This one could get interesting. I finally found the critical piece of code to tweak to permit it, and discovered why it's disabled.
The game clamps shipping values to zero if they go negative. This means one can ship the same product back and forth, making a profit on every other leg.
Probable fix: add support for negative shipping values. May still be a problem if one destroys a train in mid-shipment. Not sure how much work is involved.
Unless the product gets consumed instantly, ship-at-a-loss makes it much easier to cheat on 'deliver X loads to Y' scenarios, because one can pick up the good and redeliver it to the same station.
Possible fix: count shipped-in goods minus shipped-out goods. Still breaks existing scenarios.
I should have a test patch out soon for those of you who'd like to play with it. Good news is that it should be pretty straightforward to enable ship-at-a-loss for custom consists only.
Hmm...I had wondered if the game supported negative shipping values. Sounds like the "ship at a loss" patch ought to be interesting!
I experienced an interesting semi-related feature while playing Arop's "Florida" map. Jacksonville produced weapons/ammo at a pretty low price. Miami demanded both cargoes, and the price differential was large...large enough that both cargoes started flowing down the Atlantic coast of the state.
The interesting thing was, some of the coastal stations along the way "captured" the weapons/ammo as they were flowing southward...and the price at those stations was LESS than it was at Jacksonville. Needless to say, I began running a few trains from those coastal stations down to Miami, and it's working out pretty well. God bless the Atlantic ocean! :)
Experimental ship-at-a-loss patch is out; check the 1.06 sticky for info, and get the FTP info from the welcome thread. I haven't fixed zero-clamping or limited it to custom consists yet. Enjoy!
1.06 a01 limits ship-at-a-loss to custom consists. Weirdness: the cargo price at the source station instantly drops to match the target station as soon as the train sets out with a lossy cargo. I'm wondering if this might have something to do with the zero-clamping behavior, as it certainly blocks a loss.
I tried this out last night and it does have some weird effects. Once you've got a cargo in place - on automatic, not custom consist - it seems to keep going back and forth with the same stuff, whatever the prices of other things.
In other words, it seems to make ship-at-a-loss the default mode whereas really it ought to be a conscious choice by the player for one or two trips, probably, so I think if you can make it work ONLY on custom consist it would be much better.
I was hoping to use this feature to undermine the demand of your opponents (AI, can't do multiplayer) to make their industries unprofitable but haven't had the time to test this out properly yet.
Have you noticed this feature only affects the human player? As far as I can see, all the AI trains are still running with profitable cargoes. Which is as it should be, of course. - but I'd like MINE to have some profitable cargoes as well!!!!
Tried A01 against Sink Hole Island, and didn't see any problems with auto consists. Do you have a game save file you could upload? Also, could you check the version in the lower left corner of the main menu screen, and let me know if it's A00 or A01? Thanks in advance.
Sorry, I think I had an earlier version. I uploaded the one that's on the ftp now and it works fine.
Interesting effects, though - not what I'd expected. I thought I could satisfy the demand with loss-making cargoes, so there wouldn't be any demand for the opposition. Doesn't work that way!
I had three stations - one demand (A), my supply (B) and AI's supply (C). I ran full train loads from B to A at a loss. This equalised the price at A and B, but actually caused the price to drop at C. Meanwhile, though there was no demand for B's cargo, there was a higher demand for cargo at the lower price from C. Even though the stockpile at A was just getting bigger with each trainload.
I'm going to run through a couple of games to see what effect it has on the industry profits on both the demand and the supply side.
One consequence of "ship at a loss" is that it will ship at a loss even if you don't expect (or want) it to. Case in point: I often set up custom consists to load the cargoes I want to ship, and then if there's room, add a couple of "any cargo" cars to maximize profits. For instance I want to ship some logs, so I set the custom consist to contain 3 cars of logs and two cars of "any cargo". I set the minimum loads slider to three (so that at least one car of logs will be loaded) and let her rip. This is fine if you aren't using the ship at a loss patch. If you are, watch out, because those "any cargo" cars will load cargoes that ship at a loss if there's nothing around to ship for profit.
Is there any way to designate particular consists to "ship at a loss" while others remain their usual "ship only at a profit" status, or is an all or nothing thing.
Fixed. Next release of the code will support lossy shipments only for non-any cars in custom consists... and if you sorted out the negatives in that, you've just experienced what debugging it was like.
Sorry, no new alpha... too close to the beta release.
