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Rebalancing industry settings in Pak128.Britain-Ex

Started by Dutchman on Rails, May 01, 2010, 07:53:31 PM

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Dutchman on Rails

Moderator note: Continued from the topic, REQ: Is it possible to turn off the industry weight settings? in the Simutrans-Experimental section.

Hi James,

So what you are saying is that the old Simutrans setting of industry_increase_every ... should have worked all along, and it was simply a bug that caused large spawning of industry chains (I should have had 3 chains, as my setting was at 2500)? That should work nicely.

I also like the idea of distributionweight limiting some industries (like furniture) in favour of others (like flour) and replacing the industry.

One thing I will experiment with is to lower the production of certain industries to allow the transport of tiny amounts of certain products. At the moment, just about any kind of shop can support a viable rail line or canal based on the volume of goods transported...

For the future, I'm dreaming of a much more complex model, that basically comes down to something like the following: Every house in the towns generates a very tiny demand for a certain amount of various goods (flour, vegetables, fruit, clothes, furniture, electricity and so on, configurable through the .dat files). For some it has more demand than others (like 4 items of flour, 3 of vegetables, but only 1 of clothes). Possibly this could also be configured with a percentage switch in simuconf.tab.

This creates demand for goods that the game will try to supply by opening industries. In turn, these industries also have demands that the engine tries to supply - by generating a contract with an existing supplier if possible or if there's no more available supply by opening a new industry. This process cascades down until supply of a good equals or exceeds demand. Closure of an industry (or possibly upgrade, replacing the industry by the same one of a newer type) would cause a drop in supply and therefore an imbalance that the engine tries to fill up again... One could also dream of certain priority lists, in that food is more important to supply than furniture for instance.

But there's more in my dream. Each industry would require a certain number of employees, which would be taken from the unemployment list(s) of the town(s) the industry is located in. Only those towns that have a high enough unemployment number would be on the list where the relevant industry might spawn. One could further experiment on this by having a feedback where towns with low unemployment figures get a growth bonus, causing industrial centers on the one hand and stagnating hamlets on the other.

Basically this model, which is based simply on supply and demand balance for each good and demographics for the industries, would solve two problems I noticed, that of sometimes too many labour-intensive industries concentrated in small villages, and sometimes too many industries of the same type concentrated in small villages.

Something you (James) might also be interested in (which would be a PakSet object) is a vague idea of import and export map exits, industries that can only exist on the edge of the map (either on land or at sea) and that have huge supply and/or demand figures for a great variety of goods. This could help you with your dream of economic up- and downturn, Britain exporting huge amounts of goods in the 19th century and gradually changing to importing a higher proportion of goods. It could also help taking a bite out of the 'end of the world' problem all transport simulations have.

These are just some random thoughts on industry, I don't know how much is possible to implement, how much work it is or how much is already implemented (the core already seems to exist). I hope it catches your interest though.

jamespetts

DoR,

let me explain briefly how the increase_industry_every... and the new system interact. Whenever the population increases and/or the number of industries decrease, the actual industry density falls below the target industry density. This is calculated at the beginning of every month. Whenever the actual industry density falls below the target industry density, there is a chance of a new industry chain spawning under the new system. This is entirely separate from the old system of industry chains spawning when the population of a town grows.

However, the old system has not been disabled. It still operates in addition to the new system. To stop the two systems working together to produce too many industries, the old system is only invoked when the actual industry density is lower than the target industry density. Thus, under the new system, industry chains will spawn when otherwise they would not have done; conversely, there will be occasions when, under the old system, an industry chain would spawn where it does not now.

As to your idea of extending the industry model - that is a fascinating idea, although it would take an enormous amount of work to code and calibrate properly. Are you volunteering...? ;-)

As to the import/export idea, this can largely be done already, with the exception that we can't specify that an industry should be built on the map edge. This is not strictly necessary, as all that is required is a port into which goods are imported or to which they are exported. It wouldn't work to have an exit point on the edge of the map for ships to sail to those ports from hypothetical foreign destinations, since the distance would be far too short and the economic factors relying on journey distance would accordingly be messed up. The same idea could be used to create international airports: as attractions with a very, very high passenger level.
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Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

Thanks for the explanation on the interaction of the industry_increase_every setting and the weighting. I'm not sure if I get it completely, but we'll see in Simutrans Experimental 8.0.

About the model idea (which I'd say is a replacement rather than an extension). I would be tempted to volunteer, but my coding isn't good enough for that quite yet. :-[ My next stop will be the .dat files of Pak128.Britain, to see if I can find some changes to the 1700's production and vehicles which might spark interest. This one was just to provoke discussion, see if people like it. If not, and if your bugfix stabilised the industry, the old system will do too.

Your point on industry ports is well taken, though even on a 256x256 map the edge can be quite far from the center, and on my standard 1408x672 maps it can be very far to transport. But as you say it can't be specified, and such ports would work too. Too bad, because I don't see much work for the Indiamen in my games (though recently I did find some employment for brigs... ;D).

jamespetts

DoR,

glad that the explanation was helpful. I shall look forward to your feedback when 8.0 is released! As to the model - we are somewhat limited of coding time at present, especially since I have to divide my time between coding and pakset work (and there is a lot to do on Pak128.Britain-Ex). That idea will probably have to sit in the "would be nice, but not enough time at the present" box for a while...

On the subject of Pak128.Britain, what changes are you contemplating making to the production and vehicles? As to the vehicles in particular, we have tried where we can to use accurate historical data for them: I certainly wouldn't want any of the historical data over-written with non-historical data. The monetary figures are fairly random for the time being (although I am waiting for some real-life figures to change all of that), but things like weights and capacities are largely historically based. Industry production does need some re-calibration, however.

As to finding work for your ships, one of the problems is the way in which maps are generated, not giving enough continuous bodies of water on larger maps: some time ago, I put in a feature request for better generation of larger maps, which is somewhat beyond my coding ability, (see here), but that was not ever finished. More contiguous bodies of water on a larger map should make the larger ships much more useful.
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Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

We're getting a bit off-topic here, so perhaps we should split away some of the topics... ;)

But to answer for now:

Re: coding / industry. I tend to agree with your prioritising. There's still quite a few things to do, not least bugfixes and balancing. In the meantime, I try to get familiar with the PakSets, so perhaps I could do the dull work of writing parameters.

Re: Pak128.Britain. First of all, to reassure you, what I'm thinking of I experiment with on my own machine. If I find it helpful, I will write a proposal to the Pak128.Britain forum section. I will not overwrite your information on my own.

That said, I have the following things in mind:
- Purchase costs of ships (up to several times the 50 I pay now).
- Running costs of the 6t stage wagons (I want to attempt to tune them so that they are marginally profitable, they should be less profitable than the 3t wagons, but they should run a slight profit instead of a significant loss so that they form an alternative for congested roads.
- Shop and farm production. Fruit/Vegetables/Flour/Beer/Grain lines in the 1750's each generate enough supply and demand to take the entire capacity of the road with 3t vehicles (I have dozens of them on each line), and even warrant the building of rail lines or canals (!). The result here is not historical. I'll try to significantly lower the monthly production of Greengrocers, Bakeries, Pubs, Arable Farms, Grain Farms and Orchards (perhaps down to only 25%) as an experiment to see what happens. My goal is to get to a situation where a handful of carts each month will do nicely to fulfill supply and demand.

Re: Water on the map. I tend to agree on this one. I work around it by raising the water level by 1 on my maps, which gives more water. Also I raise terrain roughness by 1 and increase the maximum height to the maximum of 320. Most of the time that gives me at least one sea that runs from one map edge to another, isolating a few of the land masses.

Re: Employment for ships. The main problem I encounter has to do with the storage of cargo. Cargo tends to be dropped after spending some time in storage waiting for transport. That means I need pretty high frequencies on my network. I generally don't have the supply to serve 200 item capacity brigs (let alone 500 item capacity East Indiamen) at those frequencies. One needs quite intensive traffic.

I'm not too worried about that for my games though. My maps are generally intended to represent a fairly modest county, nothing major anyway. You wouldn't find much employment for big 3-mast ships there anyway, that's the working terrain of Wherries, Keels and perhaps a lone schooner... :) Now if our county would be a be an industrial center with a heavy trade to abroad, that would be a different story, as you'd expect a major, bustling port somewhere, where big sailing ships come and go from somewhere off the map...

jamespetts

DoR,

thank you for the thoughts in relation to industries: I have split the topics as you requested. A great deal of the settings for industry production were guesswork, so any thoughtful balancing for that would be much appreciated indeed. If you are able to do some work on that, I'd be very grateful, and I'm sure that much of it could be carried over into the Standard version of Pak128.Britain, too.

One thing to note is that, although the capacities for railway vehicles and most road vehicles are historically based, the stage wagons were hard to research, so I think that the capacities there are guesswork, too, so it might be helpful to think in terms of possibly recalibrating those. (The number of passengers in a stage coach, however, are accurate).

What we really need to do with the industry settings is make it so that both road transport and canal transport is viable (at least, to the same extent as it was in real life) in the 18th and early 19th century. Only in the middle of the 19th century should rail become a necessity. As to lowering farm production - you might need to increase the distributionweight of farms to compensate. You seem to have the right idea of the way in which industries should work out, so if you have time to experiment to make it so, that would be very useful.

Out of interest, what size are your games, generally?
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Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

First off, sorry that I missed earlier that you wrote a reply.

By the way, until Simutrans Experimental 8.0 (or an intermediate version containing the bugfix for the industry weight system) is released, I'm playing and experimenting with Pak128.Britain (at the moment 1.07).

My typical map size is 1408x672, on which settings the minimap fits just to my screen. I typically set up 30 towns with 10 inhabitants. I get more because the town halls don't actually allow for 10, but this way I eliminate the tendency of Simutrans to concentrate the population in one town that is much larger and also make my games more challenging.

What may help is to get some insight in how my transport modes in a typical 18th century game are functioning. The principles appear historical enough in most cases.

- Road transport is basically my cheap starter. I set intercity_road_length to 9999 and cost_depot_road to 5000. So normally I can borrow some of the existing roads and start up cheaply. As is normally set starting_money back to 15000, that's quite necessary... ;)

But, even in a purely agricultural economy (farms transporting goods), roads are simply not for high-capacity transport. I find that with wagons, the best capacity I can hope for is about 70-80 items/month on any given road. When stage wagons come into play, this will be increased, but it's still limited. Also, road transport is never very profitable.

- Water transport is the highway of the time. Capacity is practically unlimited and transport is cheap and fast in terms of vehicles.

The disadvantage this transport mode has of course is that not every place is located on open water. That means if I want to have water transport and start and end points are on open water, that's a bonus. But otherwise I have to consider if canals are viable. Normally, if I have transport for 3-4 small boats, a canal should be viable, depending on the length.

- Rail transport is somewhat in between. If the trains are long enough, they are competitive in transport capacity and profit between wagons and canals, though they can't beat boats on open water at all and they can't beat wagons on small capacity. I doubt it can compete with stage wagons in capacity, but then they don't exist for bulk and long goods.

What I focus on at the moment (except pushing the purchase prices of ships up, I feel that ships were definitely more expensive to build than wagons), and experimenting with the running costs of stage wagons to try to bring them into play, is the demand for goods of shops. Bakery, Pub, Greengrocer, China Shop, Furniture Shop, Clothes Shop and Diary (which is a factory, but acts as a shop). Any one of them can easily generate more demand than my road network can handle, any 2 and if you're lucky enough the transport comes from the right direction you can easily support a canal. My experiments focus on pushing their demand down. I can't say much yet, I've barely begun experimenting with the running costs of the stage wagons. To be continued.

jamespetts

DoR,

thank you for your insightful analysis, which is very helpful (and certainly, an accurate historical representation). Your observations seem correct to me, and I shall very much look forward to the fruits of your work! Thank you very much for putting in the effort to help to get this right (which can probably be applied to the Standard version, too).
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neroden

I've been putting off working on this type of balancing until all the existing vehicles have reasonable pulling power and capacity.  I had a fairly coherent scheme for doing this balancing, but it all has to be redone (even the factory production) if the pulling power and capacity changes.

Dutchman on Rails

#9
Hi James,

Well, I'm not sure if my experiments help make things right. My appetite for difficulties in transport simulations is comparatively masochistic in nature... ;D

Hi Neroden,

So noted about the balancing. I'll just experiment a bit for personal use.

Speaking of the experiment, the first one proved a bit too sadistic. I set the shop productivity to between 4 and 8, and compensated by setting the industry_increase_every setting to 1000. I found it possible to make a profit with my settings, but only very tiny amounts at first (until I can accumulate enough transport routes to make the pennies take care of the pounds). The fun part though is that I get large amounts of shops and a fair amount of farms, but only a handful of factories, so goods have to be distributed crisscross from one end of the map to the other, sometimes in mixed trade routes.

Add: I've more or less completed my initial experiments. Shops in the 1750's now have a productivity of between 6 and 10 in my game, gradually raising over time. Given lots of other changes, it's difficult to fully explain what's going on, but in my game, a single cart route (including the maintenance cost of the depot) barely makes a profit. But I start with 8 industries, so the chances of having a cluster of industries or shipping route should be fair.

I'll use my screenshot thread to do something of a replay, to show how things work, and what different effects this has on transporting cargo.

jamespetts

DoR,

your experiments sound encouraging - the current industry settings haven't been tested experimentally, so your work is much valued. Thank you!
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Dutchman on Rails

Well, it's unlikely that I'll do a complete test program for you, but what little I'm tinkering with, I'll post.

http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=3157.new#new

Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

An update on my thoughts.

Using semi-random industry creation creates quite some havoc in my game once industry is replaced, and also in terms that the larger towns don't necessarily have the new industries (making trade potential a little too unpredictable). I'm considering to start a new experiment, this time setting up certain rules that make industry endpoint creation as well as the kind of endpoint creation a factor of town growth (so a town will first want vegetables and fruit, then later milk, then flour (the flour mill takes some labour), then meat, then alcoholics and so on, a bit like in the old Ceasar III game.

Also, I consider experimentally reversing The Hood's theories on farms in my game. Instead of having many farms service one shop, there will be one farm serving many shops with very small production. With factories like flour mills, textile mills and breweries, this will of course be more balanced.

jamespetts

DoR,

thank you for your update. Can you expand on what you mean by "havoc" here - what particular problems did the current system cause you?

The changes in relation to the sequence in which industries are built in towns that you suggest would require modifications (and quite significant ones at that) to the code, so it might be a considerable time before this can be considered, unless somebody else writes a patch for it.  The other change is a balancing adjustment that can be compassed by altering existing .dat files. I should be very interested in your work on that: there is much to be said for rebalancing industry to reduce the potency of end-consumers and concomitantly increase their number (increase the "distributionweight" parameter by the same factor as you reduce the productivity).
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Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

What happened was that I would have a nice transport system set up, and then the industry would close in that area, and the replacement industry I ordered (remember, the industry was maintained manually in my Proof of Concept game) opened up in a completely different area where there would be no industry. Also, several industries would close in just a few months (and new ones reopen).

I'm also sorry to misformulate my point on the industry. Yes, I do modify the .dat files extensively to this effect. But the part of industry distribution I do not yet make an req for that. What I will do is use the manual settings of the public service player to simulate the effect as a Proof of Concept.

I'll keep you posted.

jamespetts

DoR,

when you write that you "ordered" an industry, do you mean that you used the "increase industry density" button in the map editing tools? That will, of course, create a random chain in a random location. If you want to use map editing tools to create a specific industry chain in a specifc location, you can use the "build industry" and "link industry" buttons.
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Dutchman on Rails

Hi James,

Yes, I did use the 'increase industry density', which more or less would give the same effect as having industry density take care of the industry (random industries). And yes, when I'm ready for my Proof of Concept test, I will use the 'build industry' and 'link industry' to control precisely where the industry is placed to simulate the effects described below.

Dutchman on Rails

James wrote in another thread:

"In relation to an earlier suggestion about the ratio of production and consumption of farms and shops: whilst there is much to be said for lowering considerably the consumption of shops and increasing their distributionweight, care should be taken not to increase the production of farms too greatly, or else each farm will require a far more substantial transport link than would in reality be required. The idea, for example, that a single farm deserves a railway line all to itself is absurd, and the industries should be balanced with this in mind."

Yes, good point. Basically I want farms (especially in the 19th century) that can supply a few of my (very low productivity) shops, or, with many combined, a mill or factory. I also want a few more fields to make them look bigger. But you're right, I should be careful to keep the balance such that they can only be served properly by carts or trucks.

neroden

#18
Quote from: Dutchman on Rails on June 29, 2010, 04:48:13 PM
James wrote in another thread:

"In relation to an earlier suggestion about the ratio of production and consumption of farms and shops: whilst there is much to be said for lowering considerably the consumption of shops and increasing their distributionweight, care should be taken not to increase the production of farms too greatly, or else each farm will require a far more substantial transport link than would in reality be required. The idea, for example, that a single farm deserves a railway line all to itself is absurd, and the industries should be balanced with this in mind."

In this case, farms should retain fairly low production levels.  But not *too* low (see below)

Several things need to be done, and I'll explain them all.

First of all, there are only so many trucks one can run on a short line: equal to the number of tiles, bascially.

On a large map, factories don't spread out that much, often being only 12 tiles apart.  I never get any long supply chains, I get clusters instead.  This means that many supply chains can only support up to 24 trucks.  This is also only 3 km apart, making for very low revenue.

Conclusion 1:
The distance of factories from their suppliers needs to be larger.  (Is it specified in terms of tiles instead of kilometers at the moment?  If so it should be in kilometers.)  The minimum should be at least twice what it is now in tile terms -- probably 4 times as much.

Now suppose we do this and factories are at least 48 tiles apart instead of the current 12.  It becomes theoretically possible to put in a truck (lorry) line.  However, it's not reasonable to do so because it's always cheaper to run a train line.  This is mostly because the horses cost more if they're running a lorry line (!!!).

Conclusion 2:
Horse running costs for road, lorry, and canal horses need to be rationalized.  For starters the pulling power should be rationalized (10 kw waterway 10 kw roadway 12 kw railway right now), but then the price-per-kilowatt should be approximately the same.

So suppose the horses cost X /km, with the 1-unit carts costing .01/km.  And suppose the minimum line is 48 tiles long (long enough to supply a 48-unit-per-month farm).  Suppose .17 remains the price for goods.

(.17 * 12 km  - (X + .01) * 24 km) * 48 = Y (per month) operating profit
Y should be at least 2 * the cost of the cheapest halt, otherwise it's impossible to pay for infrastructure.

If the cheapest halt still costs 18 per month, then this means X is less than or equal to .04.

I strongly advise .03 for the single horse if revenues and halt prices remain constant

Conclusion 3:
It is probably desirable to raise revenues slightly and/or lower halt prices.

This would leave more room to adjust the price of vehicles.  

(edit:)
Passenger and mail vehicles are going to continue to run short distances (as little as 2 km) and although they need not always be profitable when doing so they should come close to breaking even, when running a shuttle or extension service, for example.  At most.  Also, 90% full is as good as we can assume.

Short distance passenger  for the 'minimum-length' trip, assuming some economies of scale with halts and a completely congested road:  (Edited for hackney capacity)
(.90 * .22 * 5 * 2 km  - (X) * 2 km) * 16 = Y (per month) operating profit
where Y will pay for *one* halt (we assume the one on the other end is pre-existing) and X is the running cost.  Assume halt prices and passenger revenues stay the same and we discover that X can be no larger than .42.  Assuming a completely congested line is an uncomfortable and unreasonable assumption.  If we assume half as many buses, we find that X has to be negative.  Ow.

This means that either passenger revenues need to be raised, or halt costs need to be reduced, or both.

Conclusion 3, revised:
Either halt (maintenance) costs need to be lowered or revenues need to be raised, or both.

I strongly suggest both.

Lowering halt maintenance costs.  I suggest starting with an across-the-board reduction to 16 per level.

Raising revenues.  Based on my computations, I suggest raising "slow" goods revenue to .18.  (Edited): Passenger and mail revenue should go a lot higher than it currently is.  It depends on the other changes made, but if single horses are reduced to a cost of .03, then .27 will suffice for passengers and .30 for mail.


FINAL CONCLUSIONS:
(1) Minimum factory distance: raise to 12 km/48 tiles from current 3 km/12 tiles.
(2) Horses: increase to consistent 12 kW, cost .03/km; double horses to 24 kw, .06/km
(3) Halt maintenance: reduce to 16 per level
(4) Revenues: slow goods .18, passenger .27, mail .30.

Dutchman on Rails

Hi Neroden,

I use the factory_spacing setting in cityrules.tab to push the factories further apart, most of the time in the upper 20s range of tiles, though over games this has become progressively larger. Perhaps that one helps.

jamespetts

Nathaneal,

thank you for the careful analysis: it is much appreciated. This is a topic that needs careful consideration. Firstly, I am very much hoping to get some data on the real relative price differentials between different forms of transport and different types of vehicles, so that players have realistic incentives to use certain sorts of transport. For example, it would be very helpful to know just how much more expensive that it was to build and run a stage coach than a hackney carriage in real life. However, there has to be a calibration baseline somewhere to fit with the game mechanics, and using the road horse and cart seems to be a sensible calibration baseline, not least because, if the maintenance figure of the basic cart is 0.01c/km, the lowest possible figure, that sets the scale for everything else.

One or two additional, complicating factors must be considered, however. Firstly, there is fixed maintenance. Simutrans-Experimental allows the maintenance of vehicles to be charged as a fixed sum per month as well as (or instead of) a fixed sum per kilometre. In most cases, the sensible thing to do is to have both per month and per kilometre charges. Currently, in Pak128.Britain-Ex, the monthly charges are not used, as a complete price rebalancing is needed before they can be adopted; since that is what we are considering here, we need to take into account fixed maintenance.

Secondly, one needs to take into account the speed bonus and comfort bonus when determining revenue. Revenue can easily be boosted by setting a very low speed bonus value for a particular era: if, for example, in 1750, the speed bonus was set to be 3km/h, then most horse-drawn vehicles would earn more than base revenue for any speed bonus rated cargo. This needs to be considered as a way of altering relative profitability across different eras, and approximately simulating inflation (the reduction of the value of what passengers and freight customers are prepared to pay).

Thirdly, it was indeed my plan to alter the cost of the smaller stations; I have already altered the cost of depots (albeit not in a released version of the pakset as yet: see the Github repository for Pak128.Britain-Ex). You will recall that I have introduced a feature in Simutrans-Experimental to allow the cost and capacity of stops to be set independently of their level, although have not got around to implementing this into Pak128.Britain-Ex yet, as it requires very detailed, comprehensive and careful planning, calibrating and cross-checking with other values of exactly the sort that you have started here. Early road vehicles lack appropriate stop types, however: a "bus stop" does not make sense until the 1820s. Before that, we need ideally a "staging post" (very cheap, low capacity drive-through road stop: perhaps a capacity of 16 passengers and 0.01c/month maintenance) and a "staging inn" (more expensive, higher capacity terminus road stop). I have not, however, yet quite worked out how to draw (or rather, produce from Blender models) stations/stops, and have a rather large queue of graphics awaiting attention (which could be processed much faster if only I could find a way of addressing the issues discussed in this thread).

As to the industry distances, I have put them up to 24 tiles in the simuconf.tab for Pak128.Britain-Ex, so that issue should be addressed in the next release. I did not realise when I set that figure that industries would cluster quite so much with a low number.

As to pulling power: this again needs to be investigated carefully. I am not quite sure where to start for horses or boats (if you have any suggestions, I'd be most grateful, bearing in mind that the objective is to have them as real as possible), but I do have some data for railways that gives an idea of the performance of early railway trains that might be useful: power (as opposed to tractive effort) information for steam locomotives is extremely hard to find, as it was difficult to measure and thus rarely measured.

You also mention a price-per-kilowatt for haulage: I doubt that the real economy worked like this, and it is a real pricing model that I am trying to simulate. Something was not automatically twice as expensive to run because it had twice the amount of power. Different modes of power had different pricing structures, and much depended on efficiency as well as power output, plus the fact that a high proportion of the cost was the staff cost, not the fuel cost, which did not change at all with power output. Generally, therefore, one would expect cost to increase less than power, and for more powerful vehicles to be more economical, provided that their power is being put to good use (and not taking into account the need in some cases to build stronger ways and bridges to accommodate the greater weight of the more powerful unit, the inability of larger ships to fit up smaller canals, etc.).

In any event, thank you for your detailed analysis. It is a useful starting point for the large but necessary task of rebalancing costs and revenues for a Simutrans-Experimental balanced pakset. Your work is much appreciated.
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