4 corner interconnection with Air+Train+Bus

October 03, 2010, 07:20:46 pm

First after upgrading to simutrans 102 (dunno if it's the last v still) I've played the best Simutrans game I ever had, city were growing right, vehicle timeline is very good and everything is working flawlessy and in growing the network (both p****enger and goods, no mail) with city and industry growth everything has happened in the most enjoyable way I could imagine, maybe it's luck maybe it's the map that worked for me but for sure it's all the work the developer put in it, thank you.

Now on with the game, a strategic question, here's the filesavehttp://www.mediafire.com/?7bt8e1770vp8cac too big for the forum, in the middle of the process of big expansion, this is the screenshot of the map

To the upper left there are some connected cities and the Pollingfield Airport (A), cities interconnected with train and cities covered by bus.
To the lower right there is a similar situation of Bus+Train that leads to Malichester Airport (B).
Everything is close to full but not crowded except maybe some few small are that needs tweaking and adjusting, but p****enger flow on all major routes and station is very equilibrated and profitable, lots of happy p****enger.
Industry so happened to appears on map so that the train+ship chain has a lot of both way trip loaded with goods

, as you might imagine profit are going high, the game is 8 yo and I never had such a good financial situation, except from when I accidentally founded a new city few ingame years ago and went bankrupt for a year.

Now on the upper RIGHT corner there were some cities that were left unconnected so I choose to build a Third Airport (C) and connect the remaining cities with Train+Bus to this imaginary geographical focal point, where there is no city but where I plan to found one to strengthen the flow (this time with money earned from profit without going bankrupt).
I built this third set of connection and the third airport without founding the city and the flow of p****enger now is changing.

Before building Airport C I had a strong and constant both way flow between Airport A and B.
After Building C and adding the lines C<->A and C<->B P****enger are starting to flow both ways on route C-A and C-B and are quickly leaving the existing strong connection A-B.
Noticeably A and C are near and both are distant from B but C is a little closer to B than A is, considering also that C destination hold considerably less combined p****enger level than A or B and most p****enger use C airport only as a stop it seems that p****enger prefer to make more trips on shorter distant than a single long one.

So now I'm starting to rethink the way I initially thought the map and I'm considering the growth that happened near D (I helped that area by adding the headquarter to a small outward city) and I'm starting to think to cut that part out of the train connection to the B airport and give it one of it's own, a fourth airport roughly at D.

E it's a city that if I cut D destination from the B rail network I could connect only to C in order to equilibrate the amount of destination across the four local point, one for each map angle.
E is currently connected to C with a short train line and with a long one to B

If I go for this four angle approach I have no idea how to figure out what the best arrangement for profit and network load is.
One approach could be to build a fifth airport in the middle of the map (at sea) and connect all four corners airport to it so that I would always have both way load for the vehicles and I should force p****enger flow so that with a lot of air lines I could adjust the number of airplanes precisely to the need of the growing corners (ie C and D)

another approach could be to build a romboid set of connection inbetween all four corner airport, this immediately looks like a more complicated approach and possibly less manageable but I really have no idea, suggestion?

Re: 4 corner interconnection with Air+Train+Bus

Reply #1 – October 03, 2010, 09:25:53 pm

P****engers will take the journey with the least transfers. If the number of transfers of two routes is equal then one of these routes is chosen. The distance of the route is never taken into account.

So

Quote

it seems that p****enger prefer to make more trips on shorter distant than a single long one

is definitely not true.