, you should have Gasoline be produced at the refinery).

Thoughts?

[Baldy's Boss]

I've said something similar...that there should be power grids that depend on power stations being supplied (and they shouldn't be exclusively coal-fired).Towns with electricity should grow faster.

[kamnet]

It's been suggested many times over the years. Somebody would have to completely rewrite a significant chunk of the game to make rails reliant on the presence of power stations and all of that. This is probably going to fall into the category of "too much work for too little gameplay".

Coal, really, is just "stuff", and the point of the game is to move stuff from one part of the map to another part of the map to generate points and be better at it than anybody else playing the game. You can have a few stuff or many stuff, and a lot of each stuff or many of each stuff. If you start tinkering with the stuff so that you have to have the stuff before you can move the stuff, you're going to end up messing with the basic game play model, and very likely not for the better.

[Eddi]

suppose you need coal for steam trains, fuel for diesel trains and electricity for everything else. how do you ever get started? what if your network deadlocked and you need to start over after missing a few deliveries?

i can't possibly see this resulting in good gameplay.

[Alberth]

For new users, coal is attractive, as it's simple to understand that coal must go to the power plant, and it pays sufficiently. It also provides a challenge quite soon for them when you start adding more mines.

I did coal for a long time as money maker, to simplify getting started. In my newer games however, I also stopped doing that, too boring to spend time on.
Instead I do the more interesting chains where you have to transport output of one factory to the next.


As with many things in openttd, the default setup of the game is not the most interesting for players. It can however not easily be changed, as we would kill backwards compatibility.

The way out is to find additions in the form of NewGRFs and game scripts or AIs, that you like. Many players also change the goal of the game ("make money" is hardly interesting anymore once you understand how to do it, although there are a lot of extensions to make that goal more complicated and more difficult to achieve).

The ultimate form of customization is to make your own extensions or even change openttd itself. It takes time to do it, but it's fun to do, and you learn a lot from it. Biggest downside in my experience is that you have little time left to actually play with your modifications

[skippern]

One way to do this that (I believe) doesn't require too much coding is to have power plants "trigger" the arrival of electrical trains.

If Coal delivered to PP than electrical trains are made available earlier than if no coal delivered to PP.

I have also hoped that an active PP within the influence of a town or city can have impact on its growth.

[Wahazar]

I have also hoped that an active PP within the influence of a town or city can have impact on its growth.

It already works with RCG script.

By the way, in my manpower grf, I changed default steel mill function - now you must deliver coal to increase iron ore consumption/steel production rate, otherwise stockpile limit would be reached.
Additionally, mines have huge but finite resources - in conjunction with above, burning all coal in power plants is not wise (however power plants are convenient to use as "surplus eater").

[Tante2k]

Sorry for bringing back a nine year old thread from the dead, but what did you mean by RCG already having this functionality?

It doesn't seem to be present in the current version?