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Micromanagement should be automated away, in TF that does especially apply to equipment replacement. Setting up a policy should be enough, actually selling old and buying new is too much.
Being able to macromanage is, however, important. You want to make the long-term rules for how your transport system shall work, and only change those rules when you see that there is a need for a policy change.
I can think of a number of future improvements for the map generator. One is a four times bigger max mapsize, but that will probably need to wait until they have done some performance tuning.
Real forests (including option that they cover most of the map) and real mountains (including vertical cliff faces, side streams with waterfalls and whitewater (locations for watermill-powered industries).
Realistic distribution of mineral resources.
Import/export locations at the edge of the map. Can be a seaport on a lake at map edge or a customs warehouse on a pass at a map edge.
I do not think the need is moddable industry as much as a total rethink of industry.
Industries and resource extractors are two entirely different things. Mineral resources, arable land and forests are where they are, so they have to be exploited there or not at all. And – importantly – resources are not usually found all over the place, they occur in specific areas.
Processing industries should be located in a reasonable place – they are not built and financed by idiots. Farms are the most fundamental, and must be on suitable land. Grains come from rich soil in the lowlands, pastures for dairy and meat production is found in the hills – at least early on.
Mines have to be where the minerals are, but should not be opened unless there is a way to process and market the product. Oil should not be found before 1860, and then only sparingly.
Early lumbermills should be next to rivers, later they can be steam powered. Many industries need a lot of water in any case. Industries need labour, so they will not be located far away from people unless they get people to move close to them. Generally, all industries belong with the “blue buildings” in towns and villages – but they have the potential to grow to huge sizes dominating their city.
The concept of industries making one product from one or two inputs is copied from earlier and more primitive games. It is a “game” concept rather than a “simulation” concept. Most raw materials should be used by many industries, and most industries need many input resources.
To make iron, you need at least charcoal (or, after early 1800s coke), limestone, ore and air. The huge amount of air would early on be supplied by bellows driven by a watermill, then a steam engine, and later by a gas engine.
Coal is also used by most other early industries, either for heat or to run steam engines. To get gas lights, towns built gas works which used coal. Most towns need coal up to the 1950’s.
It is also necessary to distinguish between perishable and non-perishable cargos. The 20-minute rule works only for people making their daily trips. Neither people on days off nor industrial goods have that kind of constraint.
The obvious solution is to get rid of McAfee. John McAfee has published direction on how to uninstall: http://www.whoismcafee.com/
He has also gone public to say he no longer has anything to do with the antivirus company after he sold it, and that he recommends not to use what it has turned into.
I have had fast passenger trains overtake slow freight trains. You just have to have one track leading into the freight station and the other leading into the passenger station.
Nexus is the site for distribution and discussion of game mods, I think it would be a god idea to use that:
Many prefer to avoid Steam as much as possible, and in any case it is unwise to put all the eggs in the same basket.
Even knowing it lacks some features I want, I just HAD to buy it. I am hoping for a thriving modding community, because no company however successful will be able to do everything the transport simulator fanbase want.
I find it extremely addictive even in the current rather unfinished version. I suppose the developers may have a translation problem, and it might be useful to have a mixed language English/German forum. Multilingual users could do some quick paraphrasing of posts by those who only master one of the languages, and information could spread faster than if you have to make a professional and formally correct translation.
I agree that the industry / goods system is way too simple.
Basically, the otherwise very well made citizens of our towns need food, shelter, fuel and clothing. This opens for a great and complex set of products. Something sufficiently rich that you hopefully will not be able to find any standard solution to optimize growth.
One eyesore right now is that there are oil wells and oil refineries in the 1850 start. The earliest small refineries should not appear before 1860. Raw material sources should need to be discovered and seen as potentially profitable before the AI develops them, and industries should not be built unless there is a potential supply of raw materials and a market.
Another issue I have with the towns is that they do not have a market square where locals can buy and sell their produce. Market towns were an important early generator of the need for transportation.
One thing annoying me is the lack of support for the mixed train. Before we had DHL and their like it was common for local passenger trains to have one or more boxcars carrying packets and crates. People sent goods that were too bulky for the mail by train (and to some extent by buses). The distinction between goods and freight is important – one is individual units and the other is whole carloads.
It should be possible to handle goods both at a freight station and a passenger station – but not at an unmanned passenger stop if they get around to implementing that.
My preferred solution is to have a rule hierarchy. On the top level you set routes to be local, interurban or long distance for each type (train, road, tram) . Then you enter your preferred replacement unit and max age for each vehicle type. This will have the units automatically replaced when they are close to a depot and near end of life, or sent to nearest depot when older than max age. It ought to work for replacing individual cars in a train.
For an override, I would like to be able to have a different rule for lines serviced by a given depot. Some towns might have a higher or lower priority for new rolling stock.
I would want to be able to tag a given unit with “no sell” to retain some museum pieces.
I do not see any major problems with every setting maxed (2560×1440) on the biggest map except for some stuttering when I follow a vehicle (clicking on the x in the vehicle window) at almost horizontal angle. I do not know if there is a 32-bit version of this game, I would suppose it can run into problems on a 32-bit OS.
My system is about a year old, Core i7 4770 (Haswell) with 32GB RAM and a GTX 770.
This is for the period 1850-1880, though. May run into problems later on, I guess.
My primary wish is to get closer to the actual method for building roads and railroads. This includes design rules to make transitions between grades and curves gradual. Mass movements from cuts and tunnels to fills is also an important part of planning. A well-built road or railroad will even out the cutting and filling so the masses are moved the shortest possible distance. Doing this in-game with waggons or trucks would be really nice.
