OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe being the original), is my preferred traffic simulation game.
Once you can control all routes and trains, you can never go back! You get used to the control, the timetables, the organization that's possible.
Once you can control all routes and trains, you can never go back! You get used to the control, the timetables, the organization that's possible.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox?wprov=sfla1
Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
In contrast, OpenTTD encourages hub/spoke model and recycling of centers. I think its sizes are off but the overall gameplay loop is correct here.
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OpenTTD's "traffic" is pretty dumb, but its infinite. As long as you've got high station ratings, the station will expand and traffic will increase. It doesn't matter what design you have, the traffic increases until you can no longer support it.
So OpenTTD is somewhat self balancing. The stronger a player you are, the more traffic you generate. The weaker a player you are, the less traffic you generate.
It absolutely does come back? I've had major traffic headaches from returning trucks. If I don't build rail for trucks, my cities are usually screwed over by that.
> Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
The unique thing about car traffic vs station demand is that the overall speed depends on the quantity of cars on the road, with maximal throughput occurring before a fully occupied road. That's how you get weird effects like Braess paradox.
OpenTTD is much better at simulating public transit systems, Cities Skylines is better at simulating traffic.
Don't the trucks go into the Cargo station, and then disappear?
In OpenTTD, if you have a truck -> rail station, the truck drops items off, then have to return to Coal/Forests/whatever to pick up items again.
In Cities: Skylines, the truck hops onto the train, and then vanishes. Its been a while since I've played Skylines, maybe I'm mis-remembering?
> Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
Or maybe I'm just abusing the behavior of cargo stations too much.
The cargo-station "teleports" traffic somewhere else, and seems to magically erase return traffic. Use / abuse of cargo-stations seems key in making cities grow larger.
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EDIT: Ah, I misremembered. Seems like the return traffic does need to be accounted for. In any case, the industry -> Cargo Train terminal is really all you need to design against. With a proper industry block (or S-road / snake-like road), all industry goes to cargo train, and all of them return to industry, with no intersections potentially wrecking them.
Intra-branch connections are your mistake. Don't do that. If you're purely a tree-shape, there's no Braess paradox because each neighborhood (or housing unit) only has _one_ path to the rest of the city.
The minute you have 2, 3, or 4 different paths to reach the same house, is the minute that paradox starts to bite you in the ass. So just avoid it completely with a 100% tree-like branching behavior. One path means you have absolute control and force the little cars to go down the exact paths you want.
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Yes, roads and intersections will saturate. At that point, stop building in that neighborhood and build another branch of your tree.
I don't think I ever found a reason to do a non-tree design in the game, aside from simulating realism. But if you're just designing neighborhoods to minimize traffic and maximize population, a pure tree is the obvious approach.
IIRC, there's no residential-to-residential traffic. Its all residential-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-residential. That's why a pure tree works. Or industry-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-industry.
It was added maybe 5 years ago, but as an Open source project, advertising for this feature is pretty bad.
It turns passengers/mail into agents who will perform 2 or 3 or more hops to reach their destination.
Every passenger (or mail or manufactured good) has a unique destination in your system that you need to get it to. They are roughly balanced based on demand (two stations in large cities will generate a lot of traffic between them, but a small town will only generate a small amount of traffic to and from a large city). It makes the transport routing game way more interesting and more like the routing of passengers in more traditional Sim City type games.
That means you can form "Hub and Spokes" for passenger traffic, and the individual passengers are smart enough to figure out how to route themselves to their ultimate destinations.
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Its the most "realistic feeling" traffic mod I've found of any of these games, honestly. Even Cities Skylines seems rather basic in comparison.
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I play on Passengers/Mail as CargoDist, and then all other traffic (Coal, Wood, Cargo, Oil, etc. etc.) as default / original rules.
I also set the "symmetry" of CargoDist to 80%. That is, 20% of traffic is one-way, which seems to be correct in my opinion? I think it defaults to 100%, but it doesn't make sense for _ALL_ traffic to be bidirectional (ie: for all agents to make a return trip each time).
EDIT: I do think that a "big mod" to OpenTTD under a new name would be beneficial to the project. Something that redefines OpenTTD's sizes (each square is supposed to be a square km, but it doesn't "feel" like it. Roads aren't a square km wide after all...). I think that if each square were 10m x 10m nominal, and then for all other parts of the game to be redesigned off of that (scaling up docks, rail depos, cities, etc. etc. as appropriate to this new size), would be really all that OpenTTD needs. Plus CargoDist Passengers/Mail by default.
Personally this isn't really a negative. I've found that I only care about "agents" when the scale of the game focuses on caring about individual units. Once you get beyond that, I don't think the simulation necessarily is more interesting just because it uses unique agents. And conversely, I've never thought while playing SC4 or similar game that "This game would be better if it simulated all citizens as unique units".
Its a different game entirely compared to games like Sim City or City Skylines. I've noticed that these "individual agents" games are very "unstable". They're only designed for a limited number of agents before everything goes to crap.
As such, "individual agent" games tend to be scenarios that you play for a short time, rather than trying to play for months on the same map (like Sim City or City Skylines or OpenTTD can be).
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Tropico Boom/Busts grow too variable and uncontrollable. You'll eventually have an island-wide boom/bust collapse that probably triggers the instant-loss endgame (aka: Soviets and/or USA invades).
Ceasar 3 / Cleopatra are reasonably stable, but definitely a smaller map and designed for scenario play instead.