The balance is a bit off. Planes are far more profitable than they should be (and more profitable than anything else) because the price paid to transport things is proportional to distance but you don’t need to build tracks or similar for planes. I generally end up with a very profitable airline subsidising my vanity train set.
Feels like they could fix that by having lots of heavy things or lots of low value bulky things (enough that you can’t run enough planes for them without loads of runways). Either format is a good match for trains and barges and a poor match for planes and kinda bad for lorries (trucks).
As I recall, the function for computing transport cost in OpenTTD (inherited from Transport Tycoon) is that goods have a fixed multiplier per unit (fixed size) and the multiply this by the distance and divide by the time. I think that you’d need to make the time-decay factor different for different goods, so iron can take ages to deliver, for example, but not passengers (time is weird in the game, train journeys often take days or weeks, boats can take a year). Boats currently do well with things like oil, where there’s just too much to carry by air, but it’s possible to ship all of the more lucrative cargo by air and make far more money than you can with trains.
I actually let OpenTTD take over my evening and spent quite a while playing and you’re sort of right! Money for goods is a base cost * amount * Manhattan distance between source and destination * decay factor based on speed and time sensitivity of the good.
I think the most confusing part of the game for me is the accelerated timespan. It makes it very hard to work out whether your goods will arrive on time because the units are all weird (it takes days or months for a large train to be loaded).
This is clearly a fabrication. OpenTTD stopped working many years ago and no one has been able to fix it.
At least, that’s what I need to believe to ever get any work done…
OpenTTD is a game I want to love, but I always end up ragequitting after what I think is a carefully designed rail line turns into spaghetti deadlock.
But maybe this time will be different…
The balance is a bit off. Planes are far more profitable than they should be (and more profitable than anything else) because the price paid to transport things is proportional to distance but you don’t need to build tracks or similar for planes. I generally end up with a very profitable airline subsidising my vanity train set.
Feels like they could fix that by having lots of heavy things or lots of low value bulky things (enough that you can’t run enough planes for them without loads of runways). Either format is a good match for trains and barges and a poor match for planes and kinda bad for lorries (trucks).
As I recall, the function for computing transport cost in OpenTTD (inherited from Transport Tycoon) is that goods have a fixed multiplier per unit (fixed size) and the multiply this by the distance and divide by the time. I think that you’d need to make the time-decay factor different for different goods, so iron can take ages to deliver, for example, but not passengers (time is weird in the game, train journeys often take days or weeks, boats can take a year). Boats currently do well with things like oil, where there’s just too much to carry by air, but it’s possible to ship all of the more lucrative cargo by air and make far more money than you can with trains.
I actually let OpenTTD take over my evening and spent quite a while playing and you’re sort of right! Money for goods is a base cost * amount * Manhattan distance between source and destination * decay factor based on speed and time sensitivity of the good.
You can read the rules here: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Game%20Mechanics/Cargo%20income
I think the most confusing part of the game for me is the accelerated timespan. It makes it very hard to work out whether your goods will arrive on time because the units are all weird (it takes days or months for a large train to be loaded).
If you like OpenTTD, you might like Factorio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc
Good luck and I’m sorry! :)