Topic: Help Save My Company! {Pak64 111.3.1-Linux}

[Krystal_Amaia]

So, I'm playing Simutrans and have a pretty healthy 30% margin going on some basic goods.  (Coal, Lumber, Concrete and some Oil) and I'm sitting pretty at ~50million credits.   I decided to start my passenger service, and my finances have tanked!  HELP!?  About 10 years after opening passenger service I'm fluctuating between -13 and -30% profit margin, and 26million credits!  =( 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xj1gctjsjifmmhg/help.sve
Thanks in advance!


Krystal.

P.S. Save in dropbox since apparently it's bigger than 512kb. 

[LNBC]

Did you use JUMBOLINERS for those intra-town bus routes?
These buses operate with a very high cost (11.XX Cr, compared with some default buses costing of 3.XX Cr)
and they served local routes that earnings cannot recover the cost of operation.

Some comments:
(01) Replace Jumbo-liners by both buses with cheaper operation cost AND mail vans.
Cost Combining both vehicle should be cheaper than these inter-city buses.
(02) Think about to increase service frequencies by using not only ONE, but MORE THAN ONE vehicles, to operate local routes.
[By applying this method, you should also relieve problems like over-crowded stops and fully-packed vehicles at the same time.]
(03) Try to connect factories, curious building spots, EVEN between towns: like we travel as commuters do.
(04) [Optional] To get some cheaper vehicles (in OP cost) from other pak-making fansites.
Japan, Brazil... Shall you know some years ago I have tons of double-deckers available in Pak 64 format - for free.
A Friendly Transfer here: http://www.geocities.ws/nwfb_lv1/download.html
(In Chinese - if you really don't know that language - let Google Translate helps you.)
For the others? Try to have a look in Pak 64 add-on section in this forum, or the read-only Simutrans Forum Archive:
http://archive.forum.simutrans.com/board/00039.0/index.html
if you needed some older addon paks for your gaming.

Finally: RETIRE your JUMBOLINERS after new buses start servicing. (Vehicle Details> Retire)
Hope this save some money from depreciation - as time flies, the value of vehicles wear. Cheers!

[DrSuperGood]

Your rail network is not efficient enough. You are using a ton of 450 km/h rail but with no high speed trains on them. These tracks are comparatively expensive and the traffic you have placed on them is losing money. This is likely where most of your money is going.

A lot of your profit is being lost by moving cargo in the wrong direction between stops, you only get paid between stops so any distance traveled not to the next stop costs you. Worse is for every tile you travel away from a stop you need to travel an extra tile towards the next stop so the cost is double. As pak64 is balanced around high running costs this means that even a few tiles in the wrong direction can eat up a lot of your profit. For example each tile away from the next stop can cost as much as 20 tiles of travel towards the stop to pay for.

Pak64 city expansion logic works best with a 2*2 space grid. It can only place houses next to roads so those huge open spaces you made will never be populated and they greatly decrease the efficiency of passenger pickup by lowering the population density.

Passenger trains in pak64 have high break even points, after which they make a ton of profit. To maximize profit you will want to operate a wheel network where each city connects passengers to a central hub (located in the middle of nowhere for convenience and to avoid interfering with passenger pickup). The trains are then instructed to wait for 100% at the city station, so that they pull out passengers from the city into the hub. Depending on pickup percentages or if mail is asymmetric you may need to get the trains to wait for 100% at the hub. As cities expand more trains can be put onto the line servicing the city to cope with the increased traffic. This configuration is usually so efficient that it can quickly make so much money you will have no idea what to do with it all (I have had 40 billion or more in some server games where I used this). The hub is prone to congestion if no_route_over_crowded setting is used.

At Ashton branch station use the stacking exploit to make the trucks a ton more efficient. This is done by placing a drive through stop followed by a terminal (end of road) belonging to the same stop. Order the trucks to the terminal stop, and then to wait for 100% at the drive through. They will drive to the terminal, unload and then turn around and wait at the drive through. The turn around action allows them to stack (up to 64 per tile?) allowing you to replace a massive expensive stop with a neat 1*2 structure. Not only would this save you money on maintenance but you could earn some more by using better roads.

The reason your revenue is falling is due to speed bonus degradation of road and rails as time progresses. You need to use faster or more efficient convoys to keep earning well. This is why your train is losing so much money as it is just not fast enough in 2026 so the passengers are not paying enough for it to break even.

Hillden suffers from bad service. Most of the stops are overcrowded meaning that you are missing out on passengers and mail to transport.

[Ters]

By 2026, making money on passengers is near impossible in pak64. When my games reach that point in time, I'm pretty much living off the insane amounts of money I've made throughout the 20th century.

[DrSuperGood]

By 2026, making money on passengers is near impossible in pak64. When my games reach that point in time, I'm pretty much living off the insane amounts of money I've made throughout the 20th century.

That is not true, at least for pay_for_distance 0 (distance between stops) which is the setting he uses.

Passenger Aircraft (not mail) always make profit, and even at 2200 I had airplanes making several million per standard length year. Trams always make profit, especially if loaded to near maximum all the time. Trains used to barely make profit at all, however changes made a while ago removed the final speed bonus increase allowing for trains to still make tons of profit right past 2100. Improvements to monorail also mean they can now make a ton of profit end game, although I seldom see a sever reach that stage with enough development to try them out. For profitable busses you are pretty much limited to the Jumbo land cruiser operating exclusively on max speed roads, in which case they can make over 100k per standard year.

That said around 1950 to 1990 passenger income with trains is absolutely broken. I was operating 12 tile long trains in a 2-4 times slowed server and having them earning over 10 million per year.

[Ters]

Passenger Aircraft (not mail) always make profit

As long as you can fill them. I've never gotten much into aircraft. Since I tend to start prior to their introduction, big cities are already well connected by train, so my primary motivation for using them is to connect remote villages. But using 747s for that just seems wrong, and other planes always become unprofitable once the next arrives.

Trains used to barely make profit at all, however changes made a while ago removed the final speed bonus increase allowing for trains to still make tons of profit right past 2100.

I haven't been playing for quite some months now, and not in the 21st century for over a year (my current game is still crawling along in the 19th and my city streets are clogged with horse carriages), so these changes might not have appeared to me yet.

For profitable busses you are pretty much limited to the Jumbo land cruiser operating exclusively on max speed roads, in which case they can make over 100k per standard year.

Well, there's the catch. Buses are essential for winding through city streets feeding the trains and airplanes. I've used the Jumbo on one line ever, which replaced a train to a small town, rather than the outdated buses. Trams are an option, though, but require somewhat more infrastructure.

My biggest issue with the pak64 timeline is that everything just gets bigger and faster. Almost all low capacity vehicles become obsolete, although it is better now than it was a few years back, when they actually became obsolete or unprofitable every single one of them. Running a service a lesser frequency, but higher speed and/or capacity, is not something that would realistically be a feasible solution beyond a certain point. Passengers in Simutrans have infinite patience, but it just feels wrong to have them wait for months to fill up the newest and biggest in public transportation. And it looks wrong as well. The 747 did not make the 737 obsolete in real life, although the 737s made today are not quite the same as the first 737s. Nor did the speed and capacity of RMS Queen Mary 2 stop us from making smaller and slower ships like MS Sprit of France (although the difference in capacity is far less than the difference in size).

[Krystal_Amaia]

I guess one of my biggest problems is as somebody pointed out poor service.  I find it very difficult to assign vehicles to a bus line in such a way as to have spacing between each bus / mail truck so that each stop is serviced *roughly* at the same time

[DrSuperGood]

I guess one of my biggest problems is as somebody pointed out poor service.  I find it very difficult to assign vehicles to a bus line in such a way as to have spacing between each bus / mail truck so that each stop is serviced *roughly* at the same time

That is only the issue if you could make profit from the passengers, which you cannot with your train configuration.

For spacing make them wait for 100% at one of the stops that will not interfere with other lines. There you then set the maximum wait time to some month fraction based on roughly the number of convoys per month you want running through the stop. The spacing is imperfect but a ton better than no spacing at all.