Base cargo price vs. In-game price

[RulerofRails]

So, in my efforts to do a little more testing on avoiding price breakouts, I tried to double the base cargo prices in the .cty files and then use a -50% event to bring prices back to normal. Turns out this doesn't work, because the game has an interesting way of calculating In-game price. I don't know much about it yet, but this thread is for the discussion of such, data that people collect, etc. to hopefully understand what is involved in adjusting base prices to get new in-game prices.

To start, here's some data I collect for the Goods cargo in 1.05. I haven't ruled out enough factors to guuarantee that all cargoes behave this way. Basically, does for example Livestock demand at a Meat Packing Plant behave the same way. This data was gathered from a map that I had loaded fresh. I didn't run the game. For the lower prices the game may have to run a bit longer than the 3 year pre-game simulation to reach full demand strength.

In-game prices are unaffected by difficulty level. They are affected by economic level, but the default start game is at normal economic level so that's what we see here. All prices are in 1,000s.

I did notice strange things going on off-shore with the low-end prices if ports were involved (virtually all default and Coast to Coast maps have ports). Even at the lowest value of $1,000, I saw an off-shore price of $150 on existing maps. Maybe this is an artificat that was created while the map was being made. This isn't super interesting to me at this point. but it could be investigated more of course.

The most interesting thing I saw here was that there are specific jumps at particular values of base price. Those are highlighted in bold. So finally we found something that isn't coded completely simply.

[undertoad]

Good research. But I'm a bit confused by your table. I thought this was a test setup where you doubled the prices (correctly, obviously, as you wrote the values explicitly into the .cty files), and then reduced them at the start of the game with a -50% event? In your table the in-game price seems to be be (roughly) centered around 200% of the base price rather than 50%.

Maybe I've misunderstood.

[RulerofRails]

I sort of took the discussion about the double base prices coupled with a -50% event back to the "Altered Prices Thread":
viewtopic.php?p=41234#p41234. That's more recent at this point.

The table is useful for far more than that specific idea. No price modification events were used when making the table.

Example of one way the table can be used:
Suppose we want to reduce the maximum In-game price of Goods to $300 (currently the max. for Goods is $330) In the Middle Column we see $298 which is close enough. So then we see that we need to use a base price of $160,000 (remember that all these values are 1,000s) in the file.

That's a simple example, but using some maths enables a fairly accurate approximation of most practical values.