Topic: PAK128 Pricing & Balancing - Discussion

[VS]

No problem, vilvoh already explained your situation to me

I always tell any people who work on hobby projects and I am their "boss" in some way: you do not have to do anything. This is for fun, not for money. Just tell me when you want to do something, and when you aren't going to do something you already started.

I am quite content just knowing you have to postpone this but remember.

[wernieman]

Sorry for the question but ...

what is the status of he poject?

I think we could make a nighly of a new pricing-system ..... so we get better feedback ...

[VS]

Zeno has something to do…

[Zeno]

I'm a little busy with both work and studies, but I'm getting back to this ASAP; 5th december will be my last day of studies for a long time, so I'll have some more free time. By now, we can get a beta version if you want. I'm playing a bit with new prices for all locos and wagons, and I haven't seen anything out of normal perception, so I think it could be possible to use current sheet for the beta version.

Btw, I'm still wondering to treat EMU/DMU locos separately (look at jatypc comments). So it may happen some little adjustment later, but I think the newly calculated prices are quite fine: I've taken my best saved game and I still get some benefit

The only bad thing of using them right now is that if bugs/issues are detected, it will take some time for me to fix them. But if despite it you still want to use them as beta... no problem, bugs will be efficiently enqueued and wait to be processed

[wernieman]

Thanks for the dat-Files. The next nightly (tomorow) have your price-System.

So for everybody: PLEASE TEST IT!!!!

[Zeno]

I've begun to work in road vehicles balancing, and it looks quite complex. I think it will take some time to get anything clear... btw, I'm messing with the old sheet, trying to update some formulas with some used in the new sheet with locos, and trying to get some numbers to consider later.

The first results gave me numbers which appear to be much higher than current values. Another conclusion is that, without considering bonuses, I get very similar values to current ones, so it's possible that calibrating those numbers I can get some "useful" results

I'll report further advances.

[VS]

Thank you

[Zeno]

I think I'll have a big deal with trailers and trucks. But I see no problem with buses or one-pieced lorries, already got them in the right place
I'll take a couple of days to do some tests and decide if make a new sheet or what can I do with trailers and so.
Anyway, now I have to go back to homework!  >:(

[jatypc]

Just post here when you have something to test, I will have a look and "torture" it with tests  (it is going to be a bit more difficult to balance and test trucks, but anyway, you do the hard work...)

[wernieman]

For the changes of the trains ... just look at the nightlys ;o)

@zeno:
When you have a betta of the new System for Trucks and/or Bussesn, just informe me. I think it will be good, when we have a alpha/betta ...

[Zeno]

Nice!
At the moment I'm changing all income calculation formulas: I want to try income with income being calculated in a similar way that locos and wagons, based in the capacity, effective speed (bonus) and trip length. I need to try different things, different options, because I can't make the old sheet to work using that formulas, so I see I'll have to rewrite some. Stay tuned!

@jatypc:
Thanks for your help! Everything is just work, but some is shorter and some longer

@wernieman:
Ok. I'll give you some files in short time. Anyway, I've got a big headache with trailers. And yes, I also need new pricing for buses and trucks. I think it was suggested before that was very difficult to make benefit using buses until toooooo late dates... Actually I think so.

[neroden]

Before you do too much balancing of individual vehicles....

The speedbonus chart in the recent nightlies (2133) is really no good at all, at least for starting in 1930.  It needs to be rewritten.  Either that or *all* vehicle speeds need to be changed, which is a lot more work.

Problems:
(1) Train expected speeds are much too high.  Trains can only be used for bulk cargo, never for passengers or express cargo, even if there are huge volumes.  The 134 kph train, running full all the time, is just less effective than a 60 kph tram.
(2) Truck expected speeds are a bit too high.  It's very hard to make a profit on trucks for any sort of cargo at all, and buses are never any good.
(3) Tram expected speeds are a bit too low.  You can make quite a lot of money on trams.
(4) Ship expected speeds are very low.  Time-senstive cargos should always be sent by slow boats, for maximum profit!
(5) In general, the differences in 'expected speeds' between modes are very large and *do not* correspond to the difference in the speeds of the available vehicles.  All the available trams in 1932 are "faster than expected" and all the buses are "slower than expected", with predictable results.

You get paid much more to run a fleet of hundreds of 35 mph trucks than one 70 mph train.  Or to run a 19 mph ship rather than a 70 mph train!  This is sufficiently unrealistic that it's bizarre.  Building a canal to transport fish is expensive, but if I can swing the capital cost, it's better than buying cooling trucks.  And the trucks are far better than a train which is twice as fast.  Apparently people pay huge premiums for slower delivery.  :-)  I can see having some difference in the expected speed of different modes, but a *small* difference, not 19 kph for a ship and 116 kph for a train.

Once the speedbonus chart is fixed, the vehicles do need to be fixed too, but it might not be as big an issue afterwards.  There are a lot of passenger vehicles which are slightly slower than the alternative.  With the speedbonus as important it is, I found that I always needed to use the fastest possible tram, or if I couldn't afford the tracks then the fastest possible bus; nothing else was *ever* worthwhile, because the speedbonus effect was so large.  The same was true for anything with 5% or more speedbonus.  If the speedbonus effect wasn't so huge, it might be reasonable to use a 55 kph tram instead of the 60 kph one.

[VS]

Before you go into too much detail, know that so far only trains were changed, everything else is still as broken as before.

But the observations are useful!

[DirrrtyDirk]

AFAIK only the theoretical, not the actual max speed of a vehicle counts, so if the engine and the cars in use have a max speed that allows for the bonus, you'll get it - regardless of whether or not the train (or whatever vehicle) actually reaches this speed. Or has that been changed?

[Zeno]

Uhmm... you mean if its max speed is 80kmh it will receive the bonus for 80kmh even if it never goes faster than 50kmh (f.i. in city)? If so, effective speeds should be forgiven, and use theorical max speed instead. 
But anyway, I think this should be changed in game, if not you could use lower quality and maintainance roads to get same income ...  :-\

[DirrrtyDirk]

At least it used to be that way for quite a long time - I don't really know if this is still so. You gotta ask prissi to be sure.

[VS]

I don't remember any change to that. Yes, reached speed is not accounted for. However, it has some effect on how much cargo you can move and thus the revenue, too, albeit indirectly.

[Zeno]

I don't remember any change to that. Yes, reached speed is not accounted for. However, it has some effect on how much cargo you can move and thus the revenue, too, albeit indirectly.

I don't think that can really affect too much to a road vehicle... maybe trucks-trailers, but not buses since they have enough power to move their cargo by far. But actually I'm using an effective speed calculated from prissi's formula: weight=power/(vmax^2/2500+1). But all vehicles except 3 get same effective and max speeds

[VS]

Oh, that! Yes, if you overload a vehicle, it can slow down.

Can you list the weak vehicles?

[Zeno]

Goods_Truck_4. Max speed 130kmh, 236kW. Fuel: Hydrogen. Theorical effective speed: 116. Difference: 14.
MS_Hino_goods Truck. Max speed 130kmh, 200kW. Fuel: Diesel. Theorical effective speed: 125. Difference: 7.
Bulk_Truck_3. Max speed 90kmh, 194kW. Fuel: Diesel. Theorical effective speed: 83. Difference: 5.

But I would bet that PMNV_50_Mack is also quite weak... I's always suffering to accelerate when pulling any heavy trailer

[Zeno]

After some exhausting hard work days... I'm back guys 
Get the last vehicles.all.pak HERE.
I've updated the last prices for road vehicles: they are calculated the same way no matter is bus or truck or lorry.
I've finally built a pak file so you can test. It would be great if I get some FEEDBACK, please!!

[VS]

Thank you! I will try to test it... it's been soooo long since I played Simutrans!

[gauthier]

thanks a lot, I will test them.

[wernieman]

If you give us the dat-Files .. whe can check it in the vsn ...

[VS]

I see "broken" as a binary state. If the numbers are broken, you can't break them more, no?

By the way, I changed some other values (engine_type) in the meantime, please do not overwrite these... but that's a problem of using svn the right way, not your changes.


edit: I started playing and immediately some flaws are apparent... not just with your balancing! This is starting to be a rather complex problem. Let's see:

Start in 1930, now I am finishing 1930.

I "kinda" overdid it with field productivity. Grain farms are far more productive than is the actual need, at least as far as I can observe. Good for me, at least somewhere I can pump money steadily.

Compared to my memories, quite a few vehicles feel underpowered.

Ironically enough, there are not enough buses to meet the speed limit when starting game! I get zero bonus for 50 kmh, but most vehicles can do only up to 45, and even poorer model is introduced. The PC-ed bus with 58 kmh is all nice and should make insane money compared to the rest, but is horribly weak and can't drive at full speed… it could be easily overtaken by the slower models!

So I have real trouble making any money with buses, I use the most economical one and the fastest one and they make more or less same money. But the other models have even worse parameters...

Clearly the speedbonus table is too optimistic : Let's see about that >:(


Question: how do you decide if a vehicle is "productive"? As I see it, it should make profit at the time it is removed from production, since it can be bought even then. It doesn't look that way with all the costly buses...?


Argh, now I am really starting to be frustrated. I can make lots of money on grain and flour :-/ Coal pays poorly. Passengers are hell.


So, I stayed up until 3:20 am and kept feverishly punching fast-forward button to see what comes next… never more!

The speed bonus is largely disconnected from reality, so obviously that needs to be changed. Should I look into that, or do you want to perform some C# black magic punishment on it yourself?

road=1911,21,1928,50,2001,82,2032,85
The entry "1928,50" obviously created most of my problems.

I had only one train line, so most of the comments are not related to it. Everything is about road transport.


One more idea... maybe I am overestimating the importance of speed bonus. It certainly does not matter with some cargoes. But I see most vehicles always under it! That's what I can't get over.

[Zeno]

Question: how do you decide if a vehicle is "productive"? As I see it, it should make profit at the time it is removed from production, since it can be bought even then. It doesn't look that way with all the costly buses...?

I suppose it's fully loaded and get its "theorical" max speed [weight=power/(vmax^2/2500+1)], then I compare with the bonus speed of its introduction date. Then I apply "normal" income based in distance driven and capacity, and then I use a percentage of the bonus it should get if its speed is "theorical" max speed.
I use a percentage of the bonus because if I use ALL the calculated bonus I get very unbalanced results. Still got to play a little bit with it.

Anyway, I'm with you the bonus system is not perfect. That 50kmh in 1928 is the example

And another problem is we don't have a continuous vehicle time-line coberture, I mean, there are not vehicles available for any purposes at any time (not always have city buses or inter-city line buses or...) :'(

Another thing I've detected looking at planes, and I don't know if will be the same for other types of vehicles, is that there is an arbitrary use of dat parameters sometimes. Look at raven's Airbus A380 and mine. Raven's weighted 500tn and mine 277. And mine is more powerful!! If this also happens with other types of vehicles (much more difficult to detect!), this will be some kind of madness because vehicles will never get the results we expect  :-\

[VS]

Hmm, you do interpolate the bonus speed, right?

[Zeno]

Mmm... yes. Suppose: 
1930 -> 50kmh
1940 -> 60kmh
Then I interpolate the values between: 1931(51), 1932(52)...1939(59). Then I look for the year and get the speed. Shouldn't I do it this way???

[VS]

Yes, it was just a quick idea what could go wrong in some cases...

[Zeno]

Well... I'm thinking now that if bonus is calculated with vehicles' max speed (DAT) and not the higher speed it reaches in the trip (game) then I should not use the "effective" speed but the DAT max speed. Do you think I am right??

Btw, one thing I have clear is we have to make the bonus speeds table to fit our current vehicle designs, because we can not make the designs to fit our current bonus table

And lastly, I remember talking with VS some months ago about planes in pak128. After analysing them now, I do think we MUST do something (not now but in mid or long term) because planes are IMHO really the weakest part of pak128: unbalanced pricing, unbalanced data, unbalanced time-line, unbalanced graphics, ... 

[VS]

Yep, planes really need many changes. Something about half of them is from unreachable authors.

5 HIBARI (-5 copyright)
4 Haru (-4 copyright)
8 Raven (-4 too ugly - even Raven complained about them, but never got to replacing them with anything)
7 MHz
1 Sindor (-1 too small)

With this outlook, one could almost say, don't care


I'll try to plot all vehicle speeds and find some reasonable bonus values - or do you want to do it?

[Zeno]

I'll try to plot all vehicle speeds and find some reasonable bonus values - or do you want to do it?

You can try it, as I don't really have a need of it for my calculations; I will have to update bonus table when finished and everything will be re-calculated.

If you are too busy I can try it myself later on, probably next week.

What would be great is to calculate it in a sheet function of our vehicle repository, so any time a new vehicle is introduced to pak128 we'd have a quick and easy update to the bonus table. What do you think? Any idea for a formula? 

[jatypc]

Nice progress, Zeno. It is pitty I will be able to have a more detailed look only in one or two weeks.

[VS]

So - here are the charts:
http://www.simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/vehdata.rar

And the script is in svn, as always...

[Zeno]

Wow! It's nice
What about "auto-building" the bonus table for a % of the avg speed on each year? Let's say... 75%? That way it could be nearer to in-game reality