Is there an economy mod that would not reward distance?

[Etni]

Hello!

I played lots of TTDX back in the day, but I'm completely new to OpenTTD; sorry if this is a silly question. Seeing all these mods, I wonder if there is any that would make the economy more to my liking?

I always thought the game rewards cargo distance way too much. Like for example, if there's a coal mine in one town, and a power station in the next town, you'd think it'd be feasible to connect these two and make business. But nope, in TTD you'll only get pennies for that. Instead, you should transport the coal to a similar power station on the other side of the world. I always thought that was kind of stupid, and it discouraged me from trying a serious economy game. (But I did make tons of silly little fun projects of course.)

So, has anyone else thought the same about the cargo income, and maybe made a mod to change it?

Cheers!

[Protoford]

some folk do well making a living on those pennies.
Maybe more with trucks than planes at such a short distance.
as a transport company, I expect to be paid more for a longer haul, and like the economy as set up in this game.
all part of the fun figuring out what routes and with what type of transport vehicles for what type of cargo.
short trucks.
medium trains, boats.
long planes, ships.
but that's just me.

[leifbk]

Hello!

I played lots of TTDX back in the day, but I'm completely new to OpenTTD; sorry if this is a silly question. Seeing all these mods, I wonder if there is any that would make the economy more to my liking?

I always thought the game rewards cargo distance way too much. Like for example, if there's a coal mine in one town, and a power station in the next town, you'd think it'd be feasible to connect these two and make business. But nope, in TTD you'll only get pennies for that. Instead, you should transport the coal to a similar power station on the other side of the world. I always thought that was kind of stupid, and it discouraged me from trying a serious economy game. (But I did make tons of silly little fun projects of course.)

So, has anyone else thought the same about the cargo income, and maybe made a mod to change it?

Cheers!

The economy that you describe has informally been called the "This coal comes from China so it must be very valuable" model. From a realistic point of view the TT economic model is of course totally broken, as it doesn't take into account the laws of supply and demand. But I don't think that there's any real hope of getting a better one.

Personally I prefer to haul cargo over realistic distances. If you like a challenge, I'll recommend to get the eGRVTS2 road vehicle set, the Sailing Ships and the Fish2 (Squid) ships sets, and then start a game in 1700, with high water level. Typically the speed of transport is 20 km/h. You'll find that routes exceeding 200 tiles is like throwing your investments out of the window. I've got a running thread about this game type over at the Screenshots subforum, and right now I'm about halfway in the project.

[kamnet]

Hello!

I played lots of TTDX back in the day, but I'm completely new to OpenTTD; sorry if this is a silly question. Seeing all these mods, I wonder if there is any that would make the economy more to my liking?

I always thought the game rewards cargo distance way too much. Like for example, if there's a coal mine in one town, and a power station in the next town, you'd think it'd be feasible to connect these two and make business. But nope, in TTD you'll only get pennies for that. Instead, you should transport the coal to a similar power station on the other side of the world. I always thought that was kind of stupid, and it discouraged me from trying a serious economy game. (But I did make tons of silly little fun projects of course.)

So, has anyone else thought the same about the cargo income, and maybe made a mod to change it?

Cheers!

In short - yes lots of people feel the same as you do. No, nobody has yet create a new economy model to replace this. As far as I know, nobody is actually working on such a model.

[Panando]

Hmmm, off the top of my head here are some real life examples of long distance (and in some cases contrary to common sense) freight, I'm a New Zealander so my knowledge is a little biased to down under, but there you go:

New Zealand imports crude oil from overseas (probably middle east)
and exports lamb to Europe
and import oranges from California
and exports cherries to Japan
and ships fish to China, and the the canned fish is shipped back to New Zealand (because labor is cheap in China)
and imports pork from Canada.
Australia exports coal to China, and exports bauxite to New Zealand (because NZ has cheap hydro power), and the aluminum is then exported back overseas.
I have also seen (much to my horror) bottled water from the Italian Alps, in Australia.
And so on...

Some of these transportation jobs are almost literally clear around the world, freight (meat especially) is traded between New Zealand and Europe (New Zealand and Spain are antipodes). So lets just be clear that there is nothing wrong with long freight jobs, at least in terms of realism (there is the ethical issue of food miles ). In some cases this is out of necessity. New Zealand has no oil so has no choice but to import it. But I know NZ has pigs and orange trees. And I'm pretty sure there are sheep in europe. And China definitely has coal, but apparently Australian coal is better for steel making. So if you want to send coal across the map and make up some realistic reasons go nuts.

That's not to say that there aren't problems with the payments model. But the problems run deeper than the payment formula. If I was going to implement a quick modification, it would be to give a base payment for delivering cargo. For example instead of using the actual tile distance, it might use a modified distance equal to 25 + actual_distance / 2, that would result in much higher payments for short deliveries, and halved payments for very long deliveries.
However I don't think a quick fix is really what is needed. Rather a new economic model entirely is needed. But then you would just be playing simutrans which is no fun anyway.

[andythenorth]

Eh? What's the issue. Short routes are profitable. The game pays roughly per-ton-tile, which is a bit like RL per-ton-mile for freight transport. There's a payment bonus for faster delivery, and on short routes cargo is inherently delivered faster.

So the economic model is already stacked in favour of the short routes, with a bit of faff around how much time is spent waiting to load (unprofitable), versus hauling cargo (profitable).

"Screenshots or it didn't happen"

[Eddy Arfik]

if there's a coal mine in one town, and a power station in the next town, you'd think it'd be feasible to connect these two and make business. But nope, in TTD you'll only get pennies for that. Instead, you should transport the coal to a similar power station on the other side of the world. I always thought that was kind of stupid, and it discouraged me from trying a serious economy game.

The economy that you describe has informally been called the "This coal comes from China so it must be very valuable" model. From a realistic point of view the TT economic model is of course totally broken, as it doesn't take into account the laws of supply and demand. But I don't think that there's any real hope of getting a better one.

Personally I prefer to haul cargo over realistic distances

The problem with any kind of "realistic distances" argument is that map scaling is so variable everyone has a different idea of what is "realistic". If for example I have a 2048x2048 map of entire world, you would say a rail line between Beijing and London would be a completely absurd, but if I had a 2048x2048 map of Australia's east coast, the same number of tiles would only represent the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane, ie: a very realistic setup.

As for "supply and demand", I believe that the ECS Vectors have a feature where industries can only process a fixed amount of cargo per month, after that limit is reached they will not accept any more and you will have to send the excess elsewhere.

But then you would just be playing simutrans which is no fun anyway.

+1 to this. The biggest reason I play OpenTTD instead of Simutrans is that I have so many choices, it's not just OpenSourceTTD, it's OpenGameplayTTD. With the right combination of settings and NewGRF's I can create something that represents almost any region in the world, I'm not forced into one particular playing style.

[Wahazar]

Instead of removing distance reward, one should consider "demand" modifier - coal mine should assign fewer coal in case of long distance haul.
This is already done with cargodist, hovewer only if both recipients are connected to the same link.
Properly working procedure for distance dimnished demand is possible only for YACD-type patches.

[leifbk]

The problem with any kind of "realistic distances" argument is that map scaling is so variable everyone has a different idea of what is "realistic". If for example I have a 2048x2048 map of entire world, you would say a rail line between Beijing and London would be a completely absurd, but if I had a 2048x2048 map of Australia's east coast, the same number of tiles would only represent the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane, ie: a very realistic setup.

That's an intriguing thought. Maybe a user-defined "Scale" factor could solve it. That would of course lead to other "exploits", but what the heck, - a game is really about user experience, and if anybody wish to bend the rules in their single-player games, I couldn't care less. The scale should only be accessible from the "new game" menu.

As for "supply and demand", I believe that the ECS Vectors have a feature where industries can only process a fixed amount of cargo per month, after that limit is reached they will not accept any more and you will have to send the excess elsewhere.

Pikka's TaI also has that. I've tried it, but personally I feel that the mechanism is too crude to add any value to the game. I greatly prefer FIRS.

[Kevo00]

Having infra costs turned on can add a penalty for longer deliveries.

[Panando]

Eh? What's the issue. Short routes are profitable. The game pays roughly per-ton-tile, which is a bit like RL per-ton-mile for freight transport. There's a payment bonus for faster delivery, and on short routes cargo is inherently delivered faster.

So the economic model is already stacked in favour of the short routes, with a bit of faff around how much time is spent waiting to load (unprofitable), versus hauling cargo (profitable).

Your logic about the direction in which the economic model is stacked, is unfortunately flawed. It is true that short routes generally don't lose money (although they can if short enough, and if running costs are high enough, and if there is some significant docking time). But the payment is calculated from two factors, first you get a linear boost to payment for distance, secondly you get a penalty for the time taken, the penalty is dependent on the cargo type, it's not much at all for stuff like coal so with coal if you deliver it twice as far you pretty much get paid twice as much. The way the two factors interact, cargo payment first increases with distance with the time penalty being really pathetic, eventually the time penalty starts to get big and overpowers the distance boost and delivering it further reduces the cargo payment, eventually the time penalty reaches it's maximum, and the distance boost starts increasing the payment again. If your vehicles are pretty fast, then the time penalty doesn't really do much at all, with monorail/maglev you can pretty much deliver coal across the map and the time penalty isn't going to do much at all to mitigate the enormous distance bonus. The time penalty starts to bite for stuff which has spent many many months in transit.

But there is another more subtle and more important nuance, that is income per train vs income per industry. Within a fairly wide range of distances it works like this. A train which delivers cargo twice as far, gets paid twice as much. But it can only make half as many trips per year so it only moves half the stuff. A train which delivers stuff four times as far, gets paid four times as much, but can only make one fourth the trips per year so it can only transport one quarter the stuff. So in the end these trains (travelling say 50 tiles, 100 tiles, 200 tiles) all make about the same yearly income, lets call it $200,000. So they are equivalent, right? Well yeah, in terms of income per train. But the other thing is income per industry. The train delivering stuff four times as far can only move one quarter the stuff per year, this means you need to build four times as many trains to move all the cargo over that distance. Now for 50 tiles, you have one train, with a total income of $200,000. At 100 tiles, two trains for a total income of $400,000. At 200 tiles, four trains for a total income of $800,000. At 400 tiles, eight trains for $1,600,000. If your vehicles are fast enough, it doesn't stop, double the distance, double your trains, double your income.
This is the crux of the problem. In all cases the same amount of coal is being moved. When you're delivering it 50 tiles, the coal mine and power plant are paying you $200,000 a year. When you deliver it 3200 tiles they are paying your company $13 million a year to move the same amount of coal.

I'm not talking about the ideal strategy here, but pointing out the "coal to china" problem, that you can just keep cranking up the distance and the industries keep cranking up the money they give your company, until you end up with coal that costs $10000 per ton.

Defining the problem in this way also points to another possible solution - to set an absolute hard cap on how much industries will pay for cargo. For example coal might cap out at $70/tonne, and delivering to China will still only gross you $70/tonne. You can imagine them saying this "Look, we appreciate all the effort you've gone to get this coal from Poland to China, but we really can't pay more than $70/tonne, beats not getting paid at all, right?". You could still deliver wherever you like, but you no longer dictate the price. The cap would be less generous for bulk, raw materials, and more generous for finished products (goods, food and such).

[leifbk]

This is the crux of the problem. In all cases the same amount of coal is being moved. When you're delivering it 50 tiles, the coal mine and power plant are paying you $200,000 a year. When you deliver it 3200 tiles they are paying your company $13 million a year to move the same amount of coal.

I'm not talking about the ideal strategy here, but pointing out the "coal to china" problem, that you can just keep cranking up the distance and the industries keep cranking up the money they give your company, until you end up with coal that costs $10000 per ton.

In my opinion, you have made a brilliant analysis of the problem.

Defining the problem in this way also points to another possible solution - to set an absolute hard cap on how much industries will pay for cargo. For example coal might cap out at $70/tonne, and delivering to China will still only gross you $70/tonne. You can imagine them saying this "Look, we appreciate all the effort you've gone to get this coal from Poland to China, but we really can't pay more than $70/tonne, beats not getting paid at all, right?". You could still deliver wherever you like, but you no longer dictate the price. The cap would be less generous for bulk, raw materials, and more generous for finished products (goods, food and such).

+1 from me. That would seemingly eliminate the entire "Coal from/to China" model, which is my main gripe about the game.

[moki]

+1 to the idea of max. $70/ton of coal, but if it is ever implemented, there'd need to be some scaling factor. Some people like to play on very large maps with sparse industries where delivering that coal over 1000 tiles is perfectly normal and those routes wouldn't be profitable with a fixed maximum payment.

The only "realistic" solution I can think of right now is to let each industry check where its raw materials could have come from. So if the next coal mine is 1000 tiles from the power plant the max. payment is a lot higher than if there are 3 coal mines in a 100 tile radius. Now if if you want to deliver coal from across the whole map, you're free to do so, but the power plant won't pay you any more than if you delivered it from the closest mine. I really don't know if that's feasible, but that's the way I'd try to do it.

[Eddy Arfik]

Now for 50 tiles, you have one train, with a total income of $200,000. At 100 tiles, two trains for a total income of $400,000. At 200 tiles, four trains for a total income of $800,000. At 400 tiles, eight trains for $1,600,000. If your vehicles are fast enough, it doesn't stop, double the distance, double your trains, double your income.
This is the crux of the problem. In all cases the same amount of coal is being moved. When you're delivering it 50 tiles, the coal mine and power plant are paying you $200,000 a year. When you deliver it 3200 tiles they are paying your company $13 million a year to move the same amount of coal.

Profit != Income, doubling the number of trains doubles your running costs, you also need to consider infrastructure maintainence costs, which aren't scaled linearly, rather they build exponentially after a reaching a certain point.

Some people like to play on very large maps with sparse industries where delivering that coal over 1000 tiles is perfectly normal and those routes wouldn't be profitable with a fixed maximum payment.

I'm one of those people, and it's not unusual in my games for the running/maintanence costs to eat up a large portion of the income.

Edit: I've just looked at my current game, I have a train that costs $532,800/yr to run, and made profit last year of $4,775,980, it made 8 trips of over about 1500 tiles, now I use a daylength patch with factor 4, meaning with normal time train could only make 2 trips, giving roughly $1m income... not exactly printing money

[andythenorth]

What I miss is why it's desirable to cripple the game in this way. I would bet a substantial sum that penalising players for transporting cargo long distances will cause more bug reports / feature requests than the current situation.

Oddly enough, the current situation is also the most 'realistic'. Which isn't by design, and isn't always a goal for the game. But it happens to fit the gameplay here.

@panando I did read the rather long analysis, but I couldn't see anywhere what the problem is thought to be. The industries don't pay anything for the cargo. You can see that for yourself in the code.

[planetmaker]

One of the common misconceptions is that the player *buys* the cargo upon pickup and then *sells* it upon delivery to the recipient. That is not the situation this game emulates, though.

We just put the player in the postion of a logistics provider. You get contracts by the producers to deliver it to the recipients. Of course you then want rightfully(!) get more money for long-distance transport than you would charge for an inner-city bus ride or mail delivery.

[Baldy's Boss]

This is the crux of the problem. In all cases the same amount of coal is being moved. When you're delivering it 50 tiles, the coal mine and power plant are paying you $200,000 a year. When you deliver it 3200 tiles they are paying your company $13 million a year to move the same amount of coal.

I'm not talking about the ideal strategy here, but pointing out the "coal to china" problem, that you can just keep cranking up the distance and the industries keep cranking up the money they give your company, until you end up with coal that costs $10000 per ton.

In my opinion, you have made a brilliant analysis of the problem.

Defining the problem in this way also points to another possible solution - to set an absolute hard cap on how much industries will pay for cargo. For example coal might cap out at $70/tonne, and delivering to China will still only gross you $70/tonne. You can imagine them saying this "Look, we appreciate all the effort you've gone to get this coal from Poland to China, but we really can't pay more than $70/tonne, beats not getting paid at all, right?". You could still deliver wherever you like, but you no longer dictate the price. The cap would be less generous for bulk, raw materials, and more generous for finished products (goods, food and such).

+1 from me. That would seemingly eliminate the entire "Coal from/to China" model, which is my main gripe about the game.

I remarked on some similar issues when I arrived here earlier this year.If the game actually had financials for customers as well as players it might be addressed...if industries went bankrupt because they were paying too much for transportation of supplies that would shake things up significantly!(Further,more profitable customers would buy out less profitable ones).

[leifbk]

What I miss is why it's desirable to cripple the game in this way. I would bet a substantial sum that penalising players for transporting cargo long distances will cause more bug reports / feature requests than the current situation.

A new economic model should of course be optional, with the old one as default.

One of the common misconceptions is that the player *buys* the cargo upon pickup and then *sells* it upon delivery to the recipient. That is not the situation this game emulates, though.

We just put the player in the postion of a logistics provider. You get contracts by the producers to deliver it to the recipients. Of course you then want rightfully(!) get more money for long-distance transport than you would charge for an inner-city bus ride or mail delivery.

Yes, the player gets paid for the transport, but nobody in their right mind would pay premium rates for express transport of coal around the world. Still, it's conceivable that somebody actually would pay for the transport of commodities coming all the way from China, provided that the price was right, and the time in transit didn't matter much. We have such a situation in real life, as huge amounts of goods are being freighted around the world daily on ships. I believe that it's possible to tweak cargo rates and maintenance costs to give a little more sheen of realism to the game.

The value of coal shouldn't decay at all, it has been lying around for millions of years and is not likely to be eaten by bugs during transit. But as it's relatively ubiquitous, you shouldn't expect to get more for hauling coal around the world than you'd get for delivery from the mine a few miles away.

[romazoon]

I m quite satisfied the way it is now. this is why :

i recently played a a more height level FIRS scenario on 512x512. it have a big mountains with pass in the middle of the map and two flat land on each side. the pass are located 35 tile hight, and they are the only way to cross the mountains.

with FIRS : i made a sugar bet trains (1000tons capacity) going from a corner to the opposite corner...and guess what my train were all loosing money ...they turned a tiny tiny profit only each two years...and the loss was huge on the other year. (the key here was that i was using "realistic" speed for freight = 120km/h max, the way up the mountain with heavy trains is even slower and make plenty of loops to soften the grade, and of course sugar bet is not liking long trips, i used high maintenance cost, etc)

Of course, i was getting my profit return on the additionnal food produced that was raking me enough money...it was a win-win deal for the "industry" and for "me". (and if those sugar bet train were not returning empty, i m pretty sure it would rake good money)

i just wanted to point out that given that each player play differently the way it is actually handled is really not that bad.

we play a capitalist game, so the more money you invest the more money player expect in return, and because that the money is (almost) always growing faster and faster if you keep investing the money. there is i'm affraid no way to change this, even with a suposely smarter cargo payment rate.
in other words player are now complaining that payment rate make them too much rich, but no matter what, you ll allways end up with too much money in your bank account. now you can make the game harder with higher running cost, infra maintenace cost, etc to make it somewhat harder to rake billions, but you'll always end up with millions (and if you turn in the red after 100years of playing (single player), for exemple cause infra maintenace cost, i'm prety sure 99.9% of players will turn it off to not go bankrupt).

[andythenorth]

I believe that it's possible to tweak cargo rates and maintenance costs to give a little more sheen of realism to the game.

I still don't understand what problem is being solved by this idea.

You ask for more realism. But (small packages excepted), bulk freight transport is typically by the ton-mile, with higher rates for expedited transport. The game currently approximates the *most* realistic payment model. So it's simply baffling that some of you think it's somehow unrealistic.

And coals halfway round the world? Not that reality matters to OTTD, but in reality the UK, despite huge coal reserves, currently imports the majority of coal for power generation from Russia and Columbia. http://www.edfenergy.com/energyfuture/e ... p-security

So what is the actual problem you'd like solved, rather than proposing tweaking x, y or z?