On one or two occasions, I've noticed a problem where my company started hemmorhaging revenue like the Penn Central.* Almost no matter what I didn, the company would start posting more and more negative revenue, and nothing I did (expanding the network, reworking some routes, etc.) would actually fix the problem. Any advice on dealing with this, since I suspect I'm not the first person to have this problem?
For reference, I usually start with a city-less map so I can plan things out to my heart's content, run massive terminal stations, etc.
*For reference, the largest railroad bankruptcy in American history.
A source of major losses that one might not anticipate relates to delays. I'm not sure exactly how the feature works, but it seems that if passengers have to wait a long time at interchange stations, for example, then the amount they pay will be reduced. I think this is separate from the "refunds" feature, which gives passengers their money back when they are discarded.
Anderson,
could you upload a saved game so that I can see where the problem lies, and whether it is something that you're doing wrong, or a bug (which I need to fix)?
I'll try to recreate it. I threw up my hands with the savegame where it happened (I was only about five years in). The big thing seems to have been building my corporate HQ...once that went in, a feedback loop seems to have triggered, but there were a few other things that might have been to blame.
Thank you - let me know when you can reproduce it.
Ok, I have the error recreated. I've managed to isolate the bleed to one line of local elevated transit in this case (which I'm going to "kill" going forward, but with the error regeneration saved so you can take a look). Unfortunately, the save file is about 3 MB, so how should I send it to you?
You can upload it to http://files.simutrans-germany.com.
It's uploaded as "From_Scratch_6_Error_Recreated.sve"
By way of a note, as long as I cut Huntwell off from the overall network, things seem to shake out fine. I'm not sure why that city (and only that city) is generating such a bad result from long-distance traffic.
Edit: Ok, I think I know what the jam might be...I think the game is reacting badly to interchanges on elevated tracks. I added another interchange on the big city's elevated network, and voila, negative revenue coming out the wazoo.
I'm uploading a second save file. Long story short, the error came up again in the game with another city, and this time the error started cascading (with multiple lines showing the loss within a few months).
At this point, I'm convinced that it's a bug of some sort...I'm just not sure what sort.
Thank you very much for uploading that. Testing has shown that the fixes that I have already implemented in the pre-release version of 10.4 will fix this problem, so it should be fixed in the next release. Thank you for reporting this bug - that is very helpful.
No problem. I'm just wondering...what was/is the problem that was causing this to happen?