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Balancing notes from the online game

Started by jamespetts, January 22, 2012, 10:21:11 PM

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ӔO

hmm, if it is really 1500kW total, then that would be the same as 375 and 450, which require two sets in experimental to hit their top speed. I guess they are going to use a different gear ratio, which would hurt acceleration.


Is there any other BR EMU with around 1700~1900kW power per 4 car set? class 357 is just barely under 1700kW, which gives it a pretty good edge in acceleration and top speed.
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ӔO

It might be better to have tilting for the maglev sets and lower their traction by about 10~25%.
Their current corner penalty, no matter how wide, is 220km/h, which is pretty significant.
On the other hand, their acceleration is really outstanding.
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jamespetts

Hmm - do real life maglevs tilt? I think that they just have straighter tracks, don't they?
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ӔO

yeah, they don't tilt, but their tracks have quite an extreme banking in the corners, so it's pretty much the same as tilting.
On the flip side, higher banking disallows slower and heavier trains to use the tracks. This is why you normally cannot use freight trains or slower trains on high speed tracks.
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The Hood

Quote from: ӔO on April 24, 2012, 02:50:38 PM

The only thing in between are the 200km/h diesel sets, which are pretty good in their own right, but don't have an electrical counterpart. Something that costs around $20~30 in maintenance with around 175~200km/h would be nice to have.


There is of course the e-Voyager project which may well see pantograph cars inserted into Voyager units to give them dual-mode capability. We could easily add a pantograph car option in Simutrans to allow an electric Voyager to fill the gap. Although this project will probably only happen 2015ish (because of energy concerns and increasing electrification in the UK), technologically there's nothing that would have prevented an electric Voyager in 2000...

kierongreen

e-Voyager is a bit of a minefield as it becomes an electro-diesel which isn't really simulated well in simutrans...

AP

Quote from: ӔO on April 25, 2012, 01:41:53 PM
yeah, they don't tilt, but their tracks have quite an extreme banking in the corners, so it's pretty much the same as tilting.
On the flip side, higher banking disallows slower and heavier trains to use the tracks. This is why you normally cannot use freight trains or slower trains on high speed tracks.

You can do it with interlaced track (rails, not maglev) - you have 4 rails, and incline each pair at a different angle according to the speed of the train that will use it. I read an article on it once, I don't know if it's in use anywhere though.

The Hood

Quote from: kierongreen on April 25, 2012, 06:36:36 PM
e-Voyager is a bit of a minefield as it becomes an electro-diesel which isn't really simulated well in simutrans...

I take your point, but in simple terms it's not too unrealistic to imagine a voyager entirely electric powered, which is what would be simulated in game...

jamespetts

Right - I have (on my local copy for now - changes will be pushed in due course) reduced the passenger/mail maglev capacity by 1/3rd, increased the cost of the 560km/h track and tunnels by 50% and reduced the cornering penalties in simuconf.tab (which I thought was better than making them tilting). I hope that this will help the balance on the next occasion. Thank you for the feedback on this!
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neroden

Quote from: AP on January 24, 2012, 04:12:38 PM
I also think that the speed of the game timeline needs to be adjusted. When everything is moving around at  10km/h in 1830, it's like watching paint dry waiting for deliveries to arrive, and would be helped by having the game run at e.g. double speed, if it can be set up to vary with the date or something?
Hah!  This is the how-many-hours-in-a-month issue.  I was working on disentangling that so that it could be adjusted in a straightforward fashion.  In current simutrans code it's a mess, but if I ever finish straightening out the "units problem" it should be easy to change.  You've just given me more motivation to do so.

Quote
I was also suprised that I had difficulty making an industrial chain run at a profit. Coal/Ore to a steel mill, to a cannery, to a Grocer's, ought to yield a tidy reliable profit. But I had difficulty encouraging the food inputs to yield much produce (orchards giving 6 crates of apples to go with an entire trainload of steel...), and the industries seemed to lose money too. The industrial revolution was built on heavy industry moving stuff around, passengers were secondary. I also thought the map had too little heavy industry by a significant margin, although it had a nice number of towns and decent distances between.
I also noticed a while back that the food industries produced too-low production, particularly early on.

neroden

Quote from: ӔO on March 01, 2012, 06:44:41 AM
the airplanes are quite horrid to use.

they are fast, so they get a lot of pax flow, but they are low capacity, so you need a lot of them. The problem with using a lot of them, is that they have poor turn around times, which jam the airport. Compounding the problem, they only like using one runway because there's no one way signal in the pak to route the airplanes to use specific runways.

this usually results in a lot of pax that get dumped and decide to use the trains. However, there is usually around 8000~12000pax that get dumped at once, so the trains can't handle it.

These problems show up consistently in standard as well; the modelling of air traffic control in the simutrans engine is poor.  If I cared about airplanes, I'd fix that to get the airplanes to use multiple runways properly; this would be a nice engine improvement.  But I don't care much about planes so I won't be the one doing that...

jamespetts

Quote from: neroden on May 06, 2012, 05:28:42 PM
I also noticed a while back that the food industries produced too-low production, particularly early on.

The idea was realistically to reproduce the relative production levels of early farms, having a very large number of farms each producing a small amount of output, which the player would have to gather together, as in reality.
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neroden

Quote from: jamespetts on May 06, 2012, 07:09:27 PM
The idea was realistically to reproduce the relative production levels of early farms, having a very large number of farms each producing a small amount of output, which the player would have to gather together, as in reality.

It's a good idea, but the minimum levels per farm have to be at least high enough so that the deliveries pay for the construction and maintenance of the dirt roads to the farms and the stops at the farm end; that's a problem for a spreadsheet.   Also, the demand end (the Market, etc.) also needs to have high enough numbers, so that you can get economies of scale at that end.

jamespetts

Quote from: neroden on May 06, 2012, 05:31:34 PM
These problems show up consistently in standard as well; the modelling of air traffic control in the simutrans engine is poor.  If I cared about airplanes, I'd fix that to get the airplanes to use multiple runways properly; this would be a nice engine improvement.  But I don't care much about planes so I won't be the one doing that...

Sorry for necroposting here, but I am looking into airports/aircraft at present, so a comment here is in order, I think. There's something to be said for improving air traffic control (and, for that matter, forcing every airport to have a control tower before anything can land there, although how this would be presented to players in the UI is a tricky issue).

However, in the meantime, a fairly realistic workaround is to have different terminals represented as different stations ("Bimblebridge Airport Terminal 1" and "Bimblebridge Airport Terminal 2", etc.), and have each terminal have its own runway. There can be a land connexion (e.g., 'bus, maglev, monorail, underground train) between the terminals, as there often is in reality.

The excess of passengers seeking to use airports in the server game was probably caused by a combination of an excessive passenger factor with an excessive proportion of the passengers being prepared to make long-distance journeys. It is also possible that the journey distances were just too short for aircraft to be suitable, with the result that they were only marginally faster than rail, such that when actual rather than initially estimated (and very low) waiting time was factored in, they suddenly worked out as less fast than railways.
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ӔO

One thing I would like to suggest.

For 3rd rail electrification, could the max speed be brought up to 200km/h?
Due to the way speed restriction works, all trains going over the tracks are limited to 160km/h, which means one would need a separate set of tracks to run 200km/h diesel trains
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kierongreen

No routes in Britain with third rail electrification have a speed limit of over 160km/h even for diesel trains.

AP

But that's not to say they couldn't. There's no technical restriction (that I know of), why non-3rd-rail powered trains couldn't run faster than 160 cm/h on track that happens to have a 3rd rail adjacent to it.

The absence of a precedent is perhaps more to do with uk geography than anything else (3rd rail electrification being mostly south of london, where there is less need for high speed rail, because you hit the coast rather quickly...). If the restriction is to do with the shoe/contact technology, then the locomotive max speed would cover that without placing the restriction on the track also, would it not?