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pak64 vs. pak128

Started by kangirigungi, November 18, 2017, 07:52:41 AM

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kangirigungi

I've been always playing with pak64, because when I first started to play, that was said to be the most mature. Now pak128 is the default. Apart from pak128 being prettier, which one is more stable, gameplay-wise?

gauthier

I can't speak about pak64, I tried to play it once but the graphics burnt my eyes and I found there was a lack of variety in vehicles (not a judgement here, only my personnal feeling about it).

About pak128: it's not completely mature yet but still fairly playable. It needs a better balancing regarding costs of every kind of objects, the current balancing is already playable but not perfect. It also needs an overhaul of graphics: many styles of graphics are present and they don't always go together nicely; and an overhaul of objects repartition over time: for example there are too few city buildings in early (until ~1940) and late (from ~2010) eras so towns have a repetitive look.

Pak128 is popular for a long time because it has had a much greater variety of objects than any other pakset.

The best way for you to compare is still trying it ;)

DrSuperGood

Main problem I have with pak128 are the insane industry production numbers. It is near impossible to have complex chains only supplied by road as one ends up needing ~300 convoys each (more early on during the game) and dedicated roads to handle all that traffic. For this reason practically no one uses road convoys except when the public roads can be used as temporary routes to subsidise maintenance until all the necessary track is laid.

Ters

In my case, it is pak128 that "makes my eyes hurt". The individual images look nice, but the 128 pixel grid is just too big. If the same graphics, with more rotations, both vertically and horizontally, was used on a map with a 64 or 32 pixel grip, and a dozen different slope gradients, it would be acceptable. Right now, good looking graphics just makes the unrealistic scales more apparent.

kangirigungi

Quote from: gauthier on November 18, 2017, 08:45:15 PM
I can't speak about pak64, I tried to play it once but the graphics burnt my eyes and I found there was a lack of variety in vehicles (not a judgement here, only my personnal feeling about it).

About pak128: it's not completely mature yet but still fairly playable. It needs a better balancing regarding costs of every kind of objects, the current balancing is already playable but not perfect. It also needs an overhaul of graphics: many styles of graphics are present and they don't always go together nicely; and an overhaul of objects repartition over time: for example there are too few city buildings in early (until ~1940) and late (from ~2010) eras so towns have a repetitive look.

Pak128 is popular for a long time because it has had a much greater variety of objects than any other pakset.

The best way for you to compare is still trying it ;)
The same balancing issue is true for pak64 too. Though I didn't try road vehicles with jit2 yet. I'm also used to trucks being useless when I played with Transport Tycoon. There are also some price issues: some vehicles have so high running costs that they can't be economical even if they run at full capacity (the DC3 comes to my mind, for example).

gauthier

There are problems like that in pak128. Trains whose every vehicle is propelled are hardly profitable because a vehicle has a completely different balancing wether it is propelled or not.

ROCAMBOLER529

Ohh is depend in the context...

The pak64 is more traditional because is a pak for beginners and easy to start and learn how to play. it has his mistake like the poor variety but it has a very good balance with the money that you win. But the speed bonus int according if the goods for example the sand.
The pak128 is a pak very complete about trains & trucks. But its a gamemode more hardcore than the pak64 because,having a great variety of vehicles, it is much more difficult for the player to know which vehicle he should use in a given context knowing that the speed bonus is quite inflexible with the goods.

Otherwise the pak64 is much lighter compared to the pak128 for the level of graphics that has the aforementioned.

The Argentian (Argentina Empire)
The Argentian (Argentina Empire)

prissi

pak64 has intentionally not more than one or two vehciles for a certain job. If you ever watch the AI, you will see, that typically i chooses always the same vehicle for pak128, because while there are many choices, only few make sense economically.

(Default OpenTTD had even much less choices for most of the vehicles.)

In pak128 essentially everything that looked remotely like a pak128 sized object was included. Hence this rather wild mixing of scales and aaperances.

That means, if you play for model railway, pak128.German/britain/Japan or something like the other themed paks is probaly best suited.

Ters

I guess what makes a large selection of vehicles pointless from an economic point of view in Simutrans, is that there is no difference between production run and service life, as well as no drawbacks from having old vehicles beyond their possibly lower speed and/or power. Or even vehicles that turned out to be a design failure after a short while.