Early road rebalancing

[jamespetts]

Following the introduction of the industry road timeline feature in the next nightly build, there has been a rebalancing of some of the early roads in Pak128.Britain-Ex to reflect more accurately the economics of road upgrading in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The existing unsurfaced road type is now split into two types: the unimproved unsurfaced road and the improved unsurfaced road. They are both intended to represent fundamentally the same road technology (i.e., a dirt track - the pre-MacAdam style of road), but the unimproved road represents a road that is lightly maintained and the improved road represents a road that is well maintained.

The unimproved road has a lower maximum speed of 9km/h. The improved road has a higher maximum speed of 14km/h (until yesterday, the single unsurfaced road type had a maximum speed of 12km/h). The unimproved road has a maximum axle load of 1t; the improved road has a maximum axle load of 2t. The unimproved road has the same maintenance cost as the old single unsurfaced road; the improved road has a much higher maintenance cost, higher than the MacAdam road (one of whose principal advantages was its ease of maintenance).

The defaults have also changed. Now, the default road type between towns in 1750 will be the unimproved unsurfaced road, allowing wagon/coach traffic between towns, albeit at a reduced speed, in the earliest years without player sponsored road upgrades. The default road between towns and industries/attractions in the early years will be the bridleway. In 1775, the default road between towns will be upgraded to the improved road. Roads inside towns will start with the improved road in 1750 to represent the fact that local roads were generally well maintained by comparison to long distance roads in the 18th century.

The later industry road timeline is more similar to the inter-city road timeline except that heavier roads, such as the concrete road, are used in later years to allow heavier vehicles to use these roads without being upgraded.

Note that roads loaded from existing saved games will retain the maximum speed embedded in those roads when they were first built or last upgraded.

[Matthew]

This looks like an interesting refinement to the early game. So the improved road is an opportunity to invest to increase revenue while the Macadam road becomes an opportunity to invest to save maintenance. Thank you!

[Matthew]

Note that roads loaded from existing saved games will retain the maximum speed embedded in those roads when they were first built or last upgraded.

It seems that existing Unsurfaced roads cannot be upgraded to the new 14km/h Improved, because they show up as Improved already. So we won't really see the benefit of this until new games are started.

[jamespetts]

It seems that existing Unsurfaced roads cannot be upgraded to the new 14km/h Improved, because they show up as Improved already. So we won't really see the benefit of this until new games are started.

Yes - a feature of Simutrans is that the speed limit of a way is coded at the point that it is laid, and so is not updated when the pakset changes.

[Mariculous]

Is that behavior intended or just "how it is"?
From the code

max speed; could not be taken for desc, since other object may modify the speed

This relates to speed limits that do not come from the way itself but from bidges, level crossings, degradation and so on.
When loading a savegame, those speed limits can be reconstructed from these properties without storing/loading the speed limit by itself.

[jamespetts]

Is that behavior intended or just "how it is"?
From the code This relates to speed limits that do not come from the way itself but from bidges, level crossings, degradation and so on.
When loading a savegame, those speed limits can be reconstructed from these properties without storing/loading the speed limit by itself.

This is intended in the sense that there are a very large number of things in the code that depend on this: town speed limits, the speed limits of way objects, degradation based speed restrictions, crossing based speed restrictions and many other things rely on the speed limit being stored in the individual way tile rather than the object describing the way-type: this is inherited from Standard. A major rewrite would be required to change this, including changing an unknown and probably very large number of disparate things that implicitly depend on the speed being dealt with in this way.