Ah, tunnels. I remember, way, WAAAY back, before I owned the game, I had a demo version of Transport Tycoon. (not deluxe, the original). Because the demo basically only ran for a few years at most, it was hard to get much done, and lack of money made that worse. I noticed however, that there was a bug with tunnel building. Tunnels are expensive, So expensive in fact, that if you make one that spans an entire map, it'll cost so much the cost will overflow, and become a negative value. (this happens somewhere roughly at the point that the cost of the tunnel hits about 2 billion) So, build a long enough tunnel, and you end up with a tunnel that costs about -2 billion, which the game interprets as you GAINING 2 billion for building it. Of course, the presence of this bug tells us that the money in the game (that version at least) was a 32 bit signed value. It also implies that the reverse is also possible. If you manage to do well enough to have 2 billion in your account, you'll lose the game shortly afterwards as it overflows to -2 billion, meaning you're suddenly in massive debt. The irony is, your only chance at survival if that happens is to try and spend money like crazy, since if your income goes low enough, it'll become positive again. Unfortunately, you can't build anything when your money is negative. But presumably you got so much cash from having a very high income. So if you say... Stopped ALL of your vehicles, and continued having operating costs but no income, you might just drop below that point again. In OpenTTD I expect this is a moot point, since the overflow condition has been fixed. (To be honest, I expect this was already fixed for TTD, since the tunnel exploit certainly no longer worked...)
I've played this game since the original, I used to sit on the school bus with my laptop on the original TT and then TTD. Once you know the way to make money, it's pretty easy and very satisfying. Subsidies shouldn't be ignored either, multiple profit for a short time. I always used to start with coal, excellent value for a un-chained industry. I tended to all but ignore passengers. I ended up building massive railway grid of 1 way rails in each direction that covered the whole map (eventually) so when you needed a new service, you just hook up both ends and boom. A cheaty cool think in TTD and OTTD is refitting planes. Once you get the supersonic jet you just find a bank on opposite ends of the map, plonk an airport at each, refit the plane and (because of the value over distance at speed) it makes crazy money off a tiny amount. So you build a huge airport and many planes can run from a single bank. I've never used a modded version, or played multiplayer, so I've enjoyed watching your videos recently.
Timetables are only really useful if you use a patch that adds auto separation. Other than that, they are a lot if work if you want to make lines more efficient
Artemiy Karpinskiy if I stop playing the game for a while I forget how signals work and have to hunt down a tutorial video to learn again. I open some of my old saves and the signaling looks super complex because I figured it out at the time and have since forgotten the mechanics.
Seriously same I *NEED* some kind of mod that like Visualizes exactly what the signals are doing and how stuff will go though them And maybe just makes them for me lol
For mail sustainability make mail trucks in main city. It seriously works make them from stop A to stop B and it counts as delivered to a city even when it was delivered to the same one Damn my English..
They really need to make a button which just sets the timetables and separates the buses evenly. To save you setting every single time on a route (+ a depot), making each stop 4 days (to allow for lateness) then ctrl-clinging start time. That all takes about 30 seconds if you don't have a timetable set. Otherwise, it would be about 2 seconds. But if you haven't auto timetabled, you have to go along each time and journey time and press 'set time' then just press enter to input the existing number which will show the last time recorded. Be careful as these time can be months if they have been set to full load. But if you auto generate - you only have to change the stop times to add a couple of days at stops )i round them off to 4 days) so the buses don't run late and then don't wait to pick up passengers, thus increasing percentage moved, rating, and incoming passengers. So you are getting 100% value out of your buses if they are perfectly spaced and spend at least 2 days at each stop loading and unloading, ideally, 4 days (in which case the stop should be given a 6 day wait to allow 2 days float for lateness). Easy really. Also clockwise and anti-clockwise. Your buses are unforgivably bunched up. Mastering the timetable should be your next task. Even if it can be infuriating if you can't figure out why it's not working. It is really good when you get it to work.
My main issue with timetables is that what you are describing sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of gain. As long as buses have a decent profit of margin, that's good enough for me. It only gets easier as cities grow.
@@strictoaster I make more money from vehicles than anything else by a factor of about 10. Given, I am playing a desert map and am currently being completely unsuccessful in supplying food and water (simultaneously) to towns not near water (which need that), so they also need a water tower, but I digress. My buses are making £387k and costing £75k and my trains with their insane convoluted routes and loads are making £494k and costing £412k to run. So by using auto spaced timetables on all my buses, they are all making money and the backbone to my attempts to get food and water to any town with a water tower. I am losing by the way and could lose that game. But really all I need to do is buy more buses in the one town that grows. I've got bendy ones and triple ones. It's all about bussing passengers to make the easy money in ottd. Trams on the other hand, I can never make profitable.
OpenTTD's timetable system is a complete mess. It's still not 100% perfect (in my opinion), but the best system I've seen so far for this kind of thing is that used by Cities in Motion 2 (I assume the first game has roughly the same system, but I'm not sure.) Obviously, that being limited to a single city, the day-night cycle makes having a timetable make more sense, but it's just plain a better way to organise vehicles in a lot of ways... I wonder if the logic and UI behind it could be ported over to OpenTTD (even if it's as an optional mod) There's still several things wrong with CIM's logic though. (elements of the game design don't work together too well in general, needing fine-tuning, and lack of easily accessible statistics makes adjusting the timetable to be efficient more troublesome than it needs to be.) Some of it would be redundant in OpenTTD, but the general idea is still sound. Basically it works like this: You define a route without any vehicles - just stations/stops. You then define a timetable for the route. You can either auto-generate one based on how frequently you want a vehicle to show up at a station. (The game then calculates how many vehicles are required for this frequency.) You can also further tweak things in that you can set additional vehicles for the morning and evening rush hour, and set different schedules for morning, afternoon, evening and night, as well as a wholly seperate weekend schedule that also has all the elements. (you can specify what the times are for each of these categories) Once you've done that you also specify the type of vehicle to use for each section of the timetable. - this isn't exact; you simply specify if you want a small, medium or large vehicle. (you can also specify you don't care) You can tweak this timetable as much as you like, but a basic one is simply to set your desired interval. The final step is that the route must specify a depot. The route starts at the first station, and the game calculates the time taken to get from the depot to that first station. When it reaches the calculated time for the next vehicle, the depot sends out a vehicle that fits the requirements of the next required trip in the schedule. If it can't find an appropriate vehicle of the right size, it sends out anything at all that's in the depot. If there's nothing in the depot, it sends you a warning message. When a vehicle reaches the end of the route, if it's suited to running the next service in the schedule, and there's enough time, the same vehicle generally goes back to the start of the route. Otherwise, a new vehicle comes out of the depot for the next scheduled departure, and the vehicle that just reached the end of the route goes to the depot. For each scheduled service you can also specify whether it's an all stations service, or an express service that skips some stops. (with you being able to specify which stops the express services skip when defining the route.) In theory, multiple routes can share the same depot, with the vehicles it contains being shared amongst all the routes using that depot. In practice, the depot capacity is limited, and because the demand on most routes is such that you quickly need all the vehicles from the largest depot type to keep up (and sometimes from more than one depot, if demand is high enough - which requires duplicating the route), you tend to end up building a depot per route. Quite how this could be transferred to OpenTTD I'm not entirely sure, but it'd make route planning far more interesting and probably more efficient. But, it'd need a lot of tweaks to the logic to get it to work in OpenTTD... Still, could be worth a try. XD
@@KuraIthys CIM1 doesn't auto generate the vehicles for you, buying vehicles is a big part of the game. I went onto the OTTD forum to suggest some changes but they were kind of rude and accused me of not understanding that programming is hard and 'you can't just do anything' blah blah. But the timetables in OTTD become the core game if you want to play it to it maximum but you get bogged down by moving the windows around so much setting up so many bus routes it can get confusing. I would say it is still worth doing the auto routes even if you will be learning it more or less continuously. It's like signals, like I don't know wtf gate signals are for but I can use all the other ones now and that seems to be enough. The only problem with the auto timetable system is it is so manual. But once your schedules are in place it's very satisfying to have all your bus stops full because the buses are properly separated. Also profits!
I am aware of that. CIM2 still involves buying vehicles, trying to decide what kind to use, and assigning them to depots. But the defined routes still cause the game to pick a vehicle from whatever's available in it's assigned route or in the assigned depot, and vehicles are categorised into size categories. The only way to ensure you don't get an unintended vehicle on your route is to ensure the vehicles in the depot are always of the type you actually want. Still, the system makes a lot of sense. Also those people in the forums huh. Go figure they'd be asshats. 'programming is hard'. Yeah, no kidding. I've been doing it for 20 years... But that's no excuse to not even try... XD If everyone had taken that attitude, OpenTTD wouldn't exist, and wouldn't have 90% of it's current features...
I get why you build the railway stations/connections the way you do, gameway wise, but it’s soooo not how it’s done irl. I’d prefer if you made it more realistic in future episodes/series.
I'm trying to find a balance between what "looks good" and what's "efficient". At this point I'm mostly concerned about getting the town to grow, whatever it takes. I'll probably go back and tweak stations and tracks for them to be a bit more realistic and better looking later.
Killing rivers completely is a crime to realism
You've got lots of money. To grow your orchards, fund a bulk terminal in a nearby body of water.
Ah, tunnels.
I remember, way, WAAAY back, before I owned the game, I had a demo version of Transport Tycoon. (not deluxe, the original).
Because the demo basically only ran for a few years at most, it was hard to get much done, and lack of money made that worse.
I noticed however, that there was a bug with tunnel building. Tunnels are expensive, So expensive in fact, that if you make one that spans an entire map, it'll cost so much the cost will overflow, and become a negative value. (this happens somewhere roughly at the point that the cost of the tunnel hits about 2 billion)
So, build a long enough tunnel, and you end up with a tunnel that costs about -2 billion, which the game interprets as you GAINING 2 billion for building it.
Of course, the presence of this bug tells us that the money in the game (that version at least) was a 32 bit signed value.
It also implies that the reverse is also possible.
If you manage to do well enough to have 2 billion in your account, you'll lose the game shortly afterwards as it overflows to -2 billion, meaning you're suddenly in massive debt.
The irony is, your only chance at survival if that happens is to try and spend money like crazy, since if your income goes low enough, it'll become positive again.
Unfortunately, you can't build anything when your money is negative.
But presumably you got so much cash from having a very high income.
So if you say... Stopped ALL of your vehicles, and continued having operating costs but no income, you might just drop below that point again.
In OpenTTD I expect this is a moot point, since the overflow condition has been fixed.
(To be honest, I expect this was already fixed for TTD, since the tunnel exploit certainly no longer worked...)
good times!
I've played this game since the original, I used to sit on the school bus with my laptop on the original TT and then TTD. Once you know the way to make money, it's pretty easy and very satisfying. Subsidies shouldn't be ignored either, multiple profit for a short time. I always used to start with coal, excellent value for a un-chained industry. I tended to all but ignore passengers. I ended up building massive railway grid of 1 way rails in each direction that covered the whole map (eventually) so when you needed a new service, you just hook up both ends and boom. A cheaty cool think in TTD and OTTD is refitting planes. Once you get the supersonic jet you just find a bank on opposite ends of the map, plonk an airport at each, refit the plane and (because of the value over distance at speed) it makes crazy money off a tiny amount. So you build a huge airport and many planes can run from a single bank. I've never used a modded version, or played multiplayer, so I've enjoyed watching your videos recently.
This. Also passenger trains aren't as fun without the cargodist mod, which upgrades them from simple cargo into actual passengers with destinations
Timetables are only really useful if you use a patch that adds auto separation. Other than that, they are a lot if work if you want to make lines more efficient
Love your OpenTTD videos !
Keep up the great work :)
Man, my brain just... doesn't process signals. Not in OTTD, nor in any other game (Factorio for example). Idk why it's so hard for me.
Artemiy Karpinskiy if I stop playing the game for a while I forget how signals work and have to hunt down a tutorial video to learn again. I open some of my old saves and the signaling looks super complex because I figured it out at the time and have since forgotten the mechanics.
@@simondann7371 Oh that's a giant mood for any game of that sort.
Seriously same
I *NEED* some kind of mod that like
Visualizes exactly what the signals are doing and how stuff will go though them
And maybe just makes them for me lol
@@DogsRNice There is a setting in the vanilla game that shows which blocks are reserved by a train. I don't remember what it's called though.
For mail sustainability make mail trucks in main city. It seriously works make them from stop A to stop B and it counts as delivered to a city even when it was delivered to the same one
Damn my English..
yeah but transporting it between city makes way more money especially for small towns
@@frederickgrenier2367 yes but it's good for growing the city when using this script I did it myself with the mods he is using and 1 truck is enough
Yeah, that's not a bad idea.
@@strictoaster glad you might use it :)
I liked the length of this episode :-).
Hi Strictoaster, I think it may be time soon to expand Capital City's train station.
Yeah, no kidding.
They really need to make a button which just sets the timetables and separates the buses evenly. To save you setting every single time on a route (+ a depot), making each stop 4 days (to allow for lateness) then ctrl-clinging start time. That all takes about 30 seconds if you don't have a timetable set. Otherwise, it would be about 2 seconds. But if you haven't auto timetabled, you have to go along each time and journey time and press 'set time' then just press enter to input the existing number which will show the last time recorded. Be careful as these time can be months if they have been set to full load. But if you auto generate - you only have to change the stop times to add a couple of days at stops )i round them off to 4 days) so the buses don't run late and then don't wait to pick up passengers, thus increasing percentage moved, rating, and incoming passengers. So you are getting 100% value out of your buses if they are perfectly spaced and spend at least 2 days at each stop loading and unloading, ideally, 4 days (in which case the stop should be given a 6 day wait to allow 2 days float for lateness). Easy really. Also clockwise and anti-clockwise. Your buses are unforgivably bunched up. Mastering the timetable should be your next task. Even if it can be infuriating if you can't figure out why it's not working. It is really good when you get it to work.
My main issue with timetables is that what you are describing sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of gain. As long as buses have a decent profit of margin, that's good enough for me.
It only gets easier as cities grow.
@@strictoaster I make more money from vehicles than anything else by a factor of about 10. Given, I am playing a desert map and am currently being completely unsuccessful in supplying food and water (simultaneously) to towns not near water (which need that), so they also need a water tower, but I digress. My buses are making £387k and costing £75k and my trains with their insane convoluted routes and loads are making £494k and costing £412k to run. So by using auto spaced timetables on all my buses, they are all making money and the backbone to my attempts to get food and water to any town with a water tower. I am losing by the way and could lose that game. But really all I need to do is buy more buses in the one town that grows. I've got bendy ones and triple ones. It's all about bussing passengers to make the easy money in ottd. Trams on the other hand, I can never make profitable.
OpenTTD's timetable system is a complete mess.
It's still not 100% perfect (in my opinion), but the best system I've seen so far for this kind of thing is that used by Cities in Motion 2 (I assume the first game has roughly the same system, but I'm not sure.)
Obviously, that being limited to a single city, the day-night cycle makes having a timetable make more sense, but it's just plain a better way to organise vehicles in a lot of ways...
I wonder if the logic and UI behind it could be ported over to OpenTTD (even if it's as an optional mod)
There's still several things wrong with CIM's logic though. (elements of the game design don't work together too well in general, needing fine-tuning, and lack of easily accessible statistics makes adjusting the timetable to be efficient more troublesome than it needs to be.)
Some of it would be redundant in OpenTTD, but the general idea is still sound.
Basically it works like this:
You define a route without any vehicles - just stations/stops.
You then define a timetable for the route. You can either auto-generate one based on how frequently you want a vehicle to show up at a station. (The game then calculates how many vehicles are required for this frequency.)
You can also further tweak things in that you can set additional vehicles for the morning and evening rush hour, and set different schedules for morning, afternoon, evening and night, as well as a wholly seperate weekend schedule that also has all the elements. (you can specify what the times are for each of these categories)
Once you've done that you also specify the type of vehicle to use for each section of the timetable. - this isn't exact; you simply specify if you want a small, medium or large vehicle. (you can also specify you don't care)
You can tweak this timetable as much as you like, but a basic one is simply to set your desired interval.
The final step is that the route must specify a depot.
The route starts at the first station, and the game calculates the time taken to get from the depot to that first station.
When it reaches the calculated time for the next vehicle, the depot sends out a vehicle that fits the requirements of the next required trip in the schedule. If it can't find an appropriate vehicle of the right size, it sends out anything at all that's in the depot. If there's nothing in the depot, it sends you a warning message.
When a vehicle reaches the end of the route, if it's suited to running the next service in the schedule, and there's enough time, the same vehicle generally goes back to the start of the route.
Otherwise, a new vehicle comes out of the depot for the next scheduled departure, and the vehicle that just reached the end of the route goes to the depot.
For each scheduled service you can also specify whether it's an all stations service, or an express service that skips some stops. (with you being able to specify which stops the express services skip when defining the route.)
In theory, multiple routes can share the same depot, with the vehicles it contains being shared amongst all the routes using that depot.
In practice, the depot capacity is limited, and because the demand on most routes is such that you quickly need all the vehicles from the largest depot type to keep up (and sometimes from more than one depot, if demand is high enough - which requires duplicating the route), you tend to end up building a depot per route.
Quite how this could be transferred to OpenTTD I'm not entirely sure, but it'd make route planning far more interesting and probably more efficient.
But, it'd need a lot of tweaks to the logic to get it to work in OpenTTD...
Still, could be worth a try. XD
@@KuraIthys CIM1 doesn't auto generate the vehicles for you, buying vehicles is a big part of the game.
I went onto the OTTD forum to suggest some changes but they were kind of rude and accused me of not understanding that programming is hard and 'you can't just do anything' blah blah.
But the timetables in OTTD become the core game if you want to play it to it maximum but you get bogged down by moving the windows around so much setting up so many bus routes it can get confusing.
I would say it is still worth doing the auto routes even if you will be learning it more or less continuously. It's like signals, like I don't know wtf gate signals are for but I can use all the other ones now and that seems to be enough.
The only problem with the auto timetable system is it is so manual. But once your schedules are in place it's very satisfying to have all your bus stops full because the buses are properly separated. Also profits!
I am aware of that. CIM2 still involves buying vehicles, trying to decide what kind to use, and assigning them to depots.
But the defined routes still cause the game to pick a vehicle from whatever's available in it's assigned route or in the assigned depot, and vehicles are categorised into size categories.
The only way to ensure you don't get an unintended vehicle on your route is to ensure the vehicles in the depot are always of the type you actually want.
Still, the system makes a lot of sense.
Also those people in the forums huh. Go figure they'd be asshats.
'programming is hard'.
Yeah, no kidding. I've been doing it for 20 years...
But that's no excuse to not even try... XD
If everyone had taken that attitude, OpenTTD wouldn't exist, and wouldn't have 90% of it's current features...
Get a boat route form Chicago to Reykjavik
Can someone explain signals to me i tried but my trains got stuck waiting for each other when they could pass
Need more Beer
Episode 4 is missing in the UF playlist.
Obligatory "That's what she said" due to title... (paragraph 5 line 34 of the Man Code)
I get why you build the railway stations/connections the way you do, gameway wise, but it’s soooo not how it’s done irl. I’d prefer if you made it more realistic in future episodes/series.
I'm trying to find a balance between what "looks good" and what's "efficient".
At this point I'm mostly concerned about getting the town to grow, whatever it takes. I'll probably go back and tweak stations and tracks for them to be a bit more realistic and better looking later.
Yeah, but realistic designs just aren't all that effective ingame.
It's a real awkward tradeoff.
i wish we could meet on a server, there are many things i would love too teach you about the game.
Hai