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Notes about old goods trains

Started by mjhn, March 22, 2009, 03:04:32 PM

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mjhn

It's great having some classic 4-wheeled coal wagons, but -
The trains are so short and light that the large freight engines which become availble in the early 1900's (My current game has got to 1910) are completely wasted on them (My typical freight train at the moment is a GWR prairie tank and 23 bullk goods wagons, which it pulls with ease).
there are two possible solutions to this. The first is to reduce the power of all locomotives, but this would reduce the typical length of passenger trains as well, and I think it would NOT be a good idea to end up with the standard pak128 situation of a large express locomotive having problem pulling just 4 or 5 carriages. I think a better solution would be to double up all of the short wheelbased 4-wheel wagons, so one 'vehicle' is actually two wagons (as is done for the early wood and peice goods wagons in pak128).

jamespetts

Ahh, thank you for pointing that out. The 24-vehicle limit is not there for techincal reasons: it was put there just to make the trains fit easily within the depot windows. In the next version of Simutrans-Experimental, the limit will be lifted to 64 to solve exactly the problem that you are describing. The only disadvantage is that 64-car trains need a very wide depot window (does not properly fit on my 20" monitor, but the whole window can be viewed by moving it around).

(I think that this solution is better than doubling up the wagons, however, which would be very fiddly).
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The Hood

#2
Thanks for the feedback.  We need to do some re-balancing of pricing and acceleration/power before the next major release - recently most of the effort has been on graphics.

I'm not sure immediately what the problem would be (I did balance everything about 2 years ago when the train set was completed, but there was a large bias towards getting passenger stuff right as there was no industry set then!), so can you say what works with how many vehicles in the current setup (in your game pre 1900), and which locomotives are over-powered with which convoys? 

If it's not just a balancing issue (I suspect there is a balancing issue, but also a fundamental problem with the 24-car limit and therefore relatively light goods trains even of 23 wagons), then I'm not in favour of a general reduction in power - as you say this will harm passenger trains which should work nicely at the moment.  There are two possible solutions:
1) James's idea of extra vehicles: pros = longer trains, more realistic; cons = needs a patch to allow more than 24 vehicles, and some way of viewing all the vehicles in the depot.
2) mjhn's idea of doubling up: pros = easy to implement, doesn't require messing around with other vehicles, cons = less intuitive.
EDIT: just thought of a third:
3) re-draw graphics to have two (or more) wagons treated as one for game purposes (buying/selling/turning), with resulting higher capacity.  It would look fairly similar, except not so good around corners, but would allow doubling up of capacities easily (or is that what you were suggesting mjhn as point 2?)

As I'm fairly busy doing graphics, would anyone out there with more actual experience of playing the set (mine is very low!) like to do some testing and making some more detailed recommendations?  In particular, if anyone can check capacities and weights (including weights per unit of goods in goods-128.dat!) that would make the next round of balancing more consistent!

jamespetts

Incidentally, I will also be working on a "global gear" factor in simuconf.tab to make balancing easier without fiddling with all the individual .dat files - should be in the next version of Simutrans-Experimental.
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kierongreen

The goods engines should be balanced with 8 (full) wagons of the same era as far as I remember.

The Hood

Kieron, that sounds about right.  I think the problem is with mixed traffic locos.  I balanced the prairie tank with passenger coaches I think, and a sensible number of coaches (3 or 4 I think) could be much heavier than 8 wagons!

jamespetts

The Hood,

that would suggest that allowing longer trains is the way forward... ;-)
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The Hood

Yes, but that requires a change to the code.  Fine for use with Simutrans-experimental, but not so fine for the main pak...

jamespetts

You know, there's no reason in theory why the maximum train length could not be set through a Simuconf.tab setting. Perhaps submit an extension request...?
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