Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[i2amroy]

yeah but why anyone would contract you coal from the other side of the county having a mine right near them?

Actually coal is one of the few things where this would actually make sense. Not all coal is the same and there can be widely different concentrations of trace minerals, ash, etc. as such most things that use coal (like power plants) are built to use coal from a specific mine and will need to keep using that mine's coal even if a new mine opened up right next door.

[Hugehead]

In case anyone couldn't find it, the latest experimental version can be found here, you should get the complete package, the others only come with the executables, no content.

[Graknorke]

Does anyone know of some decent tutorials for this thing? The "official" one I found seemed to be outdated and not that informative and the in-game one is full of information that somehow manages to not tell me anything I actually need to know.

Fuck tutorials, I think we should trial-and-error (mostly error) this to understanding.

[Djohaal]

yeah but why anyone would contract you coal from the other side of the county having a mine right near them?

also, if industries are too close you can make loops and bam! loads of moneys.


I hate when a simulation doesn't make any readl-world sense.


... boy I miss industry giant 1

If your argument held truth we wouldn't be outsourcing 99% of the world's industries to China...

On to surviving simutrans economy: (applies to pak128 on main simutrans, not pak128 britain on simutrans experimental which is totally different)

1: a good map is vital, some bad maps it is impossible to turn a profit on early game
3: Don't start with passengers.
4: you need a good industry density with a good few-resource industry (such as a textile mill, bakery or dairy.)
5: you need to set up the starter routes for the whole production chain so goods don't clog on the factory, otherwise it'll slow down to a halt. (goods don't get magically delivered behind the curtains)
6: Don't fucking start with passengers.
7:  You can go into negative provided your "Net Worth" always stays above zero. Usually I go down to -100 million before I reach the bill gates point where money pours in faster than I can spend.
8: Usually powerplant hauls don't turn a good enough profit by themselves (exception being oil, which is a little better than coal and has more centralized production), and powerlines don't profit either, but their boost potential is vital in midgame.
9: YOU DON'T FUCKING START WITH PASSENGERS.
10: Due to balance, sadly, the profit margins for running trucks and busses before the 1950's mack trucks are abysmal and not worth the trouble. Trains and boats are the way to go.
11: A good profit margin is around 20-35% or more. Anything under it and you are doing something awful.
12: You don't start with mail either.
13: Scale your networks - maintenance of high quality tracks can kill you on early game. Also mind which locomotive to use.

[MrWiggles]

Does anyone know of some decent tutorials for this thing? The "official" one I found seemed to be outdated and not that informative and the in-game one is full of information that somehow manages to not tell me anything I actually need to know.

On a side note, I did eventually figure out that you can't just set up a road mail/passenger route with carriages with schedules linked to all the cities, like you would a train, since they would deliver the mail/people through the longest route possible otherwise and never make money. Rather, you have a carriage specifically devoted to two-four cities that overlap with other delivery schedules, as the ai is smart enough to recognize that they can send mail/people to one place to be picked up by another carriage waiting for them, so that's nice.

Give yourself a lot money, and concentrate on the steel supply chain.

[tryrar]

Ok, I have a problem that's really annoying me. I'm having issues getting trains to use sidings to allow other trains to pass, and they get stuck in a head to head standoff grinding my network to a halt. Tips?

[Orange Wizard]

PTW. I'm horrible at OTTD so this should be fun.

[TheBronzePickle]

The best tip I can give is to basically completely unlearn everything OTTD has ever taught you. Simutrans plays by completely different rules, and while there are similarities in some of the minute systems it's better to just start fresh. It's a new game. I could try and give tips on transitioning from one to the other, but it's probably a waste of time more than anything else anyway.

[Robsoie]

Toying a bit , i decided to go with coal to test the waters.

I build a yard on road at both the Coal mine and the Coal power station , then build a  Garage in a town next to the Coal mine and build a H-Trans bulk truck, then attached a trailer so it could transport 40t of coal in one travel .

Then made the line and started it.
So far it seems profitable, my truck income is only getting bigger and bigger at each travel.
Probably not the most profitable kind of transport (i'm just starting so i have yet to test the various other kind of transport) but it's a good start to make profit.

I took the 64 pakset as it looks like it's basically the default, but everything is really small and very pixelly if you zoom a bit, i'll give a try to the 128 version to see if it gets more clear when zoomed.

So far it's very similar to OpenTTD, i have not yet run into what really differ between both games.

edit : just figured out that unfortunately "graphic packages" are NOT only graphic packages, they have different things inside, i thought the pak128 was the same as pak64 but with different higher resolution graphics, but starting a new game (as loading my pak64-made save with it had most of every building disappearing) i noticed i have much more different type of roads available, more cars, less trucks and no trailers for any of them at the start.

Oh well, back to pak64 for now :/

edit 2 : after opening an oil transport line i discovered that i was oddly losing money instead of making profits.
After investigating i discovered that when you create a line, the game does not automatically require your trucks to load 100% !
What a gigantic waste ! that was exactly why money was falling, trucks were spending lots of money but where nearly empty when doing their oil delivery.
So be sure to edit your lines and make it so your trucks load 100%
Should always be 100% , not sure why it's not default to that.

[TheBronzePickle]

Same reason it's not that way in OTTD, I'm pretty sure.

As for paksets, I'd say to try a few different ones. Some of the national paks are pretty interesting and can almost give you a sort of history lesson.

[Djohaal]

Vehicles not running at 100% is helpful for passenger lines. But yeah for good hauling it should be at 100% except very specific situaitons. Paksets contain different content and balances, not just graphics. Pak128 is known to be quite brutal on the balance side, not sure about pak64.

[Robsoie]

Question about this point : why is it helpful to not charge passengers at maximum capacity ?

You're going to burn income for the distance (simulating i guess maintenance+fuel) , but without max passengers you'll then not get max income to cover the distance loss ?

Having read a bit on the board, it seems pak64 has some balancing problems.

In the end i wanted to settle for the german pak128, as i imagined Germany having been majorly an industrious country, it may be more suitable for a game that industry has a lot of impact on your transports. But unfortunately it looks like the translation aren't fully made for that pakset even if you have set language to english, as while i see "Coal Mine" in the map, i see "BZT_Kohlekraftwerk" instead of "Coal powerstation".

oh well, back to pak128, i'll see if it gets better after a while.

[Shooer]

You don't want to set to full load for passengers because passengers have a target destination, and a set time they will travel.  If your train is waiting to leave because it needs to fill up and it waits for too long people wont want to board because the train's travel time will be to slow so they wont want to board so the train will never fill.

This isn't OpenTTD, everything has a destination and a maximum travel time.

[Robsoie]

Ok, damned passengers that put their needs above my profits

Took me some time but finally found out how to batch sell everything in a line.
It's in the Line list, you select a line and click on Widthdraw All that will sell every vehicle of a line once they're empty.

Very good to replace your whole line of old crappy trucks by the shiny new ones that just got available

[Djohaal]

Yup, simutrans has a concept of passanger/good wait times, if it is too long your station coverage goes down (something similar to the station rating in OTTD), green is good rating, orange is something wrong, red is crowded.

Also there are some !!fun!! settings on the advanced options (inside simuconf.tab or on a separate menu when creating a new game)

Some I'd advise:

General:

Bits per month: If you want a more dragged out game so you don't have to spend all your time replacing vehicles as timeline progresses, crank that up. Mind it is exponential, so each bit above 19 doubles the month time while each that goes down halves the month duration. Be mindful the game does correct for month duration (as you can do more hauls) and maintenance goes up accordingly (causing a big hit on your budget every month opening)

Display:

First beginer -easymode for pussies.

Crosconnect factories - OTTD-like cargo, all factories connect to all other factories. Their GUI gets a bit stupid though as they end up with kilometer long lists of supplier and producers.

Just-in-time: Turn it off to make factories accept goods above overcrowding (again OTTD-like)

Crossconnect percentage: Chains can only link to other factories in their own chain (if you set at 0%) or to every other factory (at 100% - identical to the crossconnect toggle)

Industry_increase_every: Every 5000 people your towns will build a new landmark or a new industry chain. Can cause explosive map crowding if you set it too low.

Locality factors: early in game passangers prefer to path to closer destinations, late in game they path anywhere (globalization, bitch)

Routing:

Separate halt capacities: if enabled (default = 0 off) stops may have different capacities for passengers, mail, and  freight - more realistic IMO. You can't hold 10k people on a cargo terminal.

No routing over overcrowded: Another setting I play with, if your stop has more stuff waiting than it can hold, then new passangers or such can't route over it. Makes for planning ahead on connectivity important since a clogged node can stop all your network.

Station coverage: Game defaults to 2, I prefer 3. (how many tiles each station block covers)

max tranfers: how many times goods and passangers will switch in stations from lines - aka the search depth for your pathing.

Landscape settings:

Affect map gen, most are self explanatory. I advise lowering max_no_of_trees per square to save on RAM on huge maps (I play atm on a 1536x1536 and planning on starting anew on a huger one :p) For some reason simutrans tracks how many years old every tree on the map is. You can turn off trees altogether, does wonders for performance.

Rivergen script is terribad, if you want more rivers crank up the number of rivers to something insane like 1024.