Coal Delivery = Money Pit

February 10, 2009, 10:29:07 pm

Hi all! So, I downloaded Simutrans 101 with pak64 just the other day and I'm having a great time beating my head against it. I started on a small map and quickly went bankrupt trying to deliver p****engers to factories. (Because I ****umed factories needed p****engers to function. But I guess they use forest animals for labor or something?) So, I went and looked at some tutorials, started over, and this time I am actually surviving. But I'm having a lot of trouble.

First of all, a lot of the tutorials and quick-start guides suggest starting with providing coal to a coal power plant. What they don't say is that coal deliveries seem to make very little money, if they don't actually rapidly empty your bank account. I have figured out that longer trains with full loads are more efficient, and have managed to push two coal-delivering routes into the black, but this comes at the cost of using very long, slow trains and very large stations. (Ten map squares right now.) Not only are these huge stations and long trains really cumbersome, and making it hard to try and expand my system, but I only think they're gonna work on relatively short runs. There is an Iron Foundry I want to get working which is at least twice as far away as my current longest coal delivery route, and I can't see any way moving coal to it isn't going to be a huge drain on my finances. So I'm wondering, is there a better way to deliver coal?

Secondly, it took me a lot longer to figure out that a lot of the profit from delivering coal to power plants comes from distributing power. (I'm not sure how much yet.) None of the tutorials mention this! They just tell you to deliver the coal. I'm having trouble figuring out power delivery, though. Right now I have two oil pumps, each with their own transformer, connected via branching power lines to a single transformer at the power plant. What's weird is that the power supply keeps flipping on and off, and the production rates for the pumps are constantly going up and down- and I literally mean constantly. If I open up the oil pump detail box, the numbers never stop moving. I thought this might be related to low coal at the power plant, so I tried making sure it had larger reserves, but it didn't help. I tried providing two and then three transformers at the plant, since it says somewhere or other that more transformers produce more power, but that didn't help either. The only thing I can think of is that the branching power lines are the problem, but I haven't gone back and made a direct line to each pump yet. There are also a lot of numbers like "available power" in the various detail boxes that make no sense to me. The total power says something like 5000 but the available power is only 80-something for some reason.

So, my questions in brief:

1. Are huge slow trains really the way to go when delivering coal? Is it this way for most factory goods?

2. How do I connect my factories to the power plant so that the supply of power is steady?

Thank-you in advance to anyone who can help me with this, and also to the nice people who created this game and made it available.

Re: Coal Delivery = Money Pit

Reply #1 – February 10, 2009, 10:42:09 pm

The problem is that most of those tutorials are unfourtunately made for pak128, which has much higher prices for coals. For pak64 (and for pak128) oil is much more profitable; moreover it gets converted to more expensive to transport goods too. The easiest chain would be Oilrig->refinery->filling station for both.

A power plant can only give a certain amount of power. It should be enough to supply factories with their production about four times the power plant production level before connection the transformer. However, a power plant will only produce power when has not run out of fuel/coal; click n the transformer. If it say like 99% poeer things are ok (a little jitter is ok for fast forward). Building more than one transformer will just drain the power plant faster.

P****enger games are also not impossible. Maybe just use freeplay and never went bankrupt for starters.