Multiplayer feature idea: choose routes including all companies

[chs]

With single player games, I usually reach the point, where money is no longer an issue, and optimization of my network has to wait until population grows sufficiently. Thats why I like multiplayer games much more. Now in multiplayer games, there is a limitation.

Following situation: player A built a local transport network in cityA, player B one in cityB. Now, player A builds an intercity connection between these two cities. To make this work, he needs to get people to their destinations in cityB, otherwise they stay home. He needs local transport. There are two options to get this:
1) player B, who has a local transport network, agrees to include a public stop into his network. however, since the real money is not in local transport, but in intercity lines (which here was built by the other player), B has little motivation to do this. He would basically help his opponent to earn more money than he would earn himself. So he probably wont agree to that.
2) player A builds a second local transport network in cityB. Possible, but unnecessary and unrealistic. Also, if there are several players, room may be too limited to build another halfway successful local transport network. In reality, this does never ever happen.

How does it work in real life? People take the intercity connection from player A to cityB, get to the next local transport stop in cityB and continue their journey with player B`s local transport network. They dont care whether A and B cooperate or not. That is the behaviour I would like to see in the game.

To continue the example above, player A could simply build a stop cityBStopA next to player B`s local transport network stop cityBStopB. If A transports people to cityBstopA, they would walk to cityBStopB and continue with local transport (owned by player B). It makes sense that people would go that way, in particular if this is the only way to go. Its what they do in reality.

In the game, this would have (imho great) consequences. Now it makes sense for BOTH players to cooperate and choose a public transport stop. If A transports a lot of people, B`s stop will get overcrowded and has a negative impact on the whole local transport network. B does not want that. Also, A wants to be sure that B does not remove cityBstopB to stop the negative effect on this network. So both have a good reason to agree on a public transport stop. Also, both players will get more passengers, because passengers dont have to walk (5 minutes saved).
The security to have a permanent route and passengers increases for both players - without cooperation, both players could simply stop transporting passengers from/to this stops, making the other player`s life considerably more difficult because he has to adjust his network as well. Cooperation would be a win-win situation, which also resembles reality quite good.

To be precise: when planning a route, passengers should include the connections from adjacent transport stops in their calculations, no matter what company. If two bus stops are next to each other (250m), walking there takes 5 minutes. From cityBstopA, say there is one other connection by player A to stopC (other than the "arrival" connection). This connection and continuing connections from stopC are already included in the route calculations. Now walking to cityBstopB is like a 5 minute connection, and the new connections from cityBstopB are considered when continuing the journey (same normal method). Instead of only including existing routes to other stops, the passenger could also include directly going to adjacent stops. The result would be close to real life and make multiplayer games more interesting, I think.

What do you think?

[jamespetts]

This feature has already been implemented for the forthcoming version 10.0 - see here for details.

[chs]

that sounds great!
thanks!