Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

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Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

October 13, 2009, 02:42:58 pm

Sorry if this information is somewhere, but I've had a good dig around the forum with no success so I'm just going to ask

I'm having a more detailed look at balancing for pak128.Britain and I'm trying to estimate the effects of infrastructure costs and purchase costs on the balancing. What I want to know is:

1) Does the "per month" maintenance cost of track, depots, stations, signals etc increase with "bits per month" or is it a constant?
2) Do purchase costs of vehicles and infrastructure increase with "bits per month" or are they constant?
3) How is a convoy's speed related to the number of tiles per month? (i.e. 100km/h is equivalent to how many tiles per month, ****uming a constant speed?)

Basicly I'm trying to calculate returns on investment, which means calculating profit per month. I'm just worried that some costs don't vary with bits per month, so if you increase bits per month, you make the game easier... Is this right? Is this a loophole that needs closing?

PS if other pak-maintainers think I'm barking up the wrong tree, I'd love to know how they did it. Especially how they decided how to price the purchase and maintenance costs of infrastructure. I'm trying to get it so that infrastructure should be limited to only what is appropriate, and that over-engineered solutions aren't financially viable...

PPS Thinking about it further, it would be great if there was an option to adjust costs in game, so having a global factor for vehicle purchase costs, vehicle running costs, infrastructure maintenance costs, and infrastructure purchase costs. This would (a) help the trial and error process of balancing paks without changing 10001 dat files and (b) allow people to increase / decrease difficulty levels as they desired (e.g. I've already had conflicting reports of "too easy" and "too hard" for pak128.Britain). If this was linked to bits_per_month then the effect of making things easier with larger bits_per_month described above could also be removed.

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #1 – October 13, 2009, 03:20:08 pm

You do not need to bother about bits_per_month:

1) The mainenance increase with bits_per_month.
2) Therefore the vehicle costs (and all other fix costs) are the same.
3) Somebody fitted that, maybe in the old forum. I never bothered.

I usually use only the money you can make with a train (with the best p****enger car at full length) and take 10% of that as running cost. More than 20% is very difficult to obtain in realistic nets. YOu can change the revenue by using the geginner mode and adjust the factor accordingly.

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #2 – October 13, 2009, 06:36:55 pm

1+2) Instead of thinking in game months & years, think in game ticks. All the per-time-interval aspects are handled correctly with variable length, so that leaves you with a model of time where things always stay the same.

3) Ask Zeno. He knows too much about that, I am sure his explanations will make you look like this:

The calculations are (imho) pretty insane. But they work.

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #3 – October 14, 2009, 08:15:48 am

Thanks for the explanation. If I understand correctly:

1) all per-month costs scale with bits per month. That's good.
2) one-off costs don't. So with a really high bits per month you can repay your super-expensive all-singing-all-dancing train purchase in 3 weeks, but with a really low bits per month it will take 100 years (exaggerate to make a point). Is there not a case for scaling this with bits per month (i.e. so in identical saves with different bits per month it takes the same number of game years to repay a loco or track investment?)
3) Insane calculations. sounds good to me

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #4 – October 14, 2009, 11:15:45 am

With both settings it takes the same time for the player in front of the screen, which is the most important point.The balance after two hours of playing will be the same, and thus the amount of construction possible during that time. THe only difference would be the date ingame.

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #5 – October 18, 2010, 05:21:29 pm

Did you ever figure out #3? Was just searching the forums to answer this question.

Re: Purchase costs, maintenance costs, speed and bits per month

Reply #6 – October 23, 2010, 03:54:26 pm

I had to solve this problem when creating some features on Simutrans-Experimental about a year ago; I cannot remember the answer now, but I think that it is in the forum archive somewhere.