OpenTTD 1.10
openttd.org
openttd.org
EDIT: Just to be clear, the game is awesome and the comment is made in jest ;)
I cheered to soon...
Apologies in advance.
I play TF/TF2 mainly for the look.
Edit: in term of the transport network, not in term of economy.
In TF that makes e.g. two-way feeder lines and lines with multiple stops work reasonably, whereas I seem to remember those didn't quite work in Transport Tycoon. It wouldn't, for example, make sense to have an interim stop at a smaller town between two large ones because all of the passengers now somehow decide the small town is where they were going to, pay only for that, and now you'd only have a handful of passengers from the small town on the entire train.
It's been a long time since I played OpenTTD, though, so things may have changed. I think that alone is a game changer for me in TF.
What I miss most in TF is any kind of competition apart from private vehicles, and having any economic modeling outside of your own operation with fixed prices and basic town growth (which does work reasonably well). In that sense it feels very much like a sandbox built for you to play in rather than a dynamic world.
edit: clarification
Yet also horribly true, at least for some of us. This is one of the games that I have to put on the "avoid because pathological One-More-Turn syndrome risk" pile.
Recent and not as related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19538715
https://github.com/grand-central-garbage/openttd-prometheus (warning: grim c++ code)
Note: Not passing judgement if it is, just curious.
And while it had been done before for citybuilder, hardcore players that can really appreciate it are no longer playing the game :( http://dpointer.org/data/ttd/stats30/
In the beginning it can be a bit though, but once you get over the initial hump you're more or less swimming in money for the rest of the game.
Secondly, it's annoying how small trains become uncompetitive later on in the game. Yes, you'll have much smaller number of these megaroutes bringing in the megabucks, but you have plenty of formerly cash flow positive routes that simply can no longer cover their running costs. Yeah, maybe that mirrors reality with rail transit, but dammit, I want to play with trains not run trucks and buses.
(but to be clear, Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD is an awesome, addictive game all the same)
There are critiques of the work that make some reasonable points, but this is not how they start.
I regret that it is a poor forum to discuss pop economics with a political agenda. If you would like resources which discuss and critique the various flaws of Piketty's work, I can refer you to the scholarly publications and the conferences associated with the American Economic Association, the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, the Cliometrics Society, and like academic organizations, as starting points.
In the meantime, I will continue to use this forum to discuss the realism of video games.
If that were to be manifested in a game, there would be no "management phase" at all. You would just buy stocks and collect returns from them faster than other players could get money from actual business ventures.
I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe it was something like:
Normal people: 4.5%
Wealthy people: 7.5%
High net-worth individuals: 9%
Money earned is based on distance and speed. Planes are incredibly lucrative in the early game.
I therefore take a different approach to the game to find fun. I use the 2cc trainset, turn on car speed limits, turn on Cargo Distribution, spread out the map so it's a little less dense than normal, find a nice town-growth script that I can tune such that towns only grow when you move lots of passengers and mail — then I focus on passengers and mail only, and try to connect everyone into one unified network.
It thus becomes a network-capacity management game rather than an economics game. You need metros and suburban rail to collect people to your high-capacity mainline rail corridors and long-distance high-speed routes.
A link for the curious: https://wiki.openttd.org/Passenger_and_cargo_distribution
In short, enabling this feature allows the game to specify a specific destination for each piece of cargo. It then does a little bit of management for you in routing the cargo through whatever network you build, but it's up to you to make an efficient network with good routes that causes the cargo to flow properly.
This contrasts with the vanilla game, where passengers are just a kind of cargo with no specific destination, as is everything else, and you are allowed to just send them anywhere that accepts passengers and get money for it.
Sure it would be a lot easier to distribute your ore to different steel mills, but it's much more fun to optimize the crap out of that one huge station at a single mill. Same for factories. And the slowly connect every town in the game to the same network until complete chaos ensues.
Net result is your shares went up enormously so you made a huge profit, the opponent can't do anything except go broke as it has no more cash and spends a ton on the upkeep of the ships. And you have a lot of ships drifting around aimlessly providing some nice background views.
As a kid I loved this evil plan, but assumed it would never fly in the real corporate world. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
Another fun one was trains drive 1 pixel of the rails before turning around. So if an opponent has a huge profit making railway station, you place one rail of your own at the end and stop a train just before it turns around. Next time his trains come around, he crashes into yours and boom goes the money maker.
And then there was the fact that a train cant collide with itself. If it is long enough you can push it through itself at a crossing.
There were others, but that's all I remember.
Haven't you just described any large application?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error
In this earlier post I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181
[...]
And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.
You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.
There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.
So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia [2] to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!
It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
[...]
[2]
Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia...
Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"
http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...
From memory you didn't even need to force them to borrow money, they always did. As soon as they launched with the $200,000 value buy 75%. They would within minutes borrow a million and then you sell your shares turning $175,000 into $750,000.
The buying ships etc was definitely evil :)
I was building up a local rail and road transportation network then on a whim I built a few airports and setup some plane routes between them. The revenue from planes started outpacing my existing ground networks quickly. I then built two large airports on opposite ends of the map and purchased a large jet to fly between them. Before long I had more money than I knew what to do with. A long distance air route between two large cities with a fast, high capacity jet just prints money.
So I'm wondering, how do I get some more challenge out of this game? What are some more fun things I can do? At this point I am making money faster than I can spend it.
Also, early stage I try to optimise for high profits, late stage my mission focuses on the company performance score: there’s a maximum score of 1,000 which is actually quite tricky to achieve. Aligning your goal to get as high as you can faster than the bots is definitely a challenge.
There are probably several CityBuilder servers, but I mostly played on the BTPro[1] ones. Everyone starts at the same time and the goal is usually timeboxed to 3 hours, after which the server resets with a new map.
I haven't played the game for a few years, but these goal servers kept me hooked for months.
Fast forward to 2015, I checked out OpenTTD and it was a complete refresh. And with multiplayer, I learned a lot of new things. It's too much fun dealing with optimizations and competing with top players on the many different servers. There will be a lot to learn given how closely it aligns with real life transportation systems.
As it is now, the one who spends the most time right after the game starts wins by a huge margin.
Slowing down the tick rate works but looks silly. Making everything cost less and yield less, as well as increasing the ticks per day works until a certain point where things get too cheap for integers, eg buses not making any money any more.
I think a 15x slowdown was feasible, but not yet enough for our taste.
Here's a link to their OSS GitHub repo for quick reference: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD
The vibe is similar though and you can even take a break and ride your trains. I strongly recommend giving it a try.
The graphics don’t scale to modern resolutions, and so I literally can not read the screen or see what’s happening. I have to sit six inches away from the screen to read anything. I’ve tried wiki instructions before, but they didn’t work. I ended up having missized windows and text.
Such a shame.
It's a while since I played it, but it's similar to Transport Tycoon and seems to have variants ("paksets") with different levels of graphical detail.