I and a few people in the bay12 Discord started playing a bit of this recently, so I feel it's an appropriate enough time to revive the thread.
I had a decent session yesterday after a few complete failures. First, I was playing pak128E, which is supposed to be a little easier than the default pak128, which helps. I didn't turn Beginner Mode or any of the OTTD-like settings on though.
I was playing on a 1020x1020 map, so tons of open room, and IMO I should have cranked up the number of industries from the default value because everything was REALLY far apart. I started with bringing coal and iron to a steel mill, with just two trains, and they were able to share a good chunk of track- I made a two-lane track system with one-way signals, IMO this seems to be the only easy way to prevent trains from getting stuck. Making diagonal sections parallel without automatically conjoining is a pain in the ass though, it makes me prefer OTTD's track laying.
(DJOHAAL SAYS: HOLD CONTROL BEFORE CLICKING) I also added block signals about 20 blocks apart manually. I'll explain a little more what I learned about signals later. I started off using the grey steam engine that costs 93 cents/km and I found in earlier games that a station size of 6 was good for starting off. Later on when you get better engines 8 is better, so make room for 8-tile stations early on but do not build them yet because of the maintenance cost. I added a connection from the steel mill to a nearby goods factory so it wouldn't overfill and also started a single-lane line on which one train brought logs to a sawmill and planks from there to the goods factory. At this point I was getting into the red, so I waited a while, but I was only making profit very slowly. I added another line, to an oil field and refinery, so the goods factory was receiving plastic. Once all that was set up I was well in the red with five or six trains running, so i took a look at my finances. Apparently, my track upkeep costs were twice what my train upkeep costs were- no wonder I was barely making money!
It turns out track upkeep costs a lot in Simutrans, especially on a large map, so I actually recommend that to make maximum use of track you lay, you get multiple trains, or bigger trains, relatively early on. I added more trains and started properly making a profit (now like 700,000 in debt, but my net worth was climbing). I also started bus lines in a few of the larger cities. Only once three of the largest cities on the map (which were thankfully clustered tightly together) has grown a little did I add a short, tiny passenger train line- I made sure each station was connected to the city bus network, this is essential! I found that it was only profitable after I added 100KM track, at which point it was making twice the money per run it had on 60KM track and finally earned enough to cover its own upkeep.
I started losing money again and saw that my steel mill had stopped making steel, it was full. In retrospect I could have added storage to the steel mill's station, but my solution was to make sure the goods factory was exporting goods. There were several more hold-ups as the goods factory got full of various resources, usually because it didn't have enough plastic to use them, but eventually I had more than a dozen trains on my line (with few jams) and started really making money- this was in like 1938. I did a whole new train line with large trains and powerful engines to service a car factory on the other side of the map, a similar procedure, I think I finally went in the black in about 1948, and quickly had more than two million dollars (I was almost 3 million in the red when my second major line was finished) which I didn't know what to do with for the most part because there weren't many opportune industry spots. There also weren't enough large cities to make passenger trains viable outside of my one short line (mind that I didn't mess with tourist spots much). I think to make passengers viable you would have to crank up the size of cities in world settings, and use buses to make them start growing as soon as the game begins.
Anyway, about signals, I did
some reading which helped a bit. All block signals in Simutrans, act like path signals in OTTD. When a train chooses its path out of a station, is
reserves all tiles in in its path, up until its destination or a signal. Blocks are any continuous section of rail, and they're divided up by block signals. A train will not enter a block unless ALL of the tiles it wants to reserve are empty and not reserved by another train. Where it gets annoying is that when two trains come head to head on the same block, they won't re-path. This is why I use one-way rails, it means that if the exit to a block is occupied, it's only occupied by a train that is LEAVING, rather than waiting indefinitely to enter the block. Just make sure your intersections are one block on their own, and you're good. After that, your straight sections of rail need signals every so often. The closer the signals, the closer one train will follow behind another train, but a signal every two blocks like in the default setting is expensive and unnecessary. And remember, places where a train needs to make an interchange should be an unbroken block so trains do not stop in the middle!
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Topic: Simutrans! - bankruptcy, bankruptcy everywhere. (Read 51841 times)