Passengers – Cargo algorithm

[ir.B]

Hello Everyone,

 

I’m playing this game for a while now and I really like the simulation. It gives the feeling everything starts growing because you provide transportation and makes you think to make strategical decisions.

The algorithm which decides if passengers or cargo will want to travel is interesting (people or cargo decide to travel if they can reach a destination within 20 minutes). I’m not saying it’s super realistic as no money is involved or people aren’t willing to travel longer to destinations farther away but it works and makes a great dynamic environment.

 

However I have some questions or thoughts:

 

1. How do passengers / cargo decide where to go if they have multiple choices? It doesn’t seem they choose at random. Do they choose the destination they can reach the fastest? Or the one that is the biggest distance away (within the 20 min limit)? The last would maximize you’re profits because people / cargo would use as much of your lines as possible but would sometimes make all passengers of a town / factory want to go to the same place instead of distribute over all the available options…

 

2. Passengers and cargo seem to have to obey the same 20 min limit. This makes me get the best results using mixed passenger-goods trains that cover both cargo and passenger stations in multiple cities and pick up goods in between because:
– Passengers and goods have to go to the same place (cities).
– I want them to get them to as many places as possible to create demand so this means creating fast lines.
– To create fast lines you’ll need multiple trains.
– The usage of you’re trains will be higher if you take passengers and goods so you’ll make more money.
– If a train reaches full capacity, it’s better to add another (passenger/goods) train to the same line because capacity will go up and frequency is even lower which means even more line usage.

This makes it unattractive to set up separate passenger lines between cities (with fast passenger trains) and separate goods lines to deliver goods to cities farther away with slower lines and lesser trains (so they’re still running at ~full capacity to generate money) and split into a passenger and goods network.

Maybe if goods were allowed more time to reach their destination (60 min for example) this would balance out more nicely and make it for some interesting choices when high speed rails and passenger trains come available (since you can transport passengers much faster than goods then)…

 

These are just my thoughts at the moment… Let me know what you think 🙂

 

[synchronos]

I have never made mixed freight-passenger trains, and probably never would. The thing is, cargo and passengers need to be delivered to different stations, so that would mean twice the stops between cities. Even on early trains, it would make them much slower. Also, the route of the cargo is usually just from the factory to the city, so that even the route would have zig-zag much between the cities. In my latest game I have made complex cargo network just for the fun of it. It probably doesn’t run even on profit. The cities just have a certain demand for cargo, and the nearest factory is good enough for them. The factory scales its production upwards until the demand has been met.

[simonmd]

I have made mixed trains, as I wanted to be realistic, especially in the early years. IT seems an awful waste to have two engines going the same direction. However, mixed stations are not possible which is a major game flaw in my opinion and the march of time is so relentless that soon you have plenty of trade to warrant two or more trains anyway.

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