RulerofRails wrote:I took a look at WP&Ps planner. It's pretty, and the "averaged" curves look good. Those extra heavy freight cars are a bit strange though. If 2 or 3 cars are represented in an era, why only apply that to some of them?
It was a uglier until I revamped it a bit, so I could look at it long enough to to digest the data.
AFAIK his reasoning on the extra heavy cars was partly to get some freight train weights up towards what they are in real life, and partly to give a greater range of engine choices over the whole roster. The latter is something people generally seem to want, even if they don't care so much about the former. Personally I like the general idea of a greater gap between express and freight largely because it would finally allow dedicated express to be run on grades. At the moment, most dedicated express locos have such abysmal performance on grades that I rarely use them at all unless the terrain is
really flat.
Most people use auto consists extensively which is really mixed consists. In my experience it's a difficult task without a haul everything except option to get a seperation in cargoes that a train will haul. New maps could be designed for this and some such as SCBC (for 1.05) are not bad.
SCBC?
Even though I like to experiment, I have never played a whole game with custom consists even in TM. Auto consist is just too useful for delivering consumer cargo to the areas of highest demand stress free. 1.06 haul-at-a-loss, while great for industry supply routes, destroys much of a mixed custom consists ability to remotely mimic the auto feature. My motto is not to compete with what the game is good at. I would think seriously about limiting the maximum spread between the freight cargo weights to a sensible figure. If mainly increasing the way WP&P proposes I would suggest trying to limit same era differences to maybe 25%.
I'm inclined to agree here. Mixed consists definitely are very useful. I'd be reluctant to turn RT3 into a game that's all about micromanaging consists. TBH I find 1.06's haul at a loss ability to be of limited use. I think that really, the same time and effort would have been better spent coding haul-anything-but instead (assuming that was possible).
I'm not currently sure how limited the spread of freight weights should be, but the spreadsheet column for 2005 goes from 65 tons (livestock) to 300 tons (grain), which is quite a large range. This would need testing, but I simply cannot see hauling grain to be profitable at that weight, especially if the route has heavy grades.
Now this could be a good thing in some scenarios. For instance, if you were doing a low carbon scenario like the one I was thinking of a while back, making coal haulage uneconomical purely by weight could be useful. In fact, custom per-scenario .car files that alter weights could be a useful trick for scenario authors if they want greater range of scripting.
OTOH, having grain at 300 tons and rice at 275 tons will probably mean that you simply won't haul them at all, and they're generally the sort of thing you'd want to be hauling in any scenario that has them, so I'm not convinced they should be at those weights by default for all scenarios.
I'm going to throw something else out there: consider a much lower maximum around 100 tons. The important thing is the relationship between trains hauling that weight. So what if a heavy freight car "weighs" 300 or 100 tons, no one sees that figure.
Pros (I can think of right now):
- - locomotive setting changes, especially weights, pulling power and free weight are going to be more noticeable at the tight end of the scale
- reliability and fuel cost ratings can be kept in the mid portion of the range where they look good (most are at or above Average and if neccesary a general bump down a level or two for fuel wouldn't be disruptive) giving the scenario creator better options to increase or decrease these settings.
- A 8 car Big Boy in 1950 (620+640=1260 tons) will burn 150k+ of fuel and 30k new on a decent years work (2 trips at 120k each, a decent average profit IMO).
Best case: profit = 240k-180k = 60k. A poor showing.
- Assuming an average engine weight of 300 tons. An engine with average fuel and reliability stats will perform the same way with WP&Ps average weight in 1950 and the problem will just get rapidly worse after that.
- The game bug which affects all cargo price events restricts a per-scenario modification of prices which would be necessary before any profit could really be made above the 1260 ton level of the Big Boy.
Good points. By already having some large and uneconomical locos, we've pretty much established the overall train weights above which haulage becomes uneconomical. So really we should be starting there and working backwards, although loco and tender stats tweaks can increase the viable range to some extent.
Come to think of it, this may be a good way of shortening the testing process. It's easier to adjust the weight for one locomotive file than for all the cargo files. We could use this for narrowing down the range of freight weights, since it's the overall train weight that matters.
Cons
- - Passenger balance might be problematic, car and train weight can be cut very low, but fuel costs and reliability may look unnatural. But, passenger revenues can be adjusted more successfully per scenario.
I think we can work around any passenger balance problems. Same for the visible stats for fuel and reliability. TBH I think the defaults for those often don't make sense anyway.
Mixed engines need an economic reason to discouraging their use for passenger routes. Maybe they need to "technically" be a bit heavier than the mountain loving freights in order to keep their fuel costs at speed up to a level where they can't compete economically with the express, but still giving a slight benefit against using slow freights.
This is going to be the really tricky part, IMO.
Now, this is a big question, what type of grades are considered mountainous? With the awesome custom maps and good laying technique, 4% sustained grades are quite easy. But, "flat" stretches may have some 2% stretches. This gives a narrow range for engines to excel in climbing abilities, unless as I said above fuel costs is a big factor in keeping them out of the mountains.
Well, it's pretty easy to open a map in the editor and apply one of the preset overall height modifiers. So if quick and easy changes to overall grades become desirable it's not hard to arrange. My 2c is that "mountainous" is 5% and upwards with the way the roster is set at the moment. That's only a matter of loco pulling power stats though. You could easily make 1% "mountainous" by changing the loco stats. Some of them already have trouble with1% grades anyway.
I suppose the real catch here is that, AFAIK, the game engine does grades in steps. It only allows integer values for grades, so the greater the range of integer values in the map's grades, the greater the scope for differentiating locos. Pulling power isn't limited to integers so is more flexible.
Another big question, before any serious testing should begin, what economic levels for fuel cost are desired, for minimum, maximum, and average? How much spread should be allowed?
Fuel cost in dollars, or do you mean the visible economy rating? I don't think the latter is too much of a worry since it's only relative to other locos.
Once some parameters are determined, some experimentation and testing should be able to come up with a fairly good relationship graph that compares potential adjustments versus economic performance, to come up with a set of values and a general guide for settings on any future locos or personal adjustments that will fit in with the other locos while fulfilling their express/mixed/mountain role.
Yup.
PS: Hey I just had another thought. The visible ratings for fuel, etc are only text in the language file (Data/Language/RT3.lng). Those are very simple to change if we decide we want them to say something else. There's no hex editing involved. It's just plain text.
