Are Shipping Fees Supposed to Work Like This?

[TC]

I love this game. I just discovered Simutrans last weekend, and I spent all day yesterday playing it. I have many questions about the game, and I'm looking forward to discovering the answers to most of them as I play. However, there is one big elephant-in-the-room question which I'm curious about now: What's the deal with shipping fees?

When I started playing, I quickly discovered that I am not rewarded for delivering goods to their destination quickly and efficiently. Instead, I'm rewarded for sending goods on wild circuitous journeys. This is because the income for transporting cargo seems to be proportional to the distance it travels. The rule for making money, therefore, is to fill empty trains as quickly as possible, then run them through the longest possible routes before sending them to their final destinations. Following this rule, I've found it easy to construct simple rail lines that earn me tens of thousands of ¢ in profit per trainload.

This obviously isn't a good model of reality. It results in transportation lines that simply don't make sense. I want my simulated world to be reasonably realistic, so I've tried to ignore this flaw in the economic model. However, I don't think that is possible. The more I play the game, the more convinced I become that adding unnecessary distance to delivery lines is the only way to turn a profit. Hub and ring networks may seem like models of efficiency, but they only work because they allow you to add unnecessary distance to delivery lines while keeping large numbers of trains moving in an orderly way.

Those of you who have been playing for a while -- How do you think about this issue? Have you found a way to tweak Simutrans to make the fees more realistic? Or do you just exploit the flaw to earn millions of ¢ so you can play in Simutrans like a sandbox?

-TC

[prissi]

You can have several revenue models. The current one allows for ring lines, which would be barely profitable at all with other models. You can select them, when you start a new games under "sttings" -> "economy" -> "pay for total distance"

Default is 0, but one (only pay for total distance of single trip) or two (only pay for for distance gained to destination) may give you your desired behaviour.

[TC]

Prissi,

Thanks! I didn't know about those settings options. I just looked in the online manual, but I couldn't find them documented there. How did you find out about them?

-TC

[prissi]

Well I am head programmer; They are new. If you are not using a nightly, you need to set them in the simuconf.tab file. They are documented there too.

[TC]

Wow, I didn't know I was conversing with the head programmer. I hope my original post didn't sound critical, because your game rocks! I'll try the different settings and see which one works best for me.

-TC

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Simutrans has somewhat of a learning curve; so it may take a while to discover everything that is available, and how it all works together. :-)

[felo]

Hello
Can you expand the explanation of these options?

0: default is distance since last stop)
1: the payment is only relative to the distance to next interchange.
2: to the trips destination.

pay_for_total_distance = 0

[ES]
Hola:
¿Pueden ampliar la explicación sobre estas opciones?