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OpenTTD is in fact amazing, especially considering the amount of custom content that's been created over the years. 10/10 total nerd-bait, lose weeks and months

OpenTTD is in fact amazing, especially considering the amount of custom content that's been created over the years. 10/10 total nerd-bait, lose weeks and months of free time. The problem is that the development of these things has been very ad hoc and all the defaults are based on the old Transport Tycoon gameplay, which... has a rather primitive idea of passenger/mail service. But if you turn on the right advanced options and have the right set of trains, it's a fun challenge to design networks with a mix of service classes (super express passenger lines, high capacity metros, branching suburban commuter networks, or trams/buses/ferries where you can't fit tracks) while facing capital constraints and the consequences of your previous decisions (like when your mainline runs through a major urban city center, which puts it close to all the passengers and was a super great idea, but now it can't easily be expanded to have longer platforms because there are lots of tall buildings hemming it in.) Oh, and you can balance the risk of live upgrades (potentially, crashes and death, if you do it wrong) against the revenue losses and operational complexity of shutting down the trains.

aninhumer 10y ago
I'd recommend that people who like OpenTTD try out Simutrans[0] as well. It's far less polished, and many aspects of it are much worse, but it adds a few things that OpenTTD is missing (like flexible underground/elevated routes) and feels like a much better simulation, particularly of passenger transport. After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me. Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it. [0] https://www.simutrans.com/en/ https://www.simutrans.com/en/
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  Oh, wow. I've played Simutrans, but it was a long long time ago (think "early alphas, back when raising and lowering land under bridges raised and lowered the roadbed of that one tile") and mostly forgot about it since. Will give it another look. > After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)

aninhumer 10y ago

I'd recommend that people who like OpenTTD try out Simutrans[0] as well. It's far less polished, and many aspects of it are much worse, but it adds a few things that OpenTTD is missing (like flexible underground/elevated routes) and feels like a much better simulation, particularly of passenger transport. After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me. Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it. [0] https://www.simutrans.com/en/ https://www.simutrans.com/en/

fennecfoxen 10y ago
Oh, wow. I've played Simutrans, but it was a long long time ago (think "early alphas, back when raising and lowering land under bridges raised and lowered the roadbed of that one tile") and mostly forgot about it since. Will give it another look. > After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)