Have you ever bought out a struggling competitor?

[pickpacket]

When a competitor is about to go bankrupt an offer is made to the other players to buy the company in question. I've never been in a situation where that's seemed like a goos idea; why buy an unprofitable transport network?

Have you ever done so? What made it worth it?

[Redirect Left]

I've only ever bought it because they had a specific singular route that was quite good to acquire. Deleted the rest of the stuff (more effort than it was worth), but i got the good route!

Honestly, its rarely worth it i find. I think it's basically only in the game, because it was in the original, nothing has really been done to make it more practical, at least not yet.

[odisseus]

Some players invest their whole initial loan into a single route over the longest possible distance. Before the fix of long-distance payments, this strategy used to be hugely profitable, but there's always a risk that the company will go bankrupt before the first shipment arrives.

Buying out such a company is always a very attractive investment. In fact, once you realise this is going to happen, you can yourself start a new company and buy out your original one!

[pickpacket]

Some players invest their whole initial loan into a single route over the longest possible distance. Before the fix of long-distance payments, this strategy used to be hugely profitable, but there's always a risk that the company will go bankrupt before the first shipment arrives.

It's still hugely profitable. In practice the transport has to take a very, very long time for the cargo to lose enough value that it won't be very beneficial

Buying out such a company is always a very attractive investment. In fact, once you realise this is going to happen, you can yourself start a new company and buy out your original one!

Potential exploit discovered!!

[Not In Service]

Not in subsequent more recent OpenTTD plays thus far but in the original game and earlier OTTD plays I'd buy out companies a lot (bankrupt or active) as I (as a not entirely enthusiastic about the more ruthless ends of capitalism type of person) quite enjoyed the tycoon rp of swallowing up the competition but more as I really enjoyed and probably still would the buy them up and make them better gameplay, as the original ai tended to make tiny fairly rubbish routes which gave you the fun rp-gameplay opportunity to improve the stations, vehicles, efficiencies etc.

It does also sometimes have benefits- these (usually) badly utilized former computer rival routes can have lots of goods/passengers ready and waiting that wouldn't be there immediately with a new station, it may have some reputation score that's again higher than a new build even if low, so it's quite rewarding turning their poorly optimized route into something that works much better, or at all if theirs was a total fail.

Of course if they're not going bankrupt it can also pay off if their route(s) was/were harming yours, even a rubbish route might steal potential cargo and passengers from your routes and/or block yours by being in the way where you may want to expand stations/stops or add routes/depots etc. They may also be harming industries or town growth but I'm less sure on that theory, even if not it can't do any harm replacing them with something better that helps such matters.

One thing I remember doing in the past with OpenTTD is switching to these rival firms (saving often of course) and actually giving them decent routes not the rubbish they normally build to have some actual decent competition. Then letting them benefit thus being more of a challenge to take over. It's funny though that the original vanilla ai is so laughably awful (or maybe profit limited or something to be too easy) that you could build a really profitable route or routes doing this when flipping to play as the ai company and it would delete it, some or all of them after you flip back to yours and build more rubbish routes! Why, I'm trying to make you more of an actual competitor!

I'd love to be able to set up rivals quite precisely in the scenario editor so you had actual established rivals with good networks as that would be such a boost to the game for times you wanted to play with competitors, and would make takeovers a really interesting and worthwhile prospect and something players would actually want to aim for. Rivals would then be a much more fun and realistic aspect of gameplay, maybe there are regional ones and you as a player might want to have the choice of doing your own thing or buying them up.

With such a possibility you could also design scenarios where the player has a starting network to manage with many different possibilities from a struggling start up, to a struggling business that has seen better days (old vehicles, iffy finances etc) up to a big network with the headaches and challenges of running it (all the vehicle movements and cargo/passenger demands etc), there are some really awesome scenario prospects if you could do this.

So maybe that's a thought for future OpenTTD, would it be possible to make the scenario editor much deeper where you're actually adding rivals and starting player infrastructure to the scenario, I've always wished you could with Transport Tycoon like you can in Roller Coaster Tycoon (in RCT you can make scenarios from save games so the player is taking on an existing theme/amusement park and the attractions it already has in the state they are in good or bad or both or build an empty one where they are starting from scratch), and it also means you can design more into the scenario so the initial player business setup 'fits', which for OpenTTD would mean they could potentially have some starting routes, vehicles, stations etc and so they can then decide to keep, remodel, move or whatever these assets of the business they start with. Quite like the logic that maybe if you're ditching a route it's worth keeping the vehicle i.e. selling it would be enough of a loss that it might be better used somewhere you do want (or could have) a route, especially if it's a company with a tough start for the player. Could be really interesting in some cases especially older historical starts with early vehicles etc and the choice of the level of challenge involved when combined with starting financial health or otherwise such as loss making routes etc.

Another idea but it would need its own code is maybe options for how transport is managed rights-wise in the setting of the scenario such as a government franchises private company system or state run etc, or a mixture, each with specific limitations that might impact expansion such as maybe you have to get good enough to win regional contracts thus can't expand everywhere at the start etc. Maybe in some cases you buy out other companies if you want to, in others you have to win a government contract to run the 'rivals' 'region'/division of the network when it comes up for renewal or they lose it, or maybe it's only nationalized and you have to run certain routes as you're obliged to, again there's lots of potential for variety of scenarios/campaigns and their design.

So my late Christmas wish from Steamtrain Santa- full, deep scenario design options for designing scenarios, maybe even campaigns of a series of scenarios played in sequence

Would work quite nicely with my older long-standing wish, mixed regions, even though industry limits likely mean you couldn't have all the industries for these respective areas (perhaps a new region type could have some from each? Maybe tied in with a new FIRS option or similar) it would be good to be able to have the different climates on the same map so you can have a mountainous snowy area, a dry desert area, a sandy beach coastal area, that kind of flexibility so you could do more of a 'world' / 'country' map type.