Neglecting maintainance

[Fabio]

In real world many infrastructure owners neglect maintenance, especially in a negative economic spell.
This occurs especially with public entities letting their roads get potholed and their railroads rot.

Given that in Simutrans maintenance could bring you to bankruptcy, the player could be able to suspend maintenance on all (easier) or selected (harder UI-wise but more realistic) infrastructure.
Those ways would have a -5% max speed every month of neglected maintenance and the moment you resume paying the maintenance cost you would pay the overdue maintenance plus a small penalty (e.g. 1-2% every month you neglected).

[asaphxiix]

I like that!

[wlindley]

We will need a new "weeds" way-object... in not many months, they conceal your manicured mainlines in kudzu-covered quagmires.

[Yona-TYT]

I like the idea

[greenling]

Hi this idea there already in Simutrans exp indirectly.
To incorporate this idea in Simutrans_Standart would result in indirect but again to new sources of error.
I Think that the Programmers first build in a Pakfilemanager there manage the used pakfiles:
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=11405.0

[prissi]

You can neglect maitenance for a year or so. After that things will fall apart and you pay more later. As in SImutrans you will always have money later, this is imho pointless. The aim of a game is to be able to lose it as much as you can win it.

If you do not want to go bankrupt, use freeplay ...

[ӔO]

One could just add low maintenance, very slow way(s) to the pak.

[IgorEliezer]

If you neglect maintenance, it could happen:
- Capacity of your infrastructure will decrease every month: ways with lower max_speed and/or max_weight: -10%/month.
- Downgrade of your infrastructure: an asphalt road would "break" so bad that it would turn into a dirty road.
- Bits of your infrastructure disappear: if you keep neglecting and elements of infrastructure already reached to zero-capacity and can't downgrade any lower, they start disappearing. A bridge with max_speed = 0 would be removed in the next month as well as abandoned dirty roads would into into grass tiles.

Now the problems:
- How would you select what to abandon and what to maintain? You mean the entire world? If elements: a tool would be necessary; if regions: the territory thing that I suggested.
- How to recover/repair what was abandoned?
-- The ways that make more sense to me would be: you would need to pay all overdue maintenance taxes that you refused to pay during the period. Or, a repair tool: click on the object at a cost of maintenance tax of "neglected" period. But how would you backtrack what you have/had abandoned during the period?
- Abuse: then, the overdue maintenance tax would increase 10%/year.
- Micromanagement (?)

[greenling]

Hello IgorEliezer

*IgorEliezer's post above*

That all what you here be wish gives in Simutrans exp.

[isidoro]

In any case, all those penalties for not maintaining your infrastructure should always be less than the price of building them anew.

[ӔO]

Assuming the problem is that your network has, maybe, over expanded, or your company is suffering from some form of financial problems, then instead of using something like "neglect" switch, perhaps it would be better to have something like "frugal" switch?

In Frugal mode, all your way maintenance and speeds are cut in, let's say, half. You still keep your infrastructure and vehicles, so that would still need to be replaced with slow and efficient ones, but that would probably be less work and costly, at least immediately, than axing much of your network to try and balance your books.

Maybe it would be better if the user could adjust how slow and cheaper they would like to make their network with a percentage between 30 and 100?

This way, you can avoid having to micromanage ways, micromanagement of vehicles could be a one or two time deal and you would still end up with the same result of having cheaper network.



Or another alternative, how about a lend and loan system between players? Players taking out loans from either public player or other players over a certain term, perhaps?