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Tweak tram vs train income/expenses
This actually quite realistic. Trams are cheaper in terms of both infrastructure and vehicles so it is not surprising that they are more profitable. For a journey of max. ~30 km quite frankly I’m not surprised. The problem is rather that the game is not to scale and obviously it cannot be…
Same goes for trucks – it is not a surprise that they are cheaper. There is a reason why the vast majority of cargo is transported by truck in Europe.
Heavy rail is favored by long distances and in TF long distances we don’t have…
Totaly agree with you, this is absolutely realistic. You cannot have profitable real train line connecting two villages nearby with distance around 10km and real population below 10 000. Trains are for long distances, so either a line should go through multiple cities or the passanger traffic should be big. So there is no problem with revenue/expenses balance here. There is a problem with city sizes and growth rate though, so it boils down to the following suggestion mentioned in the head:
- Faster city growth
Surrounding towns should eventually merge together to form a metropolis. - Map Generation – Population centre’s should be split into “Cities”, “Towns”, and “Villages”. A small map should consist of about 1 city, 3 towns, and 5-8 villages, with larger maps multiples there of. Each should act like they would in real life, eg villages are 95% houses, while cities have much larger retail areas. Raw resources should spawn in or near a village, while manufactories spawn in or near towns, just as you would expect in real life.
– Eye candy: if a industry is getting more production, can you pop up some extra facilities around ? Make th eindustry visually grow on the map ? For instance if an oil rig reaches 100 production, create some extra oil extractors in that area. Demolishable, of course for a price, and not as big as the original industry itself. It woudl help immersiona lot. Ps: you already have the graphics for this.
Yes, this should look amazing. Besdides that, major factories should also provide workplaces as well as small indutries do. Having large factory very far away from big cities doesn’t look natural.
PS: I would be willling to pay for an expansion that does the industry right. I’m sure i’m not the only one.
I’m definitely with you on that.
– Allow modding of the 20 minute rule for each cargo type. Grain is perishable. Iron ore is not. Livestock HAS to be delivered quickly. Personally I’d like to set my own “recommended delivery time” for each good type.
– Allow different pricing for each cargo type.
I would say that 20 minute rule should be modified for cargo completely. This rule makes the simulation perfect for passanger traffic, and I would really want to thank developers for that, however it is absolutely unrealistic for goods. Delivery time is rarely a constraint for coal, iron, lumber, and oil as well as for the most of the industry supply one can introduce. What is usually important is the price difference of goods at locations. So, as opposed to the time-based simulation for passengers one should use price-based simulation for goods. Coal should be cheaper at the mine, however more expensive near the steel works. Production rate, demand and so on should affect the price. This system was used in RT3 many years ago and proved itself effective. It would be fun to still leave some time cutoff for each type of goods, say if modders would like to introduce meat, grain, or whatever, however the basis of cargo simulation should be changed in future.
At this point, the best strategy is to build a line from the other end of the map to deliver coal to steel works, although there is a source in the nearest city. This looks too artificial. With price-based simulation one may think of a region on the map with large source of coal, so the natural strategy would be to supply industry from this region, what makes cargo trains absolutely necessary. Besides, with this simulation players would no longer build randomly located tracks which are used for a single route, instead one can think of major artheria connecting parts of map with source and demand. Of course this would be too serious change for v1, however it would be nice to think about it in the future versions of TF.
I have to disagree with you. I usually start with trains for all cargo supply and use trucks only for distribution. Of course, you should make lines as long as current engines can get, and morover you should load it properly. You can see a screenshot from 1853 (Hard difficulty, no mods at all) with cargo line making profit (this line delivers only coal w/o iron, so the recent update doesn’t affect the balance here)
Here is the same line when General locomotive appears
And to demonstrate that this strategy works well, here is the same map 79 years from start
- Faster city growth
