Would it be possible to change the price charged for a journey?
Price change would be a great tool to lower congestion, because when the price rises, fewer people/goods(?) would take your transport.
This can also be a competition factor when playing with others (AI or online).
It will allow you to earn more money if you have low capacity (attracting less, but still enough to fill your capacity), and attract more passengers if you have high capacity, but you don't have it all used.
The setting can be applied for each vehicle, each vehicle group (trains, ships, etc.) and for all vehicles. As an additional setting, you can choose whether the selected vehicles setting overrides global settings or not.
Of course, the standard price will always be default, so you choose whether to play with or without this.
What do you think of my suggestion?
I fully agree with this idea, then, is the suggestion that
needs to be a widely discussed because of
large orders sought. I myself would love to
power tariffs on each line with a price. A good example
usefulness of this will provide is the differentiation
tariff between cities.
EXAMPLE
The city
Urban Transport X rodoviario $ 0.12
Urban rail transport X $ 0.06
Urban transportation City Railway x $ 1.20
and so on, thus, would also be the
over the years could have increased rates.
I like the idea, should be considered.
It has already been implemented in Simutrans Experimental. Though, in the Experimental there are comfort level instead of price. And each comfort level (and not only this one) defines a price.
Also, there are other algorithms of searching a route for passengers.
Quote from: Train-catcher on February 02, 2011, 10:09:35 PM
It has already been implemented in Simutrans Experimental. Though, in the Experimental there are comfort level instead of price. And each comfort level (and not only this one) defines a price.
Not quite :-) One cannot set the price manually in Experimental - having to work out the optimum price for scores of transport lines would be more a chore than a game, so it is assumed that the simulated little people in the simulated accounts office will work out the optimum price and charge that. There are comfort settings, however: passengers are prepared to pay more for more comfortable travel, and less for less comfortable travel, and demand more comfort the greater the distance travelled.
In a multiplayer game, setting price would open a whole range of possibilities for competition.
THat is correct.
What I try to add to the game with this suggestion is being able to have a low passenger number on low-capacity routes, and being able to have real competition online.
Of course you should not be forced to set the ticket priced, as the standard will be the best price.
However...
If you enable "deterring" away traffic from low-capacity routes on a supply/demand basis, you open for competition in multiplayer games.
This could affect game balance for the usual competion-law/monopoly/abuse-of-dominant-position reasons.
A rich player could dump prices to push out smaller companies.
You would almost certainly have to install some kind of regulation like goverment competition authorities, to preserve a balanced game after one player achieves dominant position.
Quote from: Kirdan on February 14, 2011, 12:17:16 PM
However...
If you enable "deterring" away traffic from low-capacity routes on a supply/demand basis, you open for competition in multiplayer games.
This could affect game balance for the usual competion-law/monopoly/abuse-of-dominant-position reasons.
A rich player could dump prices to push out smaller companies.
You would almost certainly have to install some kind of regulation like goverment competition authorities, to preserve a balanced game after one player achieves dominant position.
That'd be realistic.
And should one not want to play in that manner (either multiplayer or otherwise), there ought to be some option to disable custom pricing game-wide and force the use of default.
I came to think about that in real life, you often can't set ticket prices after how profitable the route is.
Often running a route is a matter of contract with public authorities, to ensure coverage for public transport and the ticket price is fixed in the contract. Instead there's subsidies form the authorities.
This is actually simulated in OpenTTD.
Subsidies (special transport offers) from authorities (but I am not sure that it is right word) are something what can be taken to desire - but else than exact setting of ticket price - what is not implemented in any else similar game I ever played - may be for complexity of that feature.