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0.9.1 - Passenger demand drops to nothing & Trams too small?

Started by zook2, January 29, 2014, 02:07:02 AM

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zook2

(11.17) My 27-year old game is now in 1887 and I switched to 0.9.1 yesterday. After the changes for carriages and steam trams took effect, their average speed dropped by half and two-thirds, respectively. I know I complained about horse-carts blocking all road traffic, and they zip along at 14 km/h now (some at 22 km/h), but instead my coaches move at walking speed. As a result, the number of transported passengers in the whole network keeps dropping month after month, as the route times are recalculated.

From what W.Lindley's wrote in the other thread I gathered that fully occupied horse-drawn buses would be slower than private carriages, but their load does not affect their speed. Also, the mail carriage is not affected.

Almost all my income comes from ships now and my firm can take the losses; however, I remember that the game was sometimes quite difficult in the early years and with passenger demand reduced like that, I think I wouldn't make it through the early phase now.

Another issue for me is that steam trams are the size of dog-carts now and don't emit steam any more. That makes it quite hard to get an idea of how a tram network is doing at a single glance - i.e. spacing between trams, waiting times, lock-ups, etc. were easily visible before.

jamespetts

Thank you for the feedback - this is helpful. The reason that the horse omnibuses have a reduced speed is that I discovered that these vehicles (as distinct from stagecoaches and mail coaches, which ran inter-urban services) did indeed travel at barely more than walking pace: indeed, I interpreted the historical records somewhat generously. I have also slightly reduced walking speed from 5km/h to 4km/h (5km/h is the actual average walking speed of people, but the reduced speed takes into account that people do not always walk in a straight line) to make slow vehicles more competitive with walking (and note also that pure walking journeys have a time limit of half that of a passenger's journey time tolerance to reflect the fact that walking is tiring).

As I have mentioned before, the new passenger generation code should give much more consistent results with early low speed short distance transport than the current code with distance ranges, and it is unfortunate that it has not been possible to release this yet.

As to the trams, the size is based on realistic scaling with other vehicles and historical research, although, as discussed here, it has been decided to re-scale the trams slightly to match the trains, being 1.25x as wide and tall as long in comparison to the scale. The lack of emission of steam on some of the steam trams is deliberate: Board of Trade rules required that tram engines emit no visible steam, and condensers exhaust superheaters were built to achieve this, but, as will be noted by the fact that some of the trams do in fact emit steam, some were more successful than others.
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MCollett

Quote from: zook2 on January 29, 2014, 02:07:02 AM
Almost all my income comes from ships now
Sailing ships are absurdly profitable on long haul trips.

Quote from: jamespetts on January 29, 2014, 10:05:27 PM
I have also slightly reduced walking speed from 5km/h to 4km/h (5km/h is the actual average walking speed of people, but the reduced speed takes into account that people do not always walk in a straight line) to make slow vehicles more competitive with walking

I think this does help.  The released version of 0.9.1 seems to have more patronage of the slow vehicles compared to the immediate prerelease version where walking speed was still 5km/hr.

Best wishes,
Matthew

AP

Quote from: MCollett on January 30, 2014, 02:16:08 AM
Sailing ships are absurdly profitable on long haul trips.

Presumably consistent with the global trading empires of the day??

MCollett

Quote from: MCollett on January 30, 2014, 02:16:08 AM
Sailing ships are absurdly profitable on long haul trips.
Quote from: AP on February 15, 2014, 07:27:27 PM
Presumably consistent with the global trading empires of the day??
It is true that historically sailing ships were very profitable on really long-haul journeys: a ship might pay for its construction costs with just a couple of trans-Atlantic trips.  But in the current pakset, a ship can pay for itself with just one lightly-laden trip of only a small fraction of that distance  8).

Best wishes,
Matthew 

Sarlock

Do not forget the very real risk of the ship failing to reach its destination and losing all cargo (and crew) in the process.  This risk doesn't exist in the game but should be included in the overall cost.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

zook2

Random events like "Storm at sea" would be totally new to Simutrans, but at least for ships, they make sense.

Sarlock

It adds a whole dimension of micromanagement to the game, however, something that most players would likely not enjoy (myself included).  It's probably better to just assume that element in the overall cost.  (Imagine if it happened to a player just starting out and they lost their ship and cargo on their first voyage and suffered an unrecoverable loss and went bankrupt)
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

jamespetts

Yes, probably best not to simulate storms and other one off events: it is a more fun game when things are focussed on the bigger picture, I think.
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