New to OpenTTD, confused about ships

[baronjutter]

So I started my first game and saw a nice opportunity. Two coastal coal mines on one side of a large bay and a power plant on the other. I build 2 docks and a boat house, bought a cargo ship, set up a route and told it to load at the coal mines and unload at the power plant. Simple, just setting up a train.

Problem is, it won't load anything, the dock gets no cargo. I've managed to muddle through everything in the game (seriously pleeeease implement tool-tips) but getting sea transport working still confuses me.

Also my trains seem to break down very very frequently. Is there some servicing mechanism I'm not understanding? Is there a way to automatically set upkeep?

Very cool game, I remember playing TTD as a kid but the interface has no aged well. Any intentions of maybe improving the interface?

[PikkaBird]

Welcome!

First thought - is the ship refitted to carry the right cargo?

Tool tips can be viewed by right-clicking - this is a legacy "feature" from TTD. You can change them to appear when hovering in the advanced settings menu (Interface > General) if that's preferable.

Also my trains seem to break down very very frequently. Is there some servicing mechanism I'm not understanding? Is there a way to automatically set upkeep?

"Very frequently" is subjective, but you can change the breakdown rate to "reduced" or "none" in the advanced settings (Vehicles > Disasters / Accidents) if you like (note that this is a per-game setting and changing it in the main menu won't affect existing savegames). Otherwise, yes, trains will service in depots automatically. You can adjust the servicing interval in the vehicle information panel if you want to make it more frequent.

[Transportman]

Also my trains seem to break down very very frequently. Is there some servicing mechanism I'm not understanding? Is there a way to automatically set upkeep?

If you regularly force vehicles to go to their depot (either by orders or by track design), it reduces the amount of breakdowns you have, but in the end vehicles will always break down at some point. You can try setting the amount of breakdowns to reduced (somewhere in Advanced settings) to see if that helps, or turn them off completely.

[baronjutter]

Thanks for the amazingly fast replies! I never knew I had to specify the cargo ship for coal duty, now I remember!!

[FLHerne]

(seriously pleeeease implement tool-tips)

Tooltips exist (hover for a ridiculously long time by default, can be shortened or changed to right-click in the Adv. Settings).

tooltips.png (45.58 KiB) Viewed 10013 times

[ccomley]

So I started my first game and saw a nice opportunity. Two coastal coal mines on one side of a large bay and a power plant on the other. I build 2 docks and a boat house, bought a cargo ship, set up a route and told it to load at the coal mines and unload at the power plant. Simple, just setting up a train.

Problem is, it won't load anything, the dock gets no cargo. I've managed to muddle through everything in the game (seriously pleeeease implement tool-tips) but getting sea transport working still confuses me.

Also my trains seem to break down very very frequently. Is there some servicing mechanism I'm not understanding? Is there a way to automatically set upkeep?

Very cool game, I remember playing TTD as a kid but the interface has no aged well. Any intentions of maybe improving the interface?

Ships are a problem.

First, try the "FISH" add-in, gives you a wider range of ship sizes and capacities, and so on.

Second, are you sure your new ship is capable of carrying coal? Some chips can carry a variety of items BUT only one at a time, and you have to "refit" them. Send the ship to a depot (shipyard!), once it's stopped, see the third icon on the right of it's little window ungreys. It's brown. Click it, and you can choose what cargo type to refit for. Then just re-start it.

If that isn't it, check the coverage area of your dock actually includes the mine. (Click to create a new dock and hover over the exact same place, if the creat-dock dialog doesn't show it would "Supply coal", the cover isn' good enough.) If the cover is short of the mine, create a "truck station" near the mine, but as you click, hold down Ctrl. Then "link" this new truck station to the existing Dock. You don't need to connect the truck station to a road. Merely having it there nearer the mine extends the "combined" station's coverage.

BUT all in all, expect to be disappointed. It's very hard to make money from ships. They're too slow. For the most part I run two classes of ships. (1) Oil tankers. Delivering oil from offshore rigs to nearby rail heads. The ships don't make a lot of money, some may lose money, but you can make a lot of cash from transporting the oil to refineries (if your beach-head wasn't near one) and the goods from refineries to towns. (b) Fast catamaran passenger craft. These won't necessarily make a lot of money BUT your oil platforms will live longer and grow production faster if you service their passenger traffic as well as collecting all their oil! I also run passenger cats across lakes - mostly for eye-candy!

[Dave]

(seriously pleeeease implement tool-tips)

Tooltips exist (hover for a ridiculously long time by default, can be shortened or changed to right-click in the Adv. Settings).

tooltips.png

Other way round. Default is the right click (as Pikka said, this is a legacy of the original TTD...)

[andythenorth]

FISH is rubbish and full of cruft. I forked the project and killed the original development team. Try Squid Ate FISH instead.

[Eddi]

(seriously pleeeease implement tool-tips)

Tooltips exist (hover for a ridiculously long time by default, can be shortened or changed to right-click in the Adv. Settings).

tooltips.png

Other way round. Default is the right click (as Pikka said, this is a legacy of the original TTD...)

what are you talking about? hovering has been default over right click since the setting was introduced.

the problem is, the default delay is 2s, with a stepping of 1s, where something like 250ms would be a sane value...

[Kevo00]

BUT all in all, expect to be disappointed. It's very hard to make money from ships. They're too slow. For the most part I run two classes of ships. (1) Oil tankers. Delivering oil from offshore rigs to nearby rail heads. The ships don't make a lot of money, some may lose money, but you can make a lot of cash from transporting the oil to refineries (if your beach-head wasn't near one) and the goods from refineries to towns. (b) Fast catamaran passenger craft. These won't necessarily make a lot of money BUT your oil platforms will live longer and grow production faster if you service their passenger traffic as well as collecting all their oil! I also run passenger cats across lakes - mostly for eye-candy!

He should be alright with coal, though. Its quite a slow cargo payment good.

[baronjutter]

Thanks for all the info guys!

Are there any mods that improve city construction? I hate seeing skyscrapers replaced by houses then replaced by a park then replaced by a tower then replaced by a different tower over and over. Some improved algorithm that only demolishes and replaces buildings if it's a big enough upgrade? So many of my cities barely grow because every time they get a new building they place it on top of a building of equal or often greater value. It also just looks silly.

I saw on the wiki there's a "fund local development" option but in my cites I only ever have small medium and large advertising campaigns. Was this feature removed or do I need to find it some other way?

Also do passengers actually have destinations and transfer vehicles or does it not matter where you dump them? Like a railway that has 3 stops, would passengers from stop A ever travel to stop C or is it simply everyone gets on stop A, everyone gets off stop B and vanishes, then everyone from stop B gets on and then gets off at stop C.

If I have a map with many coal mines and power plants is it better to feed every plant or focus on one? Is there any sort of demand system where the more cargo you feed something the less money you get? In railroad tycoon you can't just dump all of X cargo at one place, they have limited demands.

[Alberth]

I saw on the wiki there's a "fund local development" option but in my cites I only ever have small medium and large advertising campaigns. Was this feature removed or do I need to find it some other way?

You need more money, options that cost more than you have are not shown.

Also do passengers actually have destinations and transfer vehicles or does it not matter where you dump them? Like a railway that has 3 stops, would passengers from stop A ever travel to stop C or is it simply everyone gets on stop A, everyone gets off stop B and vanishes, then everyone from stop B gets on and then gets off at stop C.

By default it does, I think. In the Advanced Settings, you can switch on cargo-dist to get cargo with a desire to go to some place.
If you enable it for passengers, you'll need a much bigger network to move everything (passengers come in big numbers, so if they transfer, you need to move 2 or 3 times that big number).

If I have a map with many coal mines and power plants is it better to feed every plant or focus on one? Is there any sort of demand system where the more cargo you feed something the less money you get? In railroad tycoon you can't just dump all of X cargo at one place, they have limited demands.

Default industries accept anything until you hit some upper limit.
There are other industry sets, that modify this system. The one that comes closest to your idea is probably ECS, which has an upper limit on the amount of cargo you can bring each month.
Whether that is a good thing(tm) is another matter, opinions vary.

[Dave]

what are you talking about? hovering has been default over right click since the setting was introduced.

the problem is, the default delay is 2s, with a stepping of 1s, where something like 250ms would be a sane value...

Meh, whatever. I'm just throwing spanners in the works clearly haha. Apologies.

[Eddi]

Are there any mods that improve city construction? I hate seeing skyscrapers replaced by houses then replaced by a park then replaced by a tower then replaced by a different tower over and over. Some improved algorithm that only demolishes and replaces buildings if it's a big enough upgrade? So many of my cities barely grow because every time they get a new building they place it on top of a building of equal or often greater value. It also just looks silly.

building sets can specify the (average) lifetime of buildings, so if a NewGRF sets these values higher, there will be less replacement. i do not know which building sets set these values in which way, though.

[ccomley]

FISH is rubbish and full of cruft. I forked the project and killed the original development team. Try Squid Ate FISH instead.

I shall. In what way is it better? Does it solve the basic problem that ships almost never turn a profit?

[ccomley]

Also do passengers actually have destinations and transfer vehicles or does it not matter where you dump them? Like a railway that has 3 stops, would passengers from stop A ever travel to stop C or is it simply everyone gets on stop A, everyone gets off stop B and vanishes, then everyone from stop B gets on and then gets off at stop C.

If I have a map with many coal mines and power plants is it better to feed every plant or focus on one? Is there any sort of demand system where the more cargo you feed something the less money you get? In railroad tycoon you can't just dump all of X cargo at one place, they have limited demands.

IN the "basic" game, with "cargo distribution" turned off (or not even there if you have an older edition) any station that "accepts" passengers will take all you can send there, and probably generate a lot you can take back the other way, so running a passenger express back and forth between two cities is pretty lucrative. If you get more advanced and turn cargo dist on, passengers are no longer "dumb" but want to go somewhere in particular. They'll get on your train if it's going in the right general direction, and you get some credit when they get off later even if they then get on another train. SO you can have A to B, and B to C, and C to D trains, and you will get some passengers trying to get from A to D, who will go via B and C, for example. You end up with a more complex network to manage. But you also get less profit coz half the time passengers don't get off the train, to pay you and let more get on, but stay on to go to the next stop, etc., whilst half the passengers at the station wont' get ON your train coz it's going the wrong way.

I find this *too* frustrating when you have mixed stations, e.g. you have 2000 passengers waiting at Station A, but only half want to go by train, the other half are waiting to get to that nearby town that is only serviced by a few buses at 25 passengers a trip. The other problem is, if you leave CD turned on for goods... for example I had an oil terminal where all the ships unloaded oil, then trains took it to the refinery (I know ships could go to teh refinery, but as noted ships arn't profitable, so I have them go a fairly short way and trains take the oil the rest of the way). When that route got saturated, I started running trains to a second refinery the other way up the main line. But they ran empty - all the oil at the terminal wanted to go to the first refinery. I let it run for a while and SOME of the oil soon said OK, I'll go to the other refinery, but it never balanced up sensibly. Last thing this planet needs is sulky oil!

You can tinker with the settings of course...

AS far as delivering TO a destination, it only really matters if you then want the resulting product. So you can deliver ALL your coal to a single power station if you want. And it's one way to set up your network. Power station with a really big station fed by efficient main lines, then you just click around the map, find a coal mine, give it a station, send the trains from it to the one power station. Or you can choose to feed a larger number of local power stations. A power station that gets no coal ever may randomly shut down and disappear. One that is getting a regular feed will remain. But a factory, say, you have a two-stage decision. Getting raw materials TO the factory is the same - you can feed lots of local factories or one big fat one with a large station. BUT each factory produces a crate of "goods" for each item of raw material delivered. You then need to deliver those goods to a town. That, actually, is one of your big moneymakers. Better still if you have a factory near each town and deliver the goods from Factory A to Town B, then have the same train pick up goods at Factory B and deliver to Town A. (If cargodist is off, else *it* decides where the goods want to go). If you don't service a factory, it *may* disappear.

(There are other "cargo" models you can run - my comments refer to the basic game in the default mode, which seems to me a good place to start until you've learned a trick or three.)

[leifbk]

FISH is rubbish and full of cruft. I forked the project and killed the original development team. Try Squid Ate FISH instead.

I shall. In what way is it better? Does it solve the basic problem that ships almost never turn a profit?

Yes indeed it does. I'm playing a lot with horses and sailing ships starting in 1700, and even the tiny and slow brig (50 tons @ 20 km/h) will turn a handsome profit when Squid is enabled. But don't expect to earn money on a 500 tiles route

[andythenorth]

I've never understood the problem making money with ships. Ridiculously easy. NewShips, FISH, and Squid Ate FISH all print money trivially. Just be better at the game.

[Kevo00]

I've never understood the problem making money with ships. Ridiculously easy. NewShips, FISH, and Squid Ate FISH all print money trivially. Just be better at the game.

Got to agree. Just use ships when they are appropriate and you will be fine. I even use ships for goods and even the slow ferries in FISH can turn a profit. And I would hate to go back to regular OTTD without cargodist, it just makes it so much more interesting.

Splitting freight destinations on cargodist works well with me, I do it to create realistic goods and food distribution networks. Managing a network is part of your job as a transport manager.

[kamnet]

Playing a late 18th century game with both Sailing Ships and FISH almost all of them turned profits hauling mail, passengers and, well, fish.