Fleet bonus

[onre]

Hello,

I got this idea about a small maintenance bonus that would be available for larger fleets of vehicles. This would reflect the real-life situation where maintenance becomes cheaper if company fleet can make use of common spare parts and service personnel. It could work so that there is a maximum % of maintenance discount that's achievable by having N similar vehicles. As a very simple example formula, for amounts of vehicles less than N, the amount of bonus would be maximum * 1 / N. The values could of course be configurable. I don't know how much of the running cost consists of fuel and how much of actual servicing.

I think this bonus would not make sense for some things such as train carriages, because those have little need of maintenance and most serviceable parts are interchangeable anyway.

If one wanted to take this further, "partially similar" vehicles could get some part of the bonus, too. For example, trucks with same chassis but different bodyworks, and different locomotives with same type of prime mover... but this would require such things defined in pakfiles.

What do you think?

[prissi]

Usually, when you buy fleets, you have already solved the money problem. There is no benefit for gaming, only making things more complex.

[Fabio]

There is no benefit for gaming, only making things more complex.

So it could interest ST-Exp
The benefit I can see is in "which vehicle should i buy next?" choice
Similarly, using less depots should give less costs (maybe introducing - if not already in - a high maintainance cost for depots could do it easily).

[The Hood]

Similarly, using less depots should give less costs (maybe introducing - if not already in - a high maintainance cost for depots could do it easily).

But one depot in real life can only service so many convoys.  How about requiring one depot for every x convoys?

[jamespetts]

These ideas have been considered for Simutrans-Experimental in the past, but considered of relatively low priority. At present, the priority is to fix bugs, get the balancing right, and update it to be compatible with the networking code. The priority after that is to refine Pak128.Britain-Ex to make a well-balanced pakset that fully works with all of the features of Experimental, and then to test stability exhaustively and release it as "Simutrans-Extended" accross multiple platforms with automated installers. That is all likely to take a long time.

However, when that is all done, further major features that have not been proved necessary for the balancing to work well may be added. Indeed, if others are keen to program them, a similar approach to Simutrans-Standard (with a "stable" and "nightly" branch) may be adopted before the above cycle has been completed.