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IMHO the annoying thing with (Open)TTD is the economics model. In the beginning it can be a bit though, but once you get over the initial hump you're more or l
by jabl 7y ago
IMHO the annoying thing with (Open)TTD is the economics model.
In the beginning it can be a bit though, but once you get over the initial hump you're more or less swimming in money for the rest of the game.
Secondly, it's annoying how small trains become uncompetitive later on in the game. Yes, you'll have much smaller number of these megaroutes bringing in the megabucks, but you have plenty of formerly cash flow positive routes that simply can no longer cover their running costs. Yeah, maybe that mirrors reality with rail transit, but dammit, I want to play with trains not run trucks and buses.
- untog 7y agoI struggle with both Civilization and Transport Tycoon in this way: the initial stages are so much more engaging than the management phase that comes afterwards. At least in Civilization I usually end up going to war with someone. (but to be clear, Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD is an awesome, addictive game all the same)
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoIt mirrors real life, if you believe Piketty. The more money you have, the higher RoR you get on average.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoConsensus economics would have you believe that, unlike in any video game, businesses experience diminishing marginal returns on investment.
- _jal 7y ago...A fact which has only tenuous relevance to a small part of Piketty's argument. There are critiques of the work that make some reasonable points, but this is not how they start.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoThis is a reasonable forum in which to discuss how well video games' economics align with the real world. I regret that it is a poor forum to discuss pop economics with a political agenda. If you would like resources which discuss and critique the various flaws of Piketty's work, I can refer you to the scholarly publications and the conferences associated with the American Economic Association, the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, the Cliometrics Society, and like academic organizations, as starting points. In the meantime, I will continue to use this forum to discuss the realism of video games.
- _jal 7y agoWhile I appreciate your enthusiasm to share your worldview, not to mention the unintentionally hilarious attempt at throwing shade, I'll continue to enjoy my own conversations with whomever I please, and would encourage you to take part in whatever might make you happy.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoDude, you’re in here throwing out Piketty to begin with while confusing basic concepts; I don’t think you’re the one who really gets to chide about funny attempts to inflict worldviews on people :P
- pathseeker 7y agoFirst, RoR doesn't have anything to do with engagement or even difficulty of the game. Second, Picketty's argument is not even close to "RoR increases with money", it's that return on capital outpaces economic growth, that's it. If that were to be manifested in a game, there would be no "management phase" at all. You would just buy stocks and collect returns from them faster than other players could get money from actual business ventures.
- Y_Y 7y agoAlready-Rich Tycoon
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoMaybe I meant ROI. He analyzed the average returns people get on their capital by how much capital they have. I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe it was something like: Normal people: 4.5% Wealthy people: 7.5% High net-worth individuals: 9%
- kakwa_ 7y agoYes, iirc, towards the end of Capital in the 21th century, he takes universities investment funds as an example (as they can quite large and data is public). And there is a strong correlation between the size of the fund and it's return.
- realradicalwash 7y agociv 5 can be different with the right settings: when I played on deity, half of the time it has been a struggle until a few rounds before victory (conquest).
- jle17 7y agoStellaris (a space grand strategy game) has "fallen empires" which are powerful civilizations that you should absolutely not challenge early and "crisis" which are galaxy-wide threats that happen late-game to maintain engagement as you progress (it does have a ton of micro-management though).
- adwww 7y agoStart a small railway running a tiny profit, go and have dinner, return to heaps of money to take over the world!
- exitheone 7y agoIt's actually incredibly easy to print money early on. Take a loan, build 2 airports reasonable far away from each other in the larger initial cities. setup 2-3 planes between them. Wait 15 minutes -> money printer. Money earned is based on distance and speed. Planes are incredibly lucrative in the early game.
- jagger27 7y agoThere's a bit of a gamble that your planes will crash though.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoPlanes crash from time to time but they bring back their costs in 5-6 flights, so your money making printer is only limited by the number of available passengers, not by plane reliability.
- rantwasp 7y agoyeah no. trains. lots of trains. past a certain point, only trains.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoI agree that this makes the moving-cargo game a lot less fun. I therefore take a different approach to the game to find fun. I use the 2cc trainset, turn on car speed limits, turn on Cargo Distribution, spread out the map so it's a little less dense than normal, find a nice town-growth script that I can tune such that towns only grow when you move lots of passengers and mail — then I focus on passengers and mail only, and try to connect everyone into one unified network. It thus becomes a network-capacity management game rather than an economics game. You need metros and suburban rail to collect people to your high-capacity mainline rail corridors and long-distance high-speed routes.
- rocky1138 7y agoMake a video on this. It sounds awesome.
- striking 7y agoThanks for mentioning Cargo Distribution. I always imagined and longed for a world in which something like this existed in this game, and now I get to find out it always did. A link for the curious: https://wiki.openttd.org/Passenger_and_cargo_distribution https://wiki.openttd.org/Passenger_and_cargo_distribution In short, enabling this feature allows the game to specify a specific destination for each piece of cargo. It then does a little bit of management for you in routing the cargo through whatever network you build, but it's up to you to make an efficient network with good routes that causes the cargo to flow properly. This contrasts with the vanilla game, where passengers are just a kind of cargo with no specific destination, as is everything else, and you are allowed to just send them anywhere that accepts passengers and get money for it.
- ngcazz 7y agoWow, are these scripts available anywhere?
- fennecfoxen 7y agoThe regular in-app content management service has plenty of city growth scripts. It's just a matter of finding one with reasonable rules and tweaking the parameters to be fun for you.
- hyperman1 7y agoA long time ago, I found a trick/bug/cheat in the original transport tycoon deluxe: When a new opponent appears, buy a 75% majority share. Assume their identity as a majority shareholder, loan the maximum you can and buy anything you want, e.g. a ton of ships. Then sell the shares. The game calculates the value of the shares on the opponents assets but forgets to substract the loan. Net result is your shares went up enormously so you made a huge profit, the opponent can't do anything except go broke as it has no more cash and spends a ton on the upkeep of the ships. And you have a lot of ships drifting around aimlessly providing some nice background views. As a kid I loved this evil plan, but assumed it would never fly in the real corporate world. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
- Nr7 7y agoThere was another bug in the original Transport Tycoon (not Deluxe) that gave an even easier way to make massive amounts of money. If you built a tunnel through the whole continent the price integer rolled over and instead of paying a ton of money for the you actually received billions of dollars.
- hyperman1 7y agoOh yeah, the game was amazing in what it did with limited resources, but once you started pushing it, plenty of interesting bugs surfaced. Another fun one was trains drive 1 pixel of the rails before turning around. So if an opponent has a huge profit making railway station, you place one rail of your own at the end and stop a train just before it turns around. Next time his trains come around, he crashes into yours and boom goes the money maker. And then there was the fact that a train cant collide with itself. If it is long enough you can push it through itself at a crossing. There were others, but that's all I remember.
- megablast 7y ago> Oh yeah, the game was amazing in what it did with limited resources, but once you started pushing it, plenty of interesting bugs surfaced. Haven't you just described any large application?
- realradicalwash 7y agoyou can tweak the settings to higher maintenance and higher interest rates. but yes, even then, it becomes too easy after a while. would be nice if the settings allowed it to make it even harder (extra high maintenance costs, 6% interest rates, etc)
- AaronM 7y agoThere are some good economic mods like FIRS3. Really adds challenge to the economic model.
- sharpercoder 7y agoTry the hard server. Games end in 10 years on average. You end bu getting 50M, which makes it a lot of fun to play. To play competitively, you have to manage your economy the first 5 years really tight.
- blibble 7y agoif you turn on the network maintenence cost in the options it becomes quite a bit more difficult