OpenTTD Game Mechanics | Hacker News Reader

OpenTTD Game Mechanics

wiki.openttd.org

70 pointsdamir14 comments

It always bugged me that delivering far away gave more money than delivering close by.

So if you have two oil rigs and two refinery, one each on opposite corners of the map, you are better off making the oil cross the whole map than the obviously more efficient way of connecting each oil rig with the neighboring refinery.

Anyway, still an outstanding game!

Cargo delivery rates diminishing over time were the intended counter to this, but they were both tuned too low in the original TTD and the largest map size in original TTD is the smallest map size anyone actually plays in OpenTTD so you hit the price floor with plenty of distance still available to outweigh it.

Cargodist is one way around this as the cargo has a set destinations when generated, but for performance reasons it only considers connected industries so it still relies a bit on the player being "honest".

The FIRS newGRF industry model is another. Rather than secondary industries scaling their output infinitely with input, they have a max output reached when a threshold of different input types is provided, which encourages you to connect up other instances to get more cargo.

I did this too, until competitor came and started taking some of the oil that was waiting on my trains to go full-circle. Which put me in red numbers.

Still, putting more trains on that same track, so oil was never waiting to be loaded, rose my ratings and rig started giving me bigger share of oil.

That and train breakdowns... Hate them :)

>That and train breakdowns... Hate them :)

There is an option in the settings page to set the frequency of vehicle breakdowns to low or none.

Its really stupid. Coincidentally thats how energy market in EU works right now - the better connected grid you have the worse prices your close by clients get because you can export to Germany and other "responsible" countries like Italy.

Every electrical grid works the way you described, and it's not how TTD works from the point of view that you are pushing.

On the electrical grid, if a German producer sells to Italy, while an Italian producer sells to Germany, both will end with less money than if both sold locally. Not much less, because the grid operator will arrange things for them to actually sell locally, while billing the remote party, but they will lose some money.

The thing with TTD is that it's from the point of view of the transporter, and the transporter obviously gain more money for carrying things further away. The grid owner also gets more money on the scenario that both parties are exporting their energy, that's why the producers get less. The thing that is not realistic on TTD is that you get to choose where you will transport things to. That doesn't happen on the real world.

Railroad tycoon 3 had such a nice price system, where each kind of goods had a price at each point on the map, and that price changed depending on supply (including deliveries) and demand. Goods could even move short distances by itself (spreading out over consuming towns, for example). So while the game was a transportation game, it was also a game of arbitrage and efficiency. You could buy industries, and setting up multi level production chains could be very profitable.

OpenTTD is probably one of the better games I've played recently.

A few notes though:

1. Distances and tiles are very poorly represented, especially for things like inner-city rail stations. The train-station taking up 2-tiles x 5-tiles is a good building block in theory, except entire cities are like 5x5 tiles in this game.

2. I think OpenTTD needs a "revamp", bigger maps and "smaller buildings". That way, a city or town can be maybe 40x40 tiles or 80x80 tiles, allowing the players to actually think about a viable subway network. As it is, you pretty much just "ctrl-click" bus stations everywhere to increase the radius of your train-station to absurd proportions (ie: cover a whole city with the "same bus stop").

3. The industry is fine. A lot of mods seem to be making industry chains deeper / more complex. I think having just 2 or 3 steps per industry is fine (a bit unrealistic, but good enough to represent the inputs vs outputs of train stations and have interesting traffic flow issues).

4. Airplanes are a bit overpowered, but maybe that's good (since it provides an easy source of money, allowing you to reach "post-game" rather quickly). Trains are the best for station-ratings, I feel like the station-rating algorithm needs to be revamped to encourage a bit more diversity. Boats are in a weird spot, but I think increasing the "size" of the map, and then letting boats have collision detection, would help dramatically. Real life docks are far larger than represented in this game (a 30x30 area could, and probably should be, a dock in this game)

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So yeah, the main thing is the original representation of "1 tile == 1km-squared" from Transport Tycoon was a fine starting point, but our computers today can simulate far larger tilesets. So we probably should revamp so that we're closer to 1-tile == 100-square meters or so? And then rebalancing against that (or, 10,000x more granularity compared to 1km^2 tiles).

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But OpenTTD is perhaps one of the few games where "parking space" is in fact, adequately represented. And gameplay loop revolves around it (how do you design stations? Even if you're doing bus and truck stations, the number of parking spots on the route is of supreme importance). Maybe a bit silly that a parking space is 1km^2, but that's the smallest the tileset goes, lol.

The setting in OpenTTD to close windows using right click is one of the best UI features anywhere and I miss it in daily life and especially when I go back to play the original TTD.

Or hit "delete" to close all non-pinned windows.

OpenTTD is less of a game and more of a simulator/engine. After seeing so many people talking about it, I tried it last year. There's no real losing/challenge state, you just make less money. It was interesting to see all the complexity, but it never really paid off. I got bored after a few hours of "Hm, I wonder if I could do this?" It doesn't really remind me of other tycoon games where I'm trying to reach the next level of buildings/automation. It's more like SimCity 1.

I wish the game was more accessible

Hah, same, though most of my complaints would revolve around the UI/UX.

Like how it'd be nice to be able to gradually scale the UI and text (instead of either having just 2x option, or having to manually change font sizes in config files; which is still a passable solution for now).

Or maybe how some inspiration from Transport Fever 2 wouldn't hurt - personally I think it has the absolute best UI/UX from any of the transportation tycoon/simulation games out there. A clear overview of all the lines/routes and vehicles that are attached to them, color coded and visualized on the map. Very easy planning of new routes with the relevant bits being highlighted while you build things and so on.

It would be amazing to have a game like OpenTTD (low hardware requirements, lots of nice content, nice to look at, great mod support) with the actual experience of playing it a bit more like Transport Fever 2.

Oh, also, games like Mashinky (still grid based) did the creation of railroads/roads infinitely better than OpenTTD does, in my opinion - even the switch types that you most likely need were selected automatically and the track segments were visualized.

What do you find inaccessible about it?

You don't need to do anything terribly advanced to "win": you do pretty well for yourself by plonking down two airports and just shuttling passengers between them, or building rudimentary two-stop bus service in the largest towns. More advanced items are available if you really want them, and there's no penalty for experimenting.

The interface is from the 90s, so the paradigm can take some adapting to. Generally, hover over things for an explanatory tooltip, and holding down buttons will reveal additional options in the toolbar. Otherwise, reading the fine manual will tell you how to accomplish things like moving the viewport.

I have played hundreds if not thousands of hours and stopped paying attention to my scores ages ago. Generally I start a game by running a passenger service to build a profitable platform, and then go off and do something like "connect every forest on the map to a single sawmill". The challenge is really what you set for yourself (not least of all because the AI is pretty dumb).

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