I haven't looked at yours, but please look at the spreadsheet I created for this purpose, which is actually in SVN if I remember correctly.
Thanks neroden. It's a bit similar to the one of The Hood's I saw. What I'm proposing is a bit different; it uses some of the same data, but the unit of benchmarking is very different, being based on lifetime economic performance. My spreadsheet won't take long to understand, certainly faster than me trying to explain it. There is a fatal problem for it at present, as it relies on the idea that a unit has economic lifespan, something that does not currently exist in Simutrans, as maintenance costs do not increase with age.
I would like to emphasize again that there is no point in balancing prices until carrying capacity, vehicle weight, power, and tractive effort have been set
I would like to second that, and add that I cannot see how to balance prices if units do not have a economic lifespan.
If you're going to work on balancing, I suggest working on infrastructure maintenance costs first. I am really unsure how to balance them properly, but every good way of balancing vehicle prices depends on balancing infrastructure maintenance first.
I just discovered that myself! I guess the first question is how to simulate the degradation of infrastructure, i.e. fixed and variable costs, and replacement. There are currently no usage-based infrastructure costs, which unbalances early vs mature gameplay (makes it harder to make a profit when you start out), and also doesn't capture the reality that trains wear out rails but boats don't wear out water. If vehicles inflicted wear on their infrastructure that would be simple to include in balancing. One simplistic idea I have is to consider that each mode is, by nature, differentially infrastructure-intensive, and apply an infrastructure capital charge that is the same for each unit of a given mode. So we would benchmark a tram as if its purchase price included a portion of the infrastructure it required. The outcome of this is that the tram would be made cheaper than a bus to buy and own as an individual unit per passenger-km, to compensate for the fact that the player has to pay for more infrastructure to run the tram. The infrastructure loading would be set at a level that assumed a certain level of infrastructure utilisation; the player would not realise the benchmark return on the infrastructure investment if they did not achieve this utilisation (the lower cost of the trams would not offset the infrastructure cost unless a minimum number of trams were bought and used).
I haven't reached a conclusion as to whether infrastructure also needs a finite life for balancing to work.
In many cases the profitabilities would have been comparable; two transport companies in the same country in the same era would all have more or less comparable profit, would they not?
Why? If you are making a killing tramming people around London, and I am barely profitable hauling coal through the Midlands, what's going to cause us to have comparable profitabilities? Our equipment and markets are neither comparable nor transferrable, so why should we automatically achieve the same outcome? One might as well compare a steel mill and a pharmaceutical company.
Alternatively, we could both be hauling coal in different parts of the country, using identical equipment, but be getting paid a different price/km. If one of us therefore makes a lower profit than the other, is that the equipment's fault?
local 'buses, for example, may never give anything like the return on investment as airliners (even taking into account capital depreciation), but they are necessary in order to get the passengers to and from the airport and enable the aircraft to carry enough passengers in order to be profitable.
If we balanced a mode of transport on the assumption that it is only viable if cross-subsidised, how much fun would that be? If no bus could be profitable of its own accord, no matter what its loading? Each unit will require a certain utilisation to operate profitably. An operator could choose to assign it to a task with lower utilisation as part of a bigger network picture, but if a bus cannot make a profit under any circumstances, it is a lemon.
Some types of transportation might well be orders of magnitude different in profitability to others, but that does not make the less profitable ones not worth pursuing, not least because either they are necessary for linking to the more profitable types to make them work, or because, in a competitive environment, all the opportunities for the more profitable type of transport have been taken away, so the only remaining opportunities are for transportation types with lower profitability.
Yes. This is in contradiction to your opening argument about all transport companies having comparable profitabilities. Choosing to provide a transport service or not is a binary decision, and in a perfect world will be done wherever there is profit to be made, and regardless of the magnitude of the profit available.
If we balanced the minibus so that its profitability was, taking into account capital depreciation, identical to that of an airliner, there would be some significant distortion.
In dollar terms yes. As a ratio of profit earned to capital cost, no. Return on capital is the actual leveller in the real world, that causes money to be shifted from one industry or operation to another. If the airliner had much higher return on capital, more investors would pile into the airline business, and none into the minibus business, until the airline market was sufficiently saturated that return on capital fell to the minibus level. The number of planes would increase until utilisation fell to the point that one got the same return on a dollar invested in the minibus business as they did on one invested in the airline business. This is the theory. In practice the market is never perfectly balanced because of uncertainty, time delay, imperfect information, and various forms of variability.
Availability of the market is as important a choice for businesses making decisions about where to invest as profit margin, if not more so.
How could one estimate a profit margin without first estimating the market?
So, indeed, we should balance things that, in the right conditions, no types of vehicles, infrastructure or cargo are, in their own time, impossible to use profitably
Yes
but it would be somewhat arbitrary to equalise the profitability of all types of vehicles,
No
as they may well not have been equal in reality,
Because reality was heavily determined by local operating and economic conditions
It might be a helpful calibration tool (not least to compare with the profitability of the real thing), and a means to check whether things are indeed profitable within a sensible margin
Yes
the aim of the exercise should be to balance things so that they are as close to reality as possible whilst still being playable
Hence the need for a tool that allows us to massage numbers as easily as possible
A spreadsheet of the sort that you are devising may, therefore, very well be useful, as long as it is designed such as to ensure that all vehicles are somewhere between (and not including) unprofitable and excessively profitable
This is exactly what I'm aiming to present in an easily digestable format, and to support easy calibration of units that we want to move away from the benchmark.
rather than aiming to equalise the profits entirely.
Profits in the game should be an outcome of seeding and player choices, a bit like the real world. Proscribing profits in the determination of the vehicle parameters means it doesn't matter what the player does, the outcome is predetermined.
Yes, indeed - although I take the view that, when in doubt, one should always err on the side of reality, not least because reality is already balanced for us! If we have a specific reason to fudge the real numbers in a particular way because we know that using the real numbers will result in a particular inaccuracy in gameplay incentives (and, yes, I do agree that the ultimate goal is to make the incentives rather than the numbers themselves realistic), then we can then decide how and how far to depart from reality. So the next issue, then, is this: where are the economic drivers in Simutrans distinctly different from those in reality?
Reality is not static, it is in a constant state of flux, shifting away from, and back towards, equilibrium, sometimes in small steps (Patricia buys some shares), sometimes in large ones (Global Financial Crisis). The Simutrans world is, by contrast, extremely static. One can't choose a moment in history and claim that everything was in balance at that moment, therefore it's difficult to pluck numbers from history and expect them to represent a balanced set of game parameters.
A non-exhaustive list of real-world drivers that aren't represented in Simutrans, but which are consequential for transport operators:
- Inflation
- Economic cycles
- Stock and capital markets
- Exchange rates
- War and pestilence
- Government regulation, taxation, or other interference
- Variations in energy costs
- Variations in the cost and availability of labour
- Geographical variation in the value of transport due to local economic conditions
- Significant variations in terrain
- Wear on vehicles and infrastructure
- Equipment failure
- Cost of land
- Variability in industrial output, both short-term (e.g. mining stops due to rain, production increases for Christmas) and long-term (e.g. I built a railway to this factory but it's now closed down)
- Range of cargoes
- Complexity of supply chains
- Demographic variations and trends
- The fact that most of the above, along with the actual performance of anything untried, are uncertain within the typical investment horizon. Not only that, the level of uncertainty of each has changed through history.
I'm not suggesting that all, or even most of these, get modelled in Simutrans, but I will say that when you look at real-world outcomes, especially ones like profitability that are derived from a myriad of factors, you would have to account for all of them to know that you were comparing apples with apples.
And, in each such case, is it better fixed by changing the figures or changing the programme itself? I know that we are discussing a number of potential coding changes in the other thread for just this reason.
Worthy of consideration, but initially not in reference to the existing sim, and certainly not on the basis of "well, we've already coded this other thing". To come up with a good simulator, it is necessary to first decide what a good simulator should model. Once that is clear then go back to the Simutrans engine and see how it can meet that specification.
things capable of earning greatly higher revenues do, indeed, cost much more than those that aren't.
Even if they don't cost more to produce. Because they are worth more to the buyer a premium can be charged for their superior performance. A rational buyer will pay up to what the unit is worth relative to the alternatives.
Of course, this isn't always a simple model: a 'bus in a densely populated town might earn vastly more than the very same 'bus in a small village, such that the smaller 'bus built just for small village use will not be less expensive in proportion to its reduced profitability
If the small village cannot achieve the same utilisation as the city, even with a downsized vehicle, then it should generate lower profitability than its city cousin. But that is a function of the environment, not the vehicle. Take the bus to the city and utilise it more fully and its profit should increase. If the vehicle's pricing is distorted away from realistic operating parameters because it was historically used in a particularly profitable or unprofitable environment it will cause distortions in player choices in other environments. Price a minibus to be admirably profitable at low utilisation and it will be outrageously profitable at high utilisation, and suddenly it will become the most profitable bus to use even in the big city. If the minibus is priced so that it is a better economic choice for the village than a double-decker, then the player will automatically choose it over the double-decker. There's no need to try to pre-empt how the player will use the vehicle, the price and the market will take care of that.
This could work, although the note of caution that I'd sound in relation to that is that we must know in advance that our model will scale in complexity well: it is possible for any given model to work very well on the simpler tasks, but to fail completely on the more complex ones, so we have to consider the complexities (at least in the abstract) before we finalise the design for our model such as to ensure that it will, indeed, account for those complexities.
She'll be right, mate. The trains will require more computations, probably an additional model, but the numbers will be reducible to the inputs for the balancing spreadsheet.
