Topic: Station and extension variety

[wlindley]

I would like to ask: should there be bigger differences in building/monthly costs between small/basic stations and large ones?
 In my 1820s game for example I have available

• bulk goods bunker 1437.5¢ (37.44¢) 250 goods
• livestock pen 1437.5¢ (37.44¢) 250 goods
• goods warehouse 1437.5¢ (37.44¢) 250 goods + mail

These are all effectively the same in gameplay, just different "eye candy."  Instead, if we had a larger variety it would help in starting new companies, and in building large metropolitan stations.
It certainly seems like the livestock pen should be much smaller, as sheep and cattle farms have 1 unit/month and 4/month respectively.  Mines and quarries of the period have about 20 units/month output.  And although factories of this time have fairly small outputs, the warehouse probably should stay the largest of the group as it represents an improvement typical of a large port or city.
For a junction station collecting the output of a dozen sheep/cattle farms, as things stand we have a staging post at 5¢(1¢) and the livestock pen at 1437¢(37¢) as options. As we might need maximum of 50 units per month capacity, it would be silly not to use ten staging-post tiles at 50¢, or a large cargo bay at 63¢, rather than a single livestock pen at 1437¢ construction cost. 

The current selection of extensions, in short, is neither realistic nor useful in gameplay.

My suggestion: How about this as the selection in 1820?

• staging post: 5¢ (1¢) 10 psgr + goods + mail (unchanged)
• cargo bay, small: 25¢ (4¢) 20 goods
• livestock pen: 25¢ (8¢) 40 goods
• cargo bay, large: 100¢ (6¢) 40 goods  (was 62.5¢ building/5.6¢ maint)
• bulk goods bunker: 1000¢ (25¢) 80 goods
• goods warehouse: 2500¢ (40¢) 250 goods + mail
• post office: 1000¢ (25¢) 850 mail  (unchanged)

Note that some have lower building costs per unit but higher maintenance costs. 

[jamespetts]

These are interesting thoughts. Note that the whole balance of the pakset is due to be revisited comprehensively in due course and so any cost values stipulated now are likely to change radically in the future, based on normalised real world costs of various items.

However, the idea of having differing capacities is an interesting one. One must be careful, however, not to give players an incentive to use livestock pens for small quantities of coal or coal bunkers for large quantities of livestock: this was the intention behind having them all identical (faced with no economic advantage of using something unrealistic, players would, it is assumed, have a preference to use the more reaistic option). Perhaps better would be to have different size variants of all the extensions, each equal with others of the same type (e.g. a small medium and large livestock pen, a small medium and large goods warehouse, a small medium and large coal bunker, etc., with all of the smalls having the same capacity as each other and likewise the other sizes)?