Simutrans Turns 25 | Hacker News Reader

Simutrans Turns 25

blog.simutrans.com

68 pointssomat14 comments

If unfamiliar, simutrans is a game very much like transport tycoon, it tends towards being more systems heavy than TTD and is generally considered more of a challenge.

Some of the difference from transport tycoon include factories have contracts with specific other factories, that is you can not just deliver iron ore to any steel mill, it has to be a specific one. goods can back up, when this happens quantities ordered will be reduced and your income can fall, you have to make sure the entire supply chain is handled before it backups up on you.

If trying it out for the first time an important thing to note is that the paksets are not just graphical changes but more like game code. that is, pak64 plays very different from pak128. I mostly play pak64 but I think to generalize pak64 tries to force you to optimize your running costs and pak128 you have to optimize your acquisition costs.

It is on steam, this might be the easiest way to play

Wow, it sounds even more interesting than OpenTTD with CargoDist and FIRS.

There is also Simutrans-Extended (https://bridgewater-brunel.me.uk/) — a fork that adds even more detail and realism to the simulation and tries to achieve better game balance.

I've been playing Simutrans on and off for most of those of years, and while I agree the gameplay is challenging, the Achilles heel to drawing in new players is really the UI. It's ugly and confusing as hell, requires tons of faffing around rearranging menus even for simple things until you memorize all the shortcuts, and is completely unforgiving: if you're building a railroad and click on the wrong tile at the other end, it'll do some crazy loop and bankrupt you instantly with no undo. (Yes, there's an undo function, but it rarely if ever works.) And then there's just plain stupid stuff like letting you built a tram network when no trams are available in that year/scenario.

The tram thing bit me. I am not good at setting up passenger networks and decided to try trams. "what do you mean there are no trams!? it's 1936, the golden era of trams. this is bullshit" I never did figure out when trams arrive in pak64.

Could somebody that knows both explain how Simutrans compares to (Open) Transport Tycoon Deluxe?

- More detailed simulation. Cargo has fixed destinations so more places to deliver = more cargo

- The UI is much worse

- Bigger community for openttd

openttd is a functional game. simutrans feels like an endless beta.

It looks more similar to Locomotion.

I think the largest difference between Simutrans and TTD is how cargo destinations work as well as how easy money is to get. My experience last time I played OpenTTD was pretty much: Slap down a train between two or three small towns and make bank. Because people will happily go wherever. Simutrans is very stingy with money in comparison. Your first rail line is likely eating up almost all your starting capital and you might well go bankrupt if it's a poor one.

In Simutrans you don't get a high ridership until you connect to places people actually want to go. You'll often see something like "900 passengers not generated, destination not available" on stations. With Simutrans Extended you'd also see that the trip time was too long to be worth taking. A bus or tram network is largely about letting people have more destinations to generate more passengers from across the map. Rather than something which makes money on its own. Passengers will use multiple modes to get to their destinations. Take the bus to the train station, over to the ferry, onto another bus etc. Taking up space at the larger hubs as they do so. Waiting for their specific next ride.

So you don't necessarily get a lot more passengers because you have a lot of stations. You get more passengers because you have more good destinations. Small towns are entirely unprofitable until you link up a lot of them.

Cargo also only travels between partnered factories. You can't send goods anywhere, it must be to one of their actual partners. You also have to finish the entire chain. Full factories won't accept more materials.

As far as I can remember. It's a better system than Cargodist. Highly recommended either way. Good graphs for everything you might want too despite the rest of the UI being kind of meh.

Sadly, Linux download links at https://www.simutrans.com/en/download/ are broken

https://nightly.simutrans.com/en/ is also missing them

Pity that Linux is apparently unsupported.

I run it fine on openbsd. It has a bit of a strange build system, not bad but not (auto|c)make. edit: I just looked, realized my openbsd build was out of date, and now it does use automake. sigh, automake is always such a hassle. well, thats now my project for the weekend.

It's open source software, get it from your package manager? https://repology.org/project/simutrans/versions

I found ten years ago simutrans substantially improved in performance when compiled from source with -march=native and -ffast-math

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