- This topic has 9 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 3 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Trying out a new play style.. hadn’t played in awhile, but thought I’d give it a try with some recent changes and just noticed something. Train age is determined by the oldest piece on the train. For example:
If you need a faster train for a line, but instead of buying a whole new line, keep the cars from the old train, you might find that your new train is suddenly declared “old”. I had a train, where the engine is only around 10 years ago, but got a notification that it was “old”. Checked the vehicle list to see it listed as 30 years of age. Strange..the engine on it only came out 20 years ago..so it couldn’t be more than 20 years old, even though I didn’t buy it right away. Then I realized I kept the cars from the old train. Those came out 30 years ago (oil tanks). Of course not all of them are 30 years old, since I’d added some along the way.
I always replace the whole train along with wagons. That’s an easy work-around around this issue until devs decide to perhaps look into this issue.
I believe it is a feature rather than a bug. You need to pay maintenance for each wagon and with increasing age, it is rising. Therefore if you will use a train with old cars, you will get appropriately higher running costs. So it is just logical that you are informed that the train is old, as you are paying higher running costs for some parts of that train.
The problem is it doesn’t tell you what part is old (in this case probably only 2-3 cars out of 8, and not including the engine) and just says the whole thing is 30 years old. I can’t see that being a feature at all.
Yeah, we can agree that the interface of the game is weak in some areas. And after introducing the automatic replacement, it is more effective to just make any adjustments to trains using that functionality and it will replace the whole train. But ofc. can be quite expensive, especially in the early game. But on the other hand, you don’t risk loosing production bc you sent a train to depot thus weakening the frequency.
Yeah, the game sure has some issues that make players life a bit harder, but it’s mostly fun overcoming these difficulties.
It’s not a feature, it’s a simplification. And indeed, it would be unfait to declare the train’s age as the age of the locomotive in the frint of it. Once i built a train, it keeps running for me without ever really making big adjustments to them, but that’s in part because almost all my trains are passenger trains.
Well the aging and related maintenance costs for each separate vehicle is a feature. But the interface is lacking in this, a train should have a screen with data for each car in it, as it was in Transport Tycoon if I remember. But there the train age was determined only based on the loco age I think.
But it is hard to decide what is good, on one side, the loco is the most expensive part of the train, so it might be better to show the train age based on the locos age, but on the other side, you could end with a train with new loco and old wagons that will add unnecessary running costs and you would not see that if the age was determined based on the locos age.
So yes, the interface needs lot of changes. It can be especially painful, if the whole train will be replaced using automatic replacer bc of one stupid old wagon, but that is very unlikely scenario i would say :).
I personally use only the automatic replacer to make almost any changes to my trains. Well, at least in my current game where I have around 2,5 billion, so I do not care about the price. Only thing I am caring for is the flow of the goods :).
There are quite a few strange UI decisions like that – most probably because the team is so small that there’s no dedicated UI guy, and programmers are notoriously bad at making things accessible to the general public. 😀
I’m convinced, as assko277 said, that wagon age is a feature, and the real issue is the lack of a window dedicated to the train’s characteristics and set-up. If I want to know the type of engine and wagons in a train, I can’t see that in the train window. I have to open the Lines Manager, find the line, and hover over the train.
Much of the UI works in the same way: Once upon a time, someone looked at one window (like the Lines Manager), thought about what would be nice to have in that window, and had time and inclination to implement it. Other UI windows didn’t get the same love and remained in a rather preliminary state. And in the end, no-one cared to have a look whether it all fit together. So you can find a lot of information tacked on as an afterthought in some not-so-obvious places but missing from places where you should find it.
Unfortunately, wagon age is not among them. As far as I know.
- The forum ‘General Discussion’ is closed to new topics and replies.