Sorry for mixing it all together.
Regarding the classes, we have a few observations:
- especially in the beginning of the game, higher classes make so little traffic, that you go bankrupt due to maintenance and running costs.
- most (if not all) vehicles are profitable even when set to very low class, but most important is that the numbers of passengers gets much higher (more than double).
- from the previous example I have summed up the numbers of passengers according to wealth: 25/190/128/245/620. That is sligthly more than 50 % being the very low class.
- once your network is big enough, you may survive switching to default classes, but will see a big drop in profit.
- we did an experiment on server with quite a big network (many players interconnected, no cargo, some mail), and all players experience drop in transported passengers to approximately 50 %
- the drop in profit is critical, some smaller companies (with monthly profit <10000 cr.) are not profitable any more. It seems that railways are not affected that badly, but omnibuses and boats are losing money. Maybe because trains have high overcrowding ratio, so now they are just not so overcrowded. And thus the higher revenue makes for the reduced number of passengers. But buses and boats have little overcrowding and lose money. Trams were affected too (although they are very low by default), due to network effects. You just may rise the prices, as all the passengers will transfer to some other vehicle, which is low or higher class. (Perhaps a really big tram network might support local traffic for very low class).
So, the main question is:
- is it really intended that 50% of passengers are "very low", only 2% "very high" and the rest is almost evenly split between high/med/low ?
If it is really the intended distribution of wealth, then the vehicle and infrastructure costs and maintenance might not be balanced properly against the possible revenue.
If not, then the passenger generation, town growth or class levels in buildings might need to be adjusted.
Nowadays everybody who want's to travel (at least to commute), can probably afford it (excluding homeless and unemployed people). Companies sometimes lower the ticket prices to attract more passengers, but usually only to take them over from competing company. But we don't know how it was 100 years ago. How big were the profits of transport companies (not only railways, but also stagecoaches, omnibuses, boats, etc.). Would they get more passengers if they lowered the prices? Would the number of new passengers be high enough to offset the lower price? At least in simutrans the answer is yes. Why then it did not happen in real world? Cheaper travel for everyone?