Standard-style passenger destinations in experimental

[diesseits]

I love experimental a lot for the much more sensible way that passengers get from A to B, but I have found that some aspects of experimental don't really fit my game style. Particularly, to the extent that simutrans is a game, the 'game' I play, and which I found most engaging in standard, is of trying to keep up with demand and keep squeezing capacity out of infrastructure, much like a government public transport company. The passenger volumes in experimental never really seem to challenge a two-track railway line at any point in the game.

Standard, while the routing is bad, is good for this play style due to the 'game breaking' exponential increase in passenger numbers as you add more destinations to your network. I like the challenge of meeting that extra demand without bulldozing whole cities for more lines and roads.

Obviously, this effect has been written out of experimental, with good reason (especially for where you're trying to play a private transport company). But is there any way to fiddle the simuconf.tab to get the same thing happening again without having to go back to standard and the over-simplified routing model it has? If, for instance, I set the chance of short- and medium- distance passengers to 0 and the minimum distance for long-distance passengers to 1 tile, will that do the same thing? Or is it more complicated than that?

[jamespetts]

Diesseits,

the best way of increasing passenger volumes is simply to increase the "passenger_factor" setting in simuconf.tab. This will increase the overall numbers without altering the gameplay balance. Look for the simuconf.tab file in your pakset's config folder, as the setting in this file will over-ride the base simuconf.tab file in the base /simutrans/config folder.

Do let me know how you get along, as the passenger factor is something that I suspect that I shall have to adjust in future to make a more realistic game. Try setting it to 16 to start with (which is the default in Standard), and, if that is not enough, try 18, 20 or 24.

[diesseits]

jamespetts - I hadn't realised that the passenger factor could be increased above 16, as when I go into the settings tab for a new map it says 'set a value between 1 and 16' and goes red if you type in something larger.

[Banksie_82]

I've tried doing what James suggests for Ex 7.3 Pak 128. But I set the passenger_factor to something like 40. Mainly just to see how it affected game play but I also wanted the capacity of the infrastructure stretched.

The number of passengers was silly, as you would expect, but it made for quite a different strategy of game play. They money I made was also huge, but lets ignore that for now (I assume that could be fixed with the speed bonus).

Most of my double track train lines were more like metros. That is, 1 line per double track, with very little sharing of tracks between lines, and very little "at grade" crossings.

Airports didn't work, they were constantly over crowded and I found it hard to get more capacity out of them. And that was only using them as point to point (again only one line using them).

Buses were virtually useless (too much traffic) and tram infrastructure was almost always at capacity. Again, usually one line per track.

Don't get me wrong, it was fun, having an extensive "Underground", trams going everywhere and monorails criss-crossing the cities to try and get some cross connectivity and relieve over crowding at stations. However, it did lose the "if I build this line, will it make money?" because all lines made a profit. It also lost the challenge of efficiency, trying to share infrastructure between lines. Partly because there was no incentive (rolling in money) and there was rarely any free capacity.

I would be interested to hear how other passenger_factor numbers affect the style of play, or any other tweaking of settings for that matter.

[jamespetts]

The passenger factor can be set to greater than 16 in simuconf.tab; I an not sure why this is not also possible in the GUI. The challenge is to find the optimal setting for Experimental - 40 is evidently too high (and thank you to Bsnksie82 for the test).