Details on buildings?

[low_grade]

Just wondering if any hex hackers out there would like to share their insights on all the normally hidden details of buildings. Specifically I'm curious to know what the passenger demand/produce of all the city support buildings are, and beyond that I don't even know what to ask, because it's hidden! Do industries supply/demand passengers or mail? I don't have a clue.

If anybody has a nice spreadsheet tabulation of this it would be great to share around with us scenario builders and post to the site!

Thanks!

[low_grade]

Okay, think this one is pretty obvious now from Pjay's file.

Just to repeat what it says here, passenger demand/produce for various city support structures are as follows:

Commercial = 0.5 (no matter what size...)
Hotel, Hospital and Museum = 2 (very interesting about the hotel! not only does it generate income, it also generates its own passengers! So indirectly they may be good to build even in small towns or at the end of the line, just to increase passengers. Maybe even build a half dozen of them in the same city if you like!)
Church, Cinema and Dept Store = 3
Stadium = 5

and for mail Commercial demands/produces 2

Was the hospital a recent addition to the game? because it wasn't in the file but when I checked in the hexeditor it came up as you see above.

It also appears now that the school house is just clutter.

So now if I'm going to try to create a scenario which focuses more on passenger hauling I know what to build into my cities.

[low_grade]

Just going to bring this back from the dead for the new guys here who've been discussing hotels and passenger traffic...

Hotels each produce/demand 2 of their own passengers per year, so building 8 in a town is like having 4 more large houses... so yeah, that is going to increase your passenger traffic, and so your revenue from hotels, restaurants, and taverns. Double win. But is it worth the $100K investment to begin with for each additional 2 passengers supply/demand per year?

[RulerofRails]

Interesting stuff, thanks for bringing it back.

Building Hotels obviously makes some money. The question is how much in ROI terms. There are many factors, but in the golden age of railways it can be a very good strategy. Overall, I think it is safe to say that if set up with the right train routes to actually haul those extra passengers ROI will definitely beat received interest on spare cash in almost every scenario. So they are worth building. Observation is required to see how the passengers are behaving on a map and to calculate if it is better than the nominal 10% that you get from normal industry buying. Depends on the map. I like to build a test Hotel in a large city mid-game and seeing how that particular map and my hauling is dealing with passengers. If it's a good return I will make the investment earlier. Sometimes I am lazy and fishing for the bigger fish so that doesn't always happen.

Obviously there is a point of too much, but the more Hotels you build the more passengers you have. However, this will also wear down the price of hauling them. I haven't pushed this strategy to the extreme and maybe I will try sometime.

[Gumboots]

I haven't tried pushing this to the extreme either. However I have found that one hotel and restaurant in all towns that are two stars or bigger can work very well. An example is the Chile map. If you put those hotels and restaurants in the southern plains towns (Valparaiso to Peurto Montt) as soon as the strike breaks, within a couple of years the average ROI on hotels and restaurants will be close to 30%. This is pretty good. It has to be in all significant towns though. Seems that if you only put then in one or two towns the profits aren't that great.

[Hawk]

This is an interesting discussion.
The way I've always used hotels and restaurants (I rarely use taverns. I have not found them profitable enough to fool with) was: Say I have a route that covers 5 towns. A, B, C, D, E. I set a passenger train to run from A>B>C>B>A and another train that runs from C>D>E>D>C.
I generally only place a hotel and restaurant in C. To me, that's where the passengers going from A or B to D or E would get off one train, got to the restaurant and hotel and wait on the next train.
I just never figured it was worth while to place those buildings in the other towns since it's the same train running back and forth.

The above is a simple layout explanation, of course, but you get the idea.

[Gumboots]

I've also found that taverns don't seem to be worth it. Post offices can be, just because of the extra mail you can haul, but the only time I've seen taverns do really well was in my Royal Tour map, which has them given a massive profit boost for traditional/historical/cultural accuracy.

From what I can gather, the profits from hotels and restaurants seem to be largely related to the size of the town, and to how many other towns are connected to it. This sorta means they usually end up doing best in the middle of a network.

[Hawk]

Post offices is another building I rarely use, but I guess they do have their purpose and can help with the overall CBV if you're hauling a lot of mail.

[Gumboots]

Well the thing is they help you haul a lot of mail, which you wouldn't be hauling without them. They can be really useful on widely spaced maps without a lot of other cargo. Doesn't matter so much if there's already heaps of stuff, with closely spaced towns that give fast turnaround anyway. In that situation the extra mail holding time isn't really needed.

[low_grade]

When I'm playing a tough scenario, I hold off on hotels a little, but as soon as I have a network of 10-12 cities, I'll start dropping hotels in all the connection cities (not the tail end cities) depending on overall passenger generation density (are there a lot of spread out half star cities and a few two stars in between? probably not worth any hotels, not for a while anyway.) The worst of them do 5k or 10k for a while but as your network develops and cities grow, even they'll be in the 15k-20k range eventually. Restaurants need to be at least 1.5 star connection city or 2 star tail end. Mail I hold off on a lot, because I'm not sure what benefit I'm getting for... 40k?

So, mail price degrades over time, and post offices halve the rate of degradation? Or, mail price doesn't degrade, but will only be available for delivery for 6 months or something, but with a post office you'll have a year to hold on to it? How does a post office work, exactly?

And I never use a customs house... should I ever?

[Gumboots]

Post offices double the holding time for any mail. In some situations that can effectively mean that you haul twice as much mail. If one load of mail is worth $20k (for example) and if that one load of mail is a load you wouldn't have been able to haul if the post office hadn't held it there long enough, then your ROI for that post office is 50% for that year. That's the benefit. Post offices work best in widely separated towns of reasonable size, since they will generate a fair bit of mail and will need it held as long as possible.

Taking Chile as an example, there's probably not much point in putting post offices in the southern plains, but they could be useful on the north coast or over in Argentina.

I have no idea what a customs house is supposed to do either. Does anyone know?

[nedfumpkin]

The customs house was a hold over from RT2 where its purpose was to reduce the amount of time trains spent crossing borders. It was never put into use in RT3. It was made available in 1.06, but didn't actually function as intended, and only really offered a new category of building.

In TM this was used for the Railyard Structures. This way they could be turned on and off. I'm not sure how it is being used in 1.06.

The post office serves to hold mail longer. I tend to only use it when I have a goal that involves express cargo. In TM the post office was changed to be a municipal building and the Post Office was changed to be a Railroad Office. The post office generates mail and consumes mail and paper. The Railroad Office holds mail, and gold while consuming paper. The idea being that post offices operated independently of railroads, and the Railroad Offce served as the rr link to the post office. Just seemed to make more sense, and seems to work better.

I generally never build hotels, restaurants or taverns unless I am on a modern map with large cities, but even then... I find that the money you spend investing on them is never really worth it when you could be upgrading or building other industries. So I really only use them in scenarios that don't allow industry building.