Discussion: optimum starting settings

[jamespetts]

Welcome back! As to the number of cities (more accurately, conurbations), I am trying to simulate England, where, in certain parts, towns and villages can be very dense - have you ever been to South-East England and the home counties, for instance? If you have a look at a Google map of the area, you'll know what I mean. There need to be large areas as dense as that, and other areas rather sparser.

As to local versus mid-range and longer distance passengers: in the early game, it is the mid-range passengers that provide most of the profit, since local passengers generate only low levels of revenue, and the networks are insufficiently developed to transport long-distance passengers. Whilst I have been very busy over the last few weeks and have not had a chance to run the tests that I hope to run, I suspect that the issue is, in part, that fewer local passengers exceed the journey time tolerance, thus exaggerating the bias in favour of local passengers created deliberately (as this is realistic) to excessive levels.

What is the problem with the goods in Pak128.Britain-Ex, incidentally?

[ӔO]

I can tell you that with passengers = 16, there's more than enough passengers generated.

the key to success seems to be frequent service with faster connections at spots that will generate a lot of passengers.
I'm not even done building up the network, but it's earning a lot of money.
It just requires a large initial investment.

it seems to be better to not make tram hubs, because it messes up the spacing, and therefore the frequency of the service on the line.

run the vehicles and get them spaced out evenly, before you build the stops, or you will lose passengers that are waiting for the return of the first convoy in that line.
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save file updated.
http://hotfile.com/dl/85368199/91ead1f/Le_monde.sve.html

[neroden]

Welcome back! As to the number of cities (more accurately, conurbations), I am trying to simulate England, where, in certain parts, towns and villages can be very dense - have you ever been to South-East England and the home counties, for instance? If you have a look at a Google map of the area, you'll know what I mean.

Subtle point here: I'm starting in 1830!  It wasn't that dense in 1830!  The smallest "villages" shouldn't even appear on the Simutrans scale, to start with.  If I'm doing my job, the city growth should cause that area to become extremely dense later (and it does, it does), but it should build up *around* my railroad lines.  :-)  (Eventually we will figure out how to have the game automatically generate "new towns" around appropriate levels of factory traffic. :-) )

I suspect that the issue is, in part, that fewer local passengers exceed the journey time tolerance, thus exaggerating the bias in favour of local passengers created deliberately (as this is realistic) to excessive levels.

I'm certain this is what was happening, and it seems to have been fixed now.

What is the problem with the goods in Pak128.Britain-Ex, incidentally?

The core problem with farms and mines producing too little to ever handle profitably has now been fixed.

The secondary problem, unfortunately, is that the income from 0% speedbonus and 3% speedbonus goods is simply too low to pay for the infrastructure of a railroad, or even a full-length road.  The volumes are high enough to overcrowd the roads but barely break even using horse-based road vehicles -- it's not quite profitable enough to justify building the roads.  This is exacerbated because many of the factory chains contain ONLY 0% and 3% speedbonus goods. 

My baseline is that hauling coal to a coal merchant with a steam engine and the cheapest bulk wagons, and the cheapest rails which can carry that steam engine, should be profitable, which it was at the time.  It's not even profitable to run it with a plateway and horse-drawn vehicles at the moment.  The running costs and infrastructure maintenance costs for all this stuff is very low already, so I think the base price of bulk goods needs to be tweaked upwards a bit (not much, maybe from 53 to 54).  As for the 3% speedbonus goods, either the base price needs to be raised, or the speedbonus percentage needs to be increased -- you have to have a *huge* (completely unattainable in 1830) difference in speed to get any price difference for these goods, and I think that's not what's intended.  If this is true across the timeline, perhaps these should be 4% or 5% speedbonus goods instead.  If this is only true in the early timeline, the speedbonus structure for the early timeline needs to be reexamined to figure out why this is happening.

[Václav]

I often start with city size of 1300 and with 13, 21 or 31 cities (based on map size; but I often play on map of Czech republic with size 2000*1316) - and with industry 4.

It gives game right difficulty. So it is not too difficult - but still it is not easy. With these settings there in game one of two very big city where you can start with passenger transportation. And there is also optimum density of industry - one or two chains ending by any shop what are quite distant from each other - and some powerstations.

If this is what you ask, James.

[ӔO]

a few minor bits I'd like to see.

pedes_and_car_info: off
tree_info: off
ground_info: off
townhall_info: on
only_single_info: off