Vehicles are too cheap (Britain.128-Ex)

[emperon]

Hello,

It seems some vehicles are two cheap. If you say on what comparison for example the bus NS-Type costs only 639c where as it's maintenance cost is 3.10 c/km. That means the vehicle is so inefficient that only after 200km it will cost me another bus. That doesn't sound realistic.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Oh, you hadn't heard? It's made from cardboard, using trash can lids for wheels, and an electric fan + battery for propulsion...

[jamespetts]

Emperon - thank you for your comment, and welcome to the forums. Pak128.Britain-Ex is still work in progress, so there is much rebalancing to be done. The balancing needs to be a bit different in Experimental than Standard, but the balancing needs to be redone in Pak128.Britain (Standard), too.

A full rebalancing will take a long time, as I need to find some way of getting real life data on the relative costs of these things, and also recalculating the whole balance using the fixed maintenance feature (whereby maintenance costs are charged per month as well as per kilometre). However, in the interim, for the next release of Pak128.Britain-Ex, I have reduced greatly the maintenance costs of buses (they were formerly much too high), so this should assist somewhat in this respect.

If you have any idea where I might get realistic data on the price balancing for 'buses (fixed per month maintenance, variable per kilometre maintenance and purchase costs for all differnet types of 'buses over time), or, at least, some basic information from whcih I can extrapolate such data, then I should be very grateful.

[emperon]

Thanks,  I am by no means an expert of bus prices. But i can make a simple calculation.
If a simple bus stop costs 100c (in real life the cost can be 500$ say). An old is at least costs 30K$ on average (a cheap one)
So a bus should cost around 6000c . If we consider fuel, it should be around 0.30$ per kilometer making 0.06 c/km. Fixed costs are, bus driver, taxes and service maintenance. A 24 hour working bus should have  3 drivers say it costs 8000$ => 1600c with aditional taxes and service cost 2000 c.

So on the very average    0.06 c/km and 2000c fixed montly cost.

[Junna]

A full rebalancing will take a long time, as I need to find some way of getting real life data on the relative costs of these things, and also recalculating the whole balance using the fixed maintenance feature (whereby maintenance costs are charged per month as well as per kilometre). However, in the interim, for the next release of Pak128.Britain-Ex, I have reduced greatly the maintenance costs of buses (they were formerly much too high), so this should assist somewhat in this respect.

What about the running costs for trains, some of them are impossible to run at anything other than a massive loss. Just to name a few, the Eurostar, HST and APT all have such a high running cost (50+ c/km) that even fully loaded and running on dedicated high-speed track to minimise disruptions and allow the highest average speed between stations, they extremely rarely make a profit, and generally only shortly after a new year has begun and restarted the running cost graph.

[jamespetts]

Junna,

all the costs need rebalancing: that'll be one very large and complicated exercise, but it'll need to be done sometime.

[AvG]

At the moment I am reworking my huge Excel-file that is dealing with vehicle-prices and running costs.
The goal is to have these prices and costs based on real situations, like prices for commodities (wood, iron, oil, etc)
System starts in 1750, inflation and productivity are having huge influences.
If possible it will have an influence on prices of bridges, tunnels and leveling land.
Since I am working "on the fly" it is a huge time consuming job, but the results will be trustable.
It might be clear, that using these results in Exp8.2, I am very, very eager to have the possibility of changing config-values in a running scenario.
One of the ideas is that horses are no longer live forever.
Will keep you informed.
AvG

[emperon]

I understand but then we have a big problem. If i construct a road and pay the same price for maintenance every 3 months, that  would make game unrealistic weather possible or not.