Cargo characteristics

[JayEff]

Has anyone compiled information about cargoes, say into an excel spreadsheet? I am thinking of things like base prices, rates of decay if they vary, year of introduction. Perhaps there are other traits too.

I am guessing that the start price is what you see in the cargo display when you are in editor mode. A lot of cargoes show zeroes, but for 1910 and earlier I get the following prices for the cargoes available in 1800:

$24 - corn
$30 - coal, cotton, grain, iron, logs, pulp, rice, wool
$34 - sugar
$44 - coffee, produce
$84 - lumber, paper
$90 - livestock
$94 - clothing
$100 - alcohol
$110 - milk
$170 - goods
$194 - meat

At later playing dates, the prices above drop about 22%. Price for toys is comparable to goods; cheese and furniture are higher than meat.

It is important to consider price differences when programming port swaps. The "raw (EDIT: demanded) material" should be cheaper than the "finished (EDIT: supplied) material". The price difference affects the rate of production and the profitability of the port (or warehouse, or factory).

[sbaros]

(Literally!)
While testing and calibrating my South Balkan base map, I noticed a universal hijacking of freight trains by waste. On certain sections, scores of waste cars occupied trains running back and forth! This practically ruined the sessions. Some time ago, I had downloaded from somewhere in the site (I no longer recall where) a suggested modification of the "waste" cargo. Looking at the cargo price reports, I realized that waste had been assigned an outrageous base price, which probably caused the problem. See both screenshots for comparison. So, I copied the base price from the original distributed version of the commodity file and waste movements fortunately dropped back to an apparently normal level.

• First of all, users should be alarmed and check out if they have let this hazard infiltrate any of their installs.
• Second of all, what was the concept of the person that distributed this modification? Does it make any sense in some weird scenario he had in mind? If yes, this should be explicitly clarified on the spot and of course include a more logical version of the cargo alongside it.
• Third of all, shouldn't we correct the problem on the spot providing a warning and a better alternative for users? (that is, if we can detect where the ****** thing is located)
• Fourth of all and most important, should we have a sort of "editor's choice" or recommendation regarding various stuff uploaded by users?
  

  

  

[Gumboots]

TBH I'm not aware of any modifications to the Waste cargo, so I don't know where it came from or what it does, or what the author intended. Someone else might know.

Fourth of all and most important, should we have a sort of "editor's choice" or recommendation regarding various stuff uploaded by users?

That's a tricky one, because some of it will be subjective.

[sbaros]

Furthermore on the nature of "waste", I think its direct conversion to a readily-usable commodity such as steel and paper is wrong. I guess recycling plants should better produce equivalents of "iron" and "pulpwood", since their output has to be processed at scrap metal smelters and paper mills respectively before the final conversion to consumer goods. Any opinions on such matters regarding the fundamental production cycles?

[Gumboots]

Well RT3 is simplified quite a lot compared to real life. I have thought that, at least for some scenarios, there could be value in having uranium mines produce yellowcake, and requiring that to be refined into uranium metal by a warehouse or another industry before it can be used by a reactor. And for any other specific scenario requirements you might want to modify things, but overall I think the default 1.05 cargo chain works quite well for what it is. It's only meant to be the generic basics that can be applied to a wide range of maps.

One of the issues with 1.06 is that although it contains some good ideas, they're often not integrated into the game that well. You can compensate to some extent by using price and production modifiers in events, and by adjusting the map's seeding. Some maps don't seem to get it quite right though, so you end up with industries that are enabled but aren't much use.

[sbaros]

In this context, a simplification that could be avoided under the standard set of cargoes and industries is far less excusable than one requiring changes in the commodities set in order to be dealt with (in this case introducing yellowcake at the sacrifice of some other cargo). The main allowable, already built-in simplification is the compression of everything we see around us into just 52 broad categories, quite acceptable in a single-person business simulation. Further simplifications/ shortcuts in the interaction between these 52, lower the challenge to an unrealistic degree and I consider them unnecessary. Or at least, they might be confined to a special simplified Tycoon edition we could spin-off sometime for children or something like that.

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Broadly speaking, I consider neither 1.06 nor Trainmaster's cargo taxonomy as perfect or universally applicable. Both of them (especially the latter) will require extensive revamping in the future, as well as regional spin-off variations (as for example an "African Trainmaster #2", "Australasian Tycoon #3" etc). Anyway, this will have to wait for a later stage of development, when the current versions' flow of existing cargoes will have been optimized. I am working on a related proposal.

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So, for the time being we have no opinions about this scrap metal/wastepaper issue from someone more familiar with the details of recycling. I'll see what info I can squeeze out of other contacts, outside the Tycoon community.

[smith121363]

I tend to agree that recycling plants should produce equivalents of "iron" and "pulpwood". Both should need to be processed at scrap metal smelters and paper mills respectively to become consumer goods. An argument could be made to add plastic to recycling plants also. But I don't know where you would send the scrap plastic to. Maybe a tool and die?

[sbaros]

For the time being, plastic regrettably seems to form a negligible and very short-lived proportion of genuine recycling, maybe not worth wasting valuable game assets to accommodate it.

[Gumboots]

Recycling plants don't produce iron and pulpwood in real life. They just sort out the waste stream so that actual paper and steel can be sent to other plants, which can then recycle it. IOW, a recycling plant in real life is basically a garbage-sorting-and-shipping plant, with outputs of steel and paper and aluminium. So in that respect the RT3 plant is doing what the real thing does.

As far as the metals go I don't think there really needs to be any change, because they have to go somewhere else to make end products anyway. Having usable paper coming out of a recycling plant is not realistic, but then neither is having pulpwood as a product, so that leaves you with using up another cargo slot if you want to make it more realistic. For a cargo that is only in a minority of maps, is it worth doing that as a default cargo? It's the sort of thing I could see being more use as a custom cargo for specific scenarios rather than as a standard cargo using up a cargo slot all the time.

[sbaros]

Understandably, all these are compromises arising from this rather inevitable limit of 52 commodities. I will name a far more important inaccuracy of my own proposal, than the name of these scrap loads. That's the cost, since this fake "iron" and "pulpwood" will necessarily inherit the price of the genuine ones, so that the manufacturing cost for the processing industry will be the same, no matter if the material is fresh or recycled. At least, there is a choice between inaccuracies, chacun a son goût.
When I find some spare time, I'll try loading a session saved from a default recycling BCA to a modified one and see what happens.

[RulerofRails]

The Recycling Plant is a prime example of multiple outputs from the same input. In my experience no usable amounts of Paper or Aluminum are ever produced. I had believed that this is due to the comparitive price of the outputs, but a quick check reveals that Steel and Aluminum are equally priced and if the Recycling Plant is in a city without a Steel/Aluminum demand the price for Paper can be actually more in a statistically important number of cases.

I tried a quick test where I dropped Steel price by 50% and the plant still produces Steel instead of the other cargoes..... Didn't spend much time, but I'm thinking there is more than we assumed at work here. Maybe the rule of profitability is only really relevant for unique recipes (aka, multiple outputs from same input don't qualify?), I didn't test enough to say this with any confidence.

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The Iron/Pulpwood idea maybe realistic.
Technical Hurdles:
1. - still uses multiple outputs from the same input
2. - price for either is below that of Waste
3. - potential usable sites for a Recycling Plant on the map would be greatly reduced*

*On the typical map there are significantly less demanding points for Iron or Pulpwood compared to Steel/Paper/Aluminum. The speed and reach of demands is relative to cargo price, aka, those fewer demand sites also spread to less of the map. Recycling Plants would no longer work automatically (without player's attention). A functioning economy that runs decently without a player's attention (by extension where the AI is operating) is an important part of this game (at least in my mind) to separate it from other similar games.

Adjustments can be made, with much fiddling and complication, but I'm going to say that it's not going to be easy to balance as a plug in and play for existing maps. There will be limitations and cases where it will operate very awkwardly. If you are making a new map, or adjusting one to compensate, then it's your call. . . .

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PS. One idea off the top of my head would be to try to simply have houses produce a tiny amount of these raw material/s in a hidden recipe. Obviously any cargoes that houses consume are off-limits, for example Paper is out. Please note, this is a RAW idea, I haven't tried this even in a simple technical feasibilty test.

sbaros, my guess is that your "bugged" pricing for Waste was included in a map, and was meant just for playing that map?

[sbaros]

Well, I don't recall any of the maps online featuring CTYs inside in their zipfiles. Would there be some other way to incorporate such a parameter elsewhere? I recall, some time last year I downloaded various supposed improvements scattered around the forum, most of which were good ideas, such as fertilizer being produced in animal farms in addition to the default chemical fertilizer industry. I've lost track...
An additional suspicion is that somebody mistakenly wrote the price in his uploaded Waste.CTY in decimal instead of hexadecimal terms, sending it sky-high.

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Moreover: If the price for Iron/Pulpwood is below that of Waste, this obviously constitutes a serious inaccuracy. Maybe I/we have to review the whole pricelist of featured items in order to detect potential major disturbances of relative values. I suspect that accurate proportionality of prices with the real-world ones may be inadvisable because it may lead to the cheapest goods almost never be transported, but at least their order should not be reversed.
Has this subject been investigated in detail by more experienced users? Do we have a "recommended pricelist" deviating from Pop Top's default one (given the obvious option of price-changing through events for simulating exceptional situations) ?
P.S. I wonder what would happen if we defined a zero or even slightly negative price of Waste (since one normally pays to get rid of it), say about minus 5$ , so that it became selectable for transport only towards favourably-located recycling facilities.

[sbaros]

RR Tycoon 3 still lacking an acceptable industrial production model after 18 years
My parallel experimantations with the South Balkan and the modified Scandinavian scenario are grinding to a halt. The way several industries and production cycles are behaving creates an overall unsatisfactory flow of the economy in terms of realism. Some striking examples are the recycling industry and the default TrainMaster farmstead communities discussed previously. Incredibly, within 18 years of existence, their setup is still far from optimal.
So, there seems no point under the current state of things in trying to elaborate and improve any geographically specific scenario until these basic industrial procedures are dealt with.
I think our development work has to be divided into 2 distinct logical stages. The 1st stage will be limited to optimizing the production cycles of commodities available, not yet replacing unwanted commodities’ slots with new ones. The main reasons for this are:

1. The way the program is structured, the main determining factor of each major RR Tycoon version -its “identity” so to say- is its commodity set. Any change in the latter practically constitutes a new Tycoon version.
2. it seems organisationally easier first to optimize the interactions/industries within the established cargo sets, and then proceed to improved cargo sets.
3. If we allow 2 degrees of freedom, i.e. modifications both in terms of commodities and factories (BCA’s), it will be significantly more chaotic and difficult to optimize either. Moreover, we will achieve standardised, compatible versions with more difficulty, if at all. Every developer will most likely end up adhering to his/her private derivative cargo sets making teamwork impossible.

I don’t know if I was misunderstood, but when I wrote about parallel scenario development for both TrainMaster and edition 1.06, I didn’t mean altering the cargo sets of either. This has to be postponed for the second development stage.
It sounds quite paradoxical, but while the cargo sets of both versions 1.06 and Trainmaster contain flaws and must be ultimately superseded by improved ones, their existing product cycles have to be optimized themselves beforehand. Otherwise we won’t have sufficient “lessons to be learned” at hand.
Notes on the testing methodologies to be employed

• Inherent dysfunctions of industries realized during testing should be dealt with at once. Continuing a trial with known faulty elements is a wasted effort
• The industrial production concepts should produce plausible/satisfactory results for a simulated test period spanning both centuries of railway development

Testing ground
I think that in order to crash-test the suitability of industries and manufacturing processes -and later of alternative cargoes- we need a territory combining all possible natural resources. In the real world, such geographical areas seem to be the Tropics. Still, the choice of a existing tropical location for a test base map will pose severe historical and geographical restrictions to the testers. Therefore, a freelance base map loosely inspired from tropical lands seems like a more advantageous testing ground. Besides, its creation and elaboration are much quicker, because no geographical and historical research is required. Also, no effort is necessary to try to give the terrain the appearance of specific places.
I am currently experimenting on freelance mapmaking utilising random grayscale heightmaps created through algorithms provided with CorelDraw

[RulerofRails]

Cargo flow is not a matter much discussed. There can be various opinions on the matter of whether something is "balanced". Variety is a good thing in my opinion, even when that means some depature from reality. But some times imbalance is extreme and in those rare cases I would call something "broken." The cases where there is no realistic chance that the game will automatically make use of one or more functions that a building/chain allows.

When talking about TM, I released the corrected Agricultural Communities because I regarded the "default" ones as broken.
Some multi-recipe conversion industries can be regarded as "broken" as well. For example the Oil Refinery which tries to convert Oil to Chemicals as well as Oil to Petroleum.
In my opinion low demands are also broken. For example this 0.05 or 0.1 of Paper demands.

I don't think the flow in TM can be salvaged. I would say that you need to do some wide-scale adjustments.

1.06 has a couple issues, for example the multi-recipe conversion Furnace. Blackhawk's fix helps a lot with balance and negates a lot the multi-recipe problem, in my opinion. But there's always more that could be done. And he didn't put out a separated "Furnace" for backward compatibility. That could easily be done in the future.

When you talk about 18 years, you must refer to 1.05. For me balance has a lot to do with the mapper. Remember that if you don't like something it can most often be ignored, for example, don't do recycling. So I have a question of what things other than the Recycling Plant you believe have "unsatisfactory flows" in 1.05? Is the issue with the recycling plant just that it doesn't actually produce much other than Steel, aka. multi-recipe conversion problem?

[sbaros]

Many of my concerns on the subject are here, of both qualitative and quantitative nature.
Remarkably, the Furnace has not posed to me any problems so far, the ceramics and ingots supplies I obtain are fair enough.
When I talk about 18 years, I refer to the entire timespan the program has been available for improvements, both by its creators and the user community. Version 1.05 alone took a lot less than 18 years to materialize and I find it incomplete anyway, it constitutes just one intermediate stage of development. I think if I don't like something I better try to improve it instead of ignoring it, especially recycling.

[sbaros]

on the nature of "waste", I think its direct conversion to a readily-usable commodity such as steel and paper is wrong. I guess recycling plants should better produce equivalents of "iron" and "pulpwood", since their output has to be processed at scrap metal smelters and paper mills respectively before the final conversion to consumer goods.

I was pleased to discover few minutes ago that Trainmaster's "Reclamation Facility" does just this. I'll probably carry it over to one of my numerous 1.06 installs for testing.

balance has a lot to do with the mapper.

This is self-evident, provided that the mapper is equipped with an optimal set of commodities and their respective processing industries. An unskilled designer may easily produce a bad piece of machinery, even with the best of components, however a skilled one cannot produce an acceptable piece of machinery if the components are faulty in themselves. So, cargo/industry optimisation precedes map making (apart from experimental map making of course).
Practically none of the existing maps will make sense, until we establish a satisfactory cargo/industries system.