Comment by cheese4242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheese4242 | Hacker News Reader

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By random chance I installed OpenTTD a few days ago out of quarantine boredom so I am thrilled to see a HN post about it.

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.

I heartily recommend trying out some CityBuilder servers. You claim a small town and provide it different types of cargo as it grows. It really tests your TTD skills, as you need to provide constant streams of cargo every month to keep the town growing.

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.

[1] https://openttd.btpro.nl/

In the advanced settings you can disable plane usage for the bots, and then restrain yourself from using them. This forces you to build an efficient network using trains, trucks and ships. I recommend in general poking through the advanced settings to see what else could increase the difficulty.

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.

Interesting. Was it like that in original Transport Tycoon? I haven't played much OpenTTD, most of my experience is with TT, and I remember planes being very weak early game. Later on when you get big airports and fast jets they become viable, so do ships, but early game, it's all about coal and iron trains.

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