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Early years need a general revenue boost.

Started by neroden, July 15, 2010, 05:00:06 AM

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neroden

While this may be fixed by a more proper price balancing later on, right now it is fundamentally impossible to make any money with practically all of the early-timeline vehicles, except ships (and ships have running costs which are almost certainly too small).  It's *very close* to being possible to make money, however.  Accordingly, I think a small general revenue boost (5%? 10%?) might put the game into the "fully playable" state.

ӔO

How about, for now, we just reset all the running costs to a flat number like $1.00 for all vehicles?
Or maybe halve the running costs?

I'm finding my infrastructure costs a lot, so even if all the convoys in the line are reaping huge profits, I'm still losing a lot of money.
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neroden

Quote from: AEO on July 15, 2010, 05:26:50 AM
How about, for now, we just reset all the running costs to a flat number like $1.00 for all vehicles?
Or maybe halve the running costs?
I'm not sure which of the numbers are researched and which ones aren't.  I'd rather retain the researched numbers if possible :-) 

Also, a gross rebalancing is needed and I've been waiting until the power/weight stuff is all straightened out before doing it.  I was just hoping for a temporary patch until then.

Gryphonite

I've recently been using experimental with pak128.britain.ex and have been finding similar things. I found if I made all my stations public I could just about break even.

At the moment the scaling between vehicle maintenance costs, especially road vehicles, makes upgrading to bigger/faster vehicles not worthwhile. For example the cart (1 crate) has a maint cost of 0.01, the wagon 0.02 (3 crates) and the stage wagon 0.80 (6 crates). So while upgrading from carts to wagons is worth it, going to stage wagons isn't at all even with the increase in speed. (As an aside, the stage wagon, despite having superior size and speed becomes obsolete before the cart and wagon).

Buses and mail coaches are even more extreme. The Hackney carriage will carry 5 passengers for a maint of 0.10, but the Stage coach carries 4 for 2.00. Why would I ever use the Stage coach? The mail cart, mail stage wagon and Mail Coach have maint of 0.02, 1.00 and 5.20(!) respectively. Again despite the increases in speed and capacity the maintenance costs make using anything other than the cart unreasonable.

A revenue boost would help. Having more evenly scaled maintenance costs would help more, as it would mean you could get more out of your current infrastructure, thus lessening the effects of infrastructure costs. Of course, vehicles with higher capacity and speed should cost more to run, but not at the current levels.