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Design question

Started by Iluvalar, January 11, 2013, 03:24:51 PM

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Iluvalar

Hi everybody, I'm just curious about what look like a design choice in pak128 that doesn't look right to me. I wanted to know why it's like this.


Vehicles that are faster are close to always having more capacity as well. I don't understand why it's like that. As far as I can tell, it seem to me like the only target you can have from game design is the density of the traffic on the road. You want roads to be crowded up to some point. I also understand that to make use of the speed bonus, you must concentrate more lines into the same road. So to keep the traffic density, the pakmaker would need to increase the trip of faster vehicle so you need less of them to do the same job.


However, a vehicle that is faster can transport more by itself just because of speed. A 30Km/h 4t vehicle transport half the trips of a 60km/h 4t vehicle. So the traffic density is kept by itself... You can pack twice as much of those vehicles on a 60km/h road.


So why did you guys chose to constantly increasing the capacity of the vehicles ?

dennosius

To me, it doesn't look like a design choice, but it's more accidental, I think.

It might be true mainly for cargo railway cars, but capacity growth itsn't that big and modern locomotives can do both, go faster and with more load (but you can always buy small locomotives). This sometimes only allows to run a line. Also, in Simutrans (maybe just as in real life for similar reasons) demand grows faster than speed, as you connect more and more factories to pax/mail and with each other.

There are still gaps in the vehicle timeline that make it hard to find useful vehicles for some jobs, but that problem will hopefully cure itself when more vehicles are developed and has nothing to do with pak design.

Zeno

It's not a design choice, at all. Actually there's no "rule of a thumb" for that, neither.

More modern means generally more speed.
More modern means generally better space/weight distribution, so can lead to better capacity, but also could lead to longer cars/coaches in some cases.

There are too many factors that affect the relation speed/capacity along the years: security (capacity limitation for), materials (sometimes lead to less weight), higher engine power (vehicles can pull more coaches), etc.