News:

The Forum Rules and Guidelines
Our forum has Rules and Guidelines. Please, be kind and read them ;).

noob here but i find this game really random.maybe u can explain

Started by Xpiral, November 21, 2011, 09:08:34 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Xpiral

Ok i really loved and wanted to play an transport tycoon game but more complex. So when i found out about simutrans i got all excited, even more when i found out about the experimental version. But my excitemend died fast because of the economy part of the game...

All is very unclear and the player has little information about what is going on. Like how many passanger want to go where. when i get that,100 passangers no route, in stations i get frustrated, some info should be available like where would those ppl like to go also some think that the line is to slow... who, why what part of the line was to slow where did they board where did they want to go that is was so slow?

then industries.. i don't get how much stuff they consume per moth how much they produce per month (i think i know that, but it's not really clear, like: storage space, monthly production, monthly consumption)
also trains... let's say i have a train that travels at a speed of 95km per hour.. i don't know how much it's gonna take for that train to load with goods i also don't know what speed that train will achieve on the line,with those speed reductions in curves and stuff, so after i make my train i find out that the average line speed is 40km so I'm not delivering as expected and i don't turn a profit so... bat luck... the game should have some measuring tools and u should be able to plan something before u commit to it. So i make a line and it shows that I'm gonna pay 700 per moth for my rail and depot maintenance all good but i don't know how much that train will produce until i make all that infrastructure and i find out that I'm losing money.

Other stuff also... excuse my English if the read was hard, but it's not my native language.

This post it's not to bash the game or something but maybe u can help me get what I'm doing wrong and help guide me a little how to plan stuff and figure out what is going to happen.

Severous

Hi Xpiral.

I only play the standard versions of Simutrans.  It took me long enough to understand enough about the game to make profitable routes.  I believe its much harder in experimental.  My suggestion would be to try a standard version first.
Regards
Sev.

Xpiral

tried that and i find it to simple. i think it's about the pack u use. In experimental with the british pack i find it imposible maybe because like someone suggested i don't start in 1750 and play with timeline on. but.. I just tried the 64 experimental and i can turn a profit but there is a bug that the maintenance cost for depos are 0. so maybe that is why

Carl

Quote from: Xpiral on November 21, 2011, 09:08:34 PM
All is very unclear and the player has little information about what is going on. Like how many passanger want to go where. when i get that,100 passangers no route, in stations i get frustrated, some info should be available like where would those ppl like to go also some think that the line is to slow... who, why what part of the line was to slow where did they board where did they want to go that is was so slow?


This information is given in the Minimap: click the "passenger destinations" overlay. If I remember correctly, pink dots represent "Too slow" passengers and orange dots represent "No route" passengers.

I think it's best not to worry about these details early on in a map. One strategy is to connect as many large population-centres as you can as quickly as possible. There will always be people wanting to travel from one large city to another.

jamespetts

Xpiral,

thank you for your feedback - it is always appreciated :-) Very glad that you are interested in Experimental. Let me see if I can deal with some of your issues below.


Quote from: Xpiral on November 21, 2011, 09:08:34 PM
All is very unclear and the player has little information about what is going on. Like how many passanger want to go where. when i get that,100 passangers no route, in stations i get frustrated, some info should be available like where would those ppl like to go also some think that the line is to slow... who, why what part of the line was to slow where did they board where did they want to go that is was so slow?

Using the map tool ("minimap"), select "Pass. dest.". This will show you where passengers want to go and can/cannot go from any given town (select the town by clicking on its town hall). The dots represent where passengers want to go; the colours show whether they were able to get there, and some related information. Orange dots show passengers who could not reach their destination because there is no route. Light yellow dots show passengers who reached their destination using player transport. Dark yellow dots show passengers who walked to their destination. Turquoise dots show passengers who used their own car to get to their destination. Red dots show passengers who could not reach their destination because the stop where they would want to get on is too crowded. Pink dots show passengers who could not reach their destination because it would take them too long.

As to "too slow", this represents passengers for whom the fastest journey time from the station at which you are seeing the "too slow" indication is greater than their journey time tolerance. Each packet of passengers when generated has a different journey time tolerance (this is randomised to within a preset range). The journey time is calculated by adding up all the travelling times and waiting times for each part of the journey (look at "details" in the station window to see the various travelling and waiting times). If this is longer than the passengers' tolerance, passengers will not travel. There will always be some passengers for whom even the fastest practicable journey is too low (if you could travel to the other side of the world and back in five minutes, you'd probably do it more often), but if you are seeing a high number of passengers with "too slow" at some stations compared to others, you might want to think about making your services faster or more frequent.

This information should all be in the help files accessed by pressing "?" on the various windows - is yours missing or incomplete? I know that the help files have not always kept up to date with the latest developments, but I think that this is included.

Quotethen industries.. i don't get how much stuff they consume per moth how much they produce per month (i think i know that, but it's not really clear, like: storage space, monthly production, monthly consumption)

These things are actually the same as in Simutrans-Standard, so the help files should be complete here; that being said, the industry system has recently changed in Standard, and I am not sure that the help files have been updated. If you tried to use them, was there anything in particular that was unclear?

Quotealso trains... let's say i have a train that travels at a speed of 95km per hour.. i don't know how much it's gonna take for that train to load with goods i also don't know what speed that train will achieve on the line,with those speed reductions in curves and stuff, so after i make my train i find out that the average line speed is 40km so I'm not delivering as expected and i don't turn a profit so... bat luck... the game should have some measuring tools and u should be able to plan something before u commit to it. So i make a line and it shows that I'm gonna pay 700 per moth for my rail and depot maintenance all good but i don't know how much that train will produce until i make all that infrastructure and i find out that I'm losing money.

I agree that it would be lovely to have planning tools as you suggest, but I'm afraid that they're very difficult and time-consuming to code, and those working on the project have really very limited time and a large backlog of projects. Even with a great deal of work, it would still not be possible fully to predict all of the interactions of various different things (the impact of adding more trains to a line on the speed and load, therefore profitability, of others, etc.), as they would be far too complicated.

A few things to bear in mind, however: firstly, a vehicle's top speed will be much higher than its average speed. Once you have a few lines running, you will get a flavour of the relationship between the two (and this sort of heuristic planning was, after all, what real transport managers had to do in the olden days). The same applies with other economic aspects: the general way to play Simutrans-Experimental is not so much by precisely calculating the costs in advance (which is not possible in the real world of transport, and which is a tiresome thing to have to do in a game which is meant to be fun), but by making an educated guess based on what you have learned from playing previously.

I hope that this is helpful. If you have any more queries, please do let me know.

(Incidentally, Pak128.Britain-Ex is not fully balanced yet - a number of further features need to be introduced into Experimental before this can be done, and it will be a large project, so it might take some time, I am afraid. In the meantime, you might find that relative costs do not always make sense; any large anomalies I do try to rectify straight away, but a more thorough approach to rebalancing will require an enormous amount of work which is planned but still further off than I should like).
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

Xpiral

thank you for your the information. i will try to press that help button more :)
On the fun part.. it depends on what ppl consider fun or what u crave. the problem is that when i don't have enough info and the balancing is not that great i have to save my game try something and if it does not work load try something else. Constant loading and saving is not fun. Anyway keep up the good work, i don't know how to code stuff and don't really like it either :) but i will help with bugs and testing.

dustNbone

You will find the game very challenging most of the time.  It's intended to be realistic in many ways, one of those is that as a startup, you need to make very careful first moves.  As in real life, it's very easy to overextend your company to the point where it's unable to make profit.  As James mentioned above, you'll need to get at least some feeling for how much revenue and costs to expect from a given line, and which compromises you might need to make to attain profitability.  I've played a fair amount, but I still go broke in the first few years occasionally. Save before you spend.

Xpiral

thx for the tip i was doing that just i don't find it fun to load and save all the time. still can't really figure out how industry works. so factories have maximum production per month that is.. how much it will produce per month...? consumption: and has storage space followed by a procent.. what does that represent? and them production storage space and that procent again. i read the help files but they seem outdated and looked on the wiki but did not really understand how they work.
like letz say a factory has a max production of 804.
production: cars 0/100 100%
consumtion:steel 0/500 250%
                plastics 0/300 79%
What do they mean? that the factory makes 804 cars per month but only has 100 storage space for them and that a car is made of 5 steel and 1, something plastics or what?

dustNbone

Not totally familiar with the industries yet, but I think that means it takes 2.5 steel and 0.79 plastic to make one car, and the factory can make 804 cars per month if provided with enough resources.  It can store 500 steel, 300 plastic, and 100 finished cars.  

Severous

"It can store 500 steel, 300 plastic," - before it ceases to demand any more steel and plastic.  It can store much more than this - unlimited in fact. 

When it ceases to demand any more the industries supplying the steel and plastic will cease production if they no longer have an outlet for their goods and they reach their output storage capacity.   In this way a whole industry chain could eventually shut down. 

The above is true in the simpler and stable standard that I play.
Regards
Sev.

jamespetts

Quote from: Severous on November 23, 2011, 07:15:27 AM
The above is true in the simpler and stable standard that I play.

This is the same in Experimental - the economics of industry is not altered there.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

Xpiral

aha ok thx but the car factory will stop production when it reaches 100 cars?

Dwachs

yes, you have to transport the cars to a car seller etc to make the car factory produce again (or continuously producing)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and maggikraut.

Severous

"the car factory will stop production when it reaches 100 cars?"

Maybe. Depends.

- If there is no transport link in place to move cars to a showroom that has a contract, then yes the car plant will stop when it reaches its storage capacity of 100 cars.
- If there is a contract to supply cars AND a transport link set up, then the cars will move from the car plant storage to the station stop waiting for transport.
- once the station storage is full up the car plant will fill up its own storage back up to 100 cars then stop producing.
- As soon as station stop has a vehicle load up, the station will have space and cars will move from car plant storage to station and production will again resume.
- alternatively add storage capacity to the station. That will allow the car plant to keep producing cars at the station.

There are other tricks but the above is the basics.


from my current game. A car plant in PakBritian.
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/simscr02.png
It has trains with car wagons wanting to carry cars and correct orders to stop at the right places, plenty of steel and plastics to make more cars.  But the car plant has no contract with the car dealership showroom.  So car storage approaches 100 in the car plant and none are released to the station for transport.  We added a contract and months later I now have hundreds of finished cars waiting at the station.
Regards
Sev.

Xpiral

ok and when a farm has max 200 production let's say and produces milk 200% and cows 70% does that mean that it produces 2 milk in the time that it takes to produce 0.7 cow so in a month it will produce 52 cows and 148 milk?

Severous

I cant confirm that but agree with your logic and calculations.  

Electricity may have to be supplied to reach max output level.

I seem to recall in the previous version that adding electricity increased the max stated.
Edit..yes i researched production a while ago. Mines and a power station. Results on the forum:    http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=7989.0 (previous version and standard so may not be 100% relevant now to your experimental questions.)


Something changed in the recent release. There are new output and production graphs suggesting workers and mail may also be a factor. Help screen mentions just electricity affecting production levels though. In PakBritian current standard version I cant reach the stated maximum of 200pm in a fishing port despite constant supply of live fish. 160pm(+/-2) is what I can reach every month. (no mail delivered, passengers are, no electricity)

Regards
Sev.

Combuijs

Quoteok and when a farm has max 200 production let's say and produces milk 200% and cows 70% does that mean that it produces 2 milk in the time that it takes to produce 0.7 cow so in a month it will produce 52 cows and 148 milk?

To my knowledge they produce 400 milk and 140 cows a month then.
Bob Marley: No woman, no cry

Programmer: No user, no bugs



Xpiral

that would make sense if 200 was not called max. production per month...

prissi

The production per month can be only reached, when there is never much in storage. If the output storage is small, this alone will reduce the production, as a minimum of goods is required before routing.