More industries, check (would be nice to know which setting you startet stephenson-siemens with)
More diversions, check (although it was definitely not me asking public player for help with it
)
Longer map: 512x4096 is too stretchy imho. Looking at stephenson-siemens and my previous 1280x1280 server game, I fear there would only be one, maybe two main lines from north to south depending on how the towns are placed.
However, after some testing, it seems the map size itself doesn't have a huge impact on memory, so we might try a compromise of ~1000x3000
"It would be nice to have a map with flat parts and hilly parts, but that is not possible with the default landscape generator."
"I'd like to try some real world map ... but that one is probably too big"
I don't know, how big is that map?
In any case, it seems even more challenging than stephenson-siemens whose terrain I liked pretty much tbh.
If anyone is experienced with creating heightmaps from real-world data, we could also try out a map with Lübeck in the north to Florenz in the South, Bern in the West, Pilsen in the East. Scaled to 400m/pixel, this would result in a map of roughly 1000x2800 with very challanging austria and switzerland but also very flat areas in the north and the Padan Plains in the south.
The scale might be an issue, Don't know if the valleys can be used properly in that case, we'd have to try it out.
If we only had hardware capable of 4000x12000 maps xD
- game should be IMHO paused if nobody is playing.
Well I was thinking about this as we had players from all around the world, so the server ran for more than12 hours on some days anyways. Time passing by constantly might be a better option than "wtf, I was not here for a week and suddenly it's 1990"
I'm also not sure if automatically unlocking abadonned players is a good idea or not. I'm really unsure about how to handle this. Simply unlocking players will lead to artificially keeping these dead and unlocked companies alive forever or taking over parts or the whole company as first-come-first-served just after the company got unlocked. I am not pretty satisfyed with both solutions tbh.
An option might be players registering interesst in the company as a whole or parts of it and selling these parts of the company by auction if multiple players registered interesst. However, this sounds pretty interessting but I am not quite sure how to properly administrate this. Raise and flatten land until you have paid the bid?
I don't know how is it different if the houses are destroyed by public player or normal player?
Imho, there are three problems with destroying houses currently:
1. As you have mentioned, it is much to inexpensive.
2. inhabitants will just disappear from the world when their house is removed.
3. Some operations will require much more destroying of city buildings than it would in the real world.
I would solve these the following way:
- Make destruction of buildings MUCH more expensive 100-500 times the current cost.
- Allow players to make a request for a new way or an upgrade within the city.
- Public service or players may decide if (re)moving the required houses is worth it or not.
- If it is, public service will move delete some of the houses and re-build them somewhere else. How many houses are moved depends on the type of way building:
Adding a parallel roat or track to an existing one would often fit without removing much in the real world, so public service will do the clearance and re building.
Building an entirely new track will be quite expensive in the real world, so public service will only remove a few houses and restore the number of inhabitants somewhere else, maybe even in another town nearby.
Building ways without making a request is also allowed, but public service will not subsidise this at all, so the player has to pay the full (very expensive) price for the built up grounds to their owners and public service won't grow the city to the previous level again (due to not knowing the number of inhabitants before the destruction)
"No opinion. But if your bits_per_month is anything other than 22, you will need to think about how to manage pakset compatibility."
Changes to bits_per_month is pretty uncritical. Simuspeed will be left unchanged. In relation to real-world time nothing will change. purchase costs, however will be properly adjusted.
That means, you will make 4x the profit per month but purchasing new stuff will also be 4x as expensive.
"I only have 4GB RAM, so I would not be able to play in that case."
I am sorry :/ However, I don't think a multiplayer map for thatt few memory can be set up. Simply launching an extended 64x64 map already consumes ~2800 MB of memory and your system also wants some memory. Loading current stephenson-siemens will already raise the memory to ~3350MB
A higher max_diversion_tiles and max_city_size is a good option I think.
I don't think towns_adopt_player_roads and allow_making_public are a good idea for singleplayer maps but won't work well on multiplayer. Imho city roads should always be shared, no matter if the owner wants to share or not. In principle the same goes for upgraded intercity roads but there is sadly no option to share only these roads but not rails and airports with other players whilst still being the owner and thus getting paid the toll.
way_height_clearance=1 will indeed fight the mentioned issues but on the other hand it will also allow half-height bridges to be built above rails iirc.
I had solved this situation by abusing the public player, either building public half-height bridges above rivers in that case or remvoing the river, building the bridge and re-building the river underneath.
However, I would be interested in others opionions of the last three points.
