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[Neonivek]

IIRC, revenues increased more slowly than the expenditures.

This is surprising compared that the only form of income in the Transport Tycoon world is transportation.

Even Cities grow or die based on transport.

[Starver]

Haven't played OTT(D-or-otherwise) for a while.  May have to pick it up again.

The original TT (#1) was a particularly favoured time-waster of the day.  (It helped that it was absolutely unbothered by what memory you had set up in DOS, EMS/XMS-wise, etc..., which saved time with re-editing the CONFIG.SYS et al.)


One simple way of playing, BTW, is to only pursue bidirectional transportations (mostly passengers, plus mail) at the beginning.  Jump on absolutely every request to set up such a transport link between two towns (by your own favoured method, sometimes it's better with buses and sometimes with trains... but build airports when you can[1] for already large settlements with a significant intervening distance...  I tend to neglect water-borne transportation for everything but service oil-rigs, but you might be able to get a good ferry service set up) and set that up as a to-and-fro service with fine-tuned "wait for load" settings on the vehicles involved.

Getting a "Circle Line"-like railway or an "M25"-like ringroad connecting a whole set of settlements might be a good thing to plan for, but initially just to-and-fro nets you the contract and the initial rewards that let you expand onwards and round and back again.

Of course, without service contracts for woods to lumber-yards you're not going to get the villages to grow into towns, etc, but apart from contract-attraction requests that I think I can do well (especially if it looks like I can get in a secondary production network feeding off of it, while I'm there) I tended to scan the resource-source/sink map for woods that actually were almost next door to the lumber yards, coal mines right next to the power stations, etc, and then set up a super-short shuttle-run between the two.

I tended to absolutely never mix train types (excepting mail-vans on the end of passenger trains), but for all I know I was missing a trick.


Don't know (can't remember, for the version I will have played) if this is possible in OTTD, but in original TT I found I could sabotage an opponents road-network by setting up a double-level-crossing over their route and looping an small, cheap, otherwise unused engine (and perhaps some carriages) over the road, thus:

  ║
 ┌╫┐
 └╫┘
  ║


The engine speeds across the road again and again and again, and at some point, any of the opponents' vehicles that use the road are going to be crashed through by it, if done right.  Well, that's how I remembered it.


Anyway, off to download the latest OTTD now.

[1] Don't go borrowing too much in the early days, to do this, but bear it in mind)

[Ozyton]

Build train depot next to road with railroad crossing, buy 1 cheap engine and have it go out onto the road, tell it to stop and leave it there forever, roadblock.

[Starver]

Yeah, that's possible (also might need to take measures to avoid the competitor AIs from building/using routes around this), but with my method there's the sheer satisfaction of actually destroying the road vehicles.  And any replacements.  And their replacements...

[Charmander]

I'd play if someone set up a server.

I tend to build shitty, elaborate, inefficient networks that focus on good mostly. And boats can be very useful - the high-capacity hydrofoil boats added by... one mod or another can be very effective.

Realistic acceleration is... pretty much a must, though.

[Bluerobin]

Huh, I didn't expect to find another topic on this. It looks like /r/OTTD over on reddit has a couple of servers set up that they want people to play on. If you're just looking for multiplayer (one server with just some new vehicles, one with cargodist and a couple other newgrfs) they're worth checking out: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/136bac/second_reddit_openttd_server_now_running/

[DarkerDark]

IIRC, revenues increased more slowly than the expenditures.

I'm not entirely sure, but I seem to remember outdated trains/vehicles having really high running costs compared to their modern counterparts. So, if you don't upgrade your vehicles at all during the course of a really long game, you will take a big hit to your profits.

I usually play with lots of different mods, so maybe it's different in the vanilla game.

[Sonlirain]

IIRC, revenues increased more slowly than the expenditures.

I'm not entirely sure, but I seem to remember outdated trains/vehicles having really high running costs compared to their modern counterparts. So, if you don't upgrade your vehicles at all during the course of a really long game, you will take a big hit to your profits.

I usually play with lots of different mods, so maybe it's different in the vanilla game.

Well it makes sense. Noone makes replacement parts and only a handfull od enhusiasts know how to repair 70 year old steam engines so keeping them in shape would obviously require a ton of expenditures.

[sluissa]

I suppose this would apply if you went too far into the future an no new vehicles were being introduced. The only ones available would have slowly rising costs with nothing you could do to change that.

[Neonivek]

I suppose this would apply if you went too far into the future an no new vehicles were being introduced. The only ones available would have slowly rising costs with nothing you could do to change that.

Well the thing is that the Inflation versus Profit is balanced by technology in the game. Obviously as inflation rises there is a need for more efficient machines.

This is like if the government said "Nope you arn't using new technology"

Essentially feeling like you are running a transportation company is a very poor country.

[Starver]

(Regarding costs of technology of various modernity/antiquity...)

What you should have is a (perhaps skewed) bell-curve keeping pace with the rate of new developments.  The morning after the first personal jet-packs come out, the local garage will probably not be able to do much with them.  After some time, the garage (or equivalent) will know all about them, have the tools and knowledge and the like...  After a further wait (now everyone's travelling via personal wormholes or transporter beams), the artisan jet-pack repairers are getting thin on the ground and your grandma's antique jet-pack can only be restored by a specialist, in preparation for the re-enactment weekend[2], who will charge a fortune for his bespoke service.


In Stars![1], there's the concept of "Bleeding edge" technologies.  The newer stuff that costs (except if mitigated by a given chooseable species specialities?  ...I vaguely remember something like that) double or more what it should cost in resources, but worth it if it gives you the edge over the competitors.  After a while you've got it cheaper, but also new bleeding-edge techs that you might want to pay over-the-odds for.  I can't remember if you've got an old-age bonus/penalty coming into play.



However, this is probably more related to generic game-design than OTTD... 



[1] A game which I've spent far too much time on, in the past, but now I've lost both my original licence key stickers, so haven't been able play even against the computer for years, and never did Play-By-eMail or whatever.

[2] If I have the right page.  The xkcd site appears to be not serving me its pictures.  I don't know if it's just me (but it's several computers using this same network connection) or how long it'll last.  Look, I thought it was apt, but now I just don't know...

[Neonivek]

Maybe it just represents a time when transport becomes less and less important because as he said everyone has their own jetpacks... why do they need a train?

[Starver]

(With XKCD working again, that link to comic #771 was the one I intended to give you, but in the intervening time it occurred to me that this one also had merit to reference what I was mentioning, and maybe a couple more that I won't bore you with right now.)

(And the jetpack thing (do they exist in TT?  ..even in the Open Source and Deluxe version, with mods and everything?) was an analogy.  As far as I know, trains-as-a-concept never goes out of style, in the game, unless you fixate upon airports, seaports and coach stations to the exclusion of them for possibly good reasons but mostly personal playing style.  The jetpack thing was just a "starts expensive, goes cheap, goes expensive again" hypothetical example.  I bet you knew that, and it was just dry wit on your behalf that now makes me look foolish, though.)

[Girlinhat]

Actually I think that upkeep costs and maintenance life does follow a curve.  At the release of an item it's more prone to breakdowns, and as it's in use longer it becomes more reliable, until like 10-15 years when it starts getting more expensive to maintain, and you eventually cannot buy a replacement so you have to change the engine to a newer model.

I turn obsoletes off, so I can still use old designs for however long I want.  Because fuck industry, steam is the future!

[Graknorke]

I played OTTD for about a month or so, I never really did figure out trains properly (fucking magnets signals, how do they work?), it was still quite a bit of fun with all of the industry around supply/demand with facotories and taking things to cities and all that.