Topic: Ship profitability 1850?

[merry]

HI,

For the first time, I'm playing the 'early years' of PakBritain Experimental. And it's not going so well...
Looking at what's available: Road transport - obviously short distances, rail only medium, but for long-haul it really has to be ships - no ways to build for a start!

Now, this is where it goes pear-shaped: Ships seem to have virtually no revenue.
E.g. Ironclad paddle steamer: take a full load of 80 pax+20 mail for 90 km, in a virtually straight line on open sea, and get about Cr250 revenue. huh? The ship costs around Cr2000 to run
Road horsebuses seem to be profitable with significantly less than full loads, as do wagons, and it's not like i've never used ships before in ST (I've had really effective networks - ships are a fun way to play).

And to add to all this, the low revenue on my main long-haul routes (and therefore revenue earning stream) not meeting my infrastructure costs, which do seem high, plunges the network into serious losses. Are my captains embezzling away the fares ?!

So, what am I doing wrong?
Are 'refunds coming in to play here? Average speed is reported as '4' to '5' (whatever the units are) although the ship spends most of it's time at the full 22kmh. The journey takes a long time, but it's a long way so no surprise there.
Any advice, or [repeatable] comment, would be most welcome.

Cheers,
Merry



OK, so any ideas waht's happening? Is it just that the ships in PakBritain0.8.3 are not balanced yet?

[jamespetts]

Merry,

thank you for your report. There is a lot of balancing yet to be done, but your figures sound very low indeed if they are revenue rather than profit figures. Would you mind uploading your saved game so that I can try to see what the issue is? Thank you very much.

[dustNbone]

This seems to be related to the average speed problem I was having with my ships on the server game.  He's getting paid based on the incorrect average speed of 5 or whatever instead of the proper 19 or 20 that it should be, and therefore gets no money.  I had some success with running the ships as lineless convoys so that they'd get paid based on their individual average speed rather than that which the line is showing.   Not a great solution though as it makes management quite tedious.

[jamespetts]

Ahh, I think that I've solved that bug, so perhaps this issue will also be solved.

[merry]

Hi,

Well, I tried running the convoys 'lineless' and the reported average speed fell to almost nothing, costs and revenue remaining similar. Now I'm not sure this is the fixed version, so...

(1) is the fix post ST-Ex-10.10 ? If so, maybe it's sorted - and thank you. I will try the latest nightly if need be (let me know).
(2) do you still want the upload?

Merry

[jamespetts]

Hmm - I must confess, I cannot remember now whether I fixed this on the 10.x branch or the -devel branch: would you be so kind as to upload your saved game so that I can re-test? I should be most grateful.