Restaurant/Tavern

[Blackhawk]

Having never used a Restaurant or Tavern before I wasn't sure how much profit they should be creating. In a scenario I'm currently working on the restaurants were barely making any profit, but the Taverns were gold mines. Since I haven't use these rail yard structures ever before, I'm not sure if this is normal or just some modifier in my scenario that's created the profits of the Taverns and the restaurants were barely profitable.

As far as I know I haven't been supplying either the Taverns or Restaurants, although there are gold mines around the area, but not really that close, maybe that has something to do with the Tavern's gambling?

[nedfumpkin]

It's the gambling. The house makes very good money off taverns if they are supplied with gold. Perhaps I should tone it down a bit, but I am curious how it is getting 11,000 customers.

I'll look into it some more and run some tests to see what I come up with.

[Blackhawk]

I'm not really sure how it's got 11,000 customers either. It might have something to do with the gold, cause the other tavern is in a busier town for passengers, however, it has no gold. Where as the tavern with 11,000 passengers is in a town with a port that demands gold, so gold is accumulating there and being shipped there.

[nedfumpkin]

Then that must be it. The tavern takes .3 gold and produces .5 gold. It's only supposed to do one load per year, but that must be ignored in the station amneities.

[nedfumpkin]

Blackhawk,

Here's a copy of the taven bca file where I have changed the gold to 0.1=>0.2 This should signigicantly reduce the profit margin. See if that works better in your scenario.

I have been thinking that the way you set up your map, a player could always just put a station out in the middle of nowhere and ship gold to it and make a ton of cash. This will reduce that exploit feature. Although it is something to think about.

If the file works better then I will include it as a patch. Unzip this to the data/building types folder.

[Blackhawk]

I'll let you know how it goes after I try it. I was thinking of possibly creating an event if needed, which would reduce the revenues of hotels, taverns, and restaurants. I've never used that modifier but I'd assume it would work.

[Blackhawk]

I haven't replayed my entire scenario yet, but from just replacing the file and continuing on, it seemed like the profits were "slightly" less or stayed about constant. (The growing amount of gold and passengers in the town would explain it staying constant)

I also started the scenario from scratch and just built a tavern in the middle of the gold mines. There's 4 mines in the area, with 2 mines within the range of a large station. I just remembered that I have a 75% increase modifier on the gold being produced so that may have skewed my results some.

With the new file the tavern seemed to have a few more "customers" but profit was less. Although the gold multiplied more/faster.
The old file there were slightly fewer customers but the profit was slightly more and the gold didn't multiply as fast.

With the large amount of gold on my map I might just have to use an event to limit the revenue a tavern can create even if the tavern's profitability is changed.

EDIT: There's a picture attached, I can't seem to find the first 2 years for the "old" tavern file. I also ran a few tests at once so I can't remember when the economy changed, which I think that had an effect as well. I know I hit around 220k one year when the economy was booming with the "old" file in another test.

[nedfumpkin]

Considering the revenue is from gambling since there isn't a casino in the 1800s, I think I'm okay with what you've got since the modifier seems to be doing a lot of the increase in production.

On another note....you know it's a good day when yousearch your hard drive for something and find all these skins you made for passenger carriages from a while ago! I'm almost finished making the Canadian troop carriers. It also turns out that I'm almost finished the CNR passenger coaches too! ...and....and....it turns out that I also have cars made for CPR's The Canadian....just got to make up an FP7 skin and that's done.

[Blackhawk]

On another note....you know it's a good day when yousearch your hard drive for something and find all these skins you made for passenger carriages from a while ago! I'm almost finished making the Canadian troop carriers. It also turns out that I'm almost finished the CNR passenger coaches too! ...and....and....it turns out that I also have cars made for CPR's The Canadian....just got to make up an FP7 skin and that's done.

The joys of finding something you forgot you had on the hard drive. Large hard drives these days are great to store stuff, but I also end up forgetting what I had on there since I don't have to periodically go through to make sure there's enough room.

Back to the tavern issue, I did a single gold mine a few times rather than use my scenario map with its modifiers and numerous gold mines to see how the old versus the new tavern worked. Contrary to what I originally thought in that the new tavern was better than the old tavern, it looks like the old might be the better version to keep.

The following results are taken at the start of the year. I started in 1870.

Just the Mine
1870 - 1.0 loads
1871 - 1.3
1872 - 1.5
1873 - 1.8
1874 - 2.0

railroad office:
70 - 1.1
71 - 1.4
72 - 1.6
73 - 1.8/1.9
74 - 2.1

new tavern
70 - 1.1
71 - 2.0 (58k)
72 - 3.0 (65k)
73 - 4.0 (79k)
74 - 4.9 (81k)

new Tavern #2
70 - 1.1
71 - 2.0 58k N
72 - 3.0 69k P
73 - 4.0 79k B
74 - 4.9 79k B-P

Old Tavern #1
70 - 1.1
71 - 1.9 46k
72 - 2.7 49k
73 - 3.7 78k
74 - 4.7 80k

Old Tavern Test #2
70 - 1.1
71 - 1.9 46k
72 - 2.8 50k
73 - 3.5 55k
74 - 4.3 59k B
75 - 5.0 59k B
76 - 5.6 59k B

Old Tavern #3
70 - 1.1
71 - 1.9 46k N
72 - 2.7 49k N
73 - 3.5 49k N
74 - 4.1 53k P


I'm not sure why the results for Old Tavern #1 are so different from The other Old Tavern runs, it looks more like it was still using the new tavern.bca file. (actually it looks like the old tavern the first 2 years based off the gold multiplication and profits and then new tavern the last 2 years.)
If Old tavern Test #1 results are thrown out, I think the current tavern bca file might be the better of the two choices. Making about 60k with just 1 gold mine in a booming economy seems better than 80k. Although I sort of think both are a little high considering the cost of the building, and if there are more than one mine I'd imagine the number would go up even more.

I'm conflicted on the ability of the tavern to multiply the gold. I understand the concept that there is gambling so the gold is increased, but at the same time, it seems like gold from a mine is just another resource/mineral, but gold from the tavern is now "money" that was won gambling. Is it possible to reduce the gained gold from gambling though? It seemed like the new tavern gave doubled the newly mined gold each year (0.5 loads became 1.0). The old tavern seemed slightly better. In many cases it wouldn't really matter that the gold is being multiplied (other than extra gold to haul) but in scenarios where it is a haulage requirement, it might make the requirement easier if the gold can be multiplied with a few taverns.

In the next update to the supply game or TM manual, you might want to add a line in it telling scenario writers they might want to look and see how taverns affect their scenarios if they make gold haulage requirements (and possibly disable them for the scenario), and if they use several gold mines they may want to create an event that reduces the revenue of a tavern to an acceptable level for their scenario (particularly if multiple mines increase the profit of a tavern. I didn't test that) It seems like 1 tavern next to one gold mine makes a good investment for the cost of the building and the return, and placing several taverns next to the mine multiples the gold and they all make a profit. [In a quick test I put 2 gold mines and surrounded it with 10 or 11 new taverns. The gold went from 3.0 loads to 13.0 by the end of the year, and each tavern made at least 70k]. Is it possible for the tavern to require passengers + gold before the gold multiplies, as that would represent people actually coming to play and make it more difficult to just put several taverns around a gold mine to make some quick cash?

[nedfumpkin]

I'm thinking that booze+people+gold= more gold. Alcohol is already demanded by the tavern, but I think a good requirement would be to have it as a necessity for gambling...also passengers....let me think of how to formulate this.

[RulerofRails]

I have experimented using the Gold production event effect for a work-around for this issue. As long as you can sacrifice a territory for your gold mines, either no-access or high industry cost, and you are willing to sacrifice the Casino, this effect can be adjusted as you wish. My experiment was only in one territory, but maybe a combination of game-wide reduction combined with an increase for the gold mining territory would be the easiest way to use this on a map with many territories. Not perfect, but it's a solution to consider until this issue gets fixed properly.

[RulerofRails]

Here's my modified version of the Tavern. First up, any feedback on how it works with your gameplay style is appreciated. Further adjustments can be made if there are any issues.

TM Tavern Update July 2016.zip

(1.94 KiB) Downloaded 241 times

What you need to know:
The profit the building makes is related to the price of Gold at its location. The higher the price, the higher the profit. In Boom times this can give a maximum of around $15k in a year. The biggest difference is that the building will now in net consume Gold instead of building a big stack that is only limited in size by time from the rot factor. Building a Tavern may still be a good investment, but no-one should end up building stacks of them.

There is still a caution involving Gold production events. Increasing Gold production events will make Taverns more profitable. So, where appropriate use a territory for your Gold Mines in which you also increase the price of building these amenity buildings (Hotels, Rest., Tavern, etc.)


How to use it:
Place the file into your .../Railroad Tycoon 3/Data/BuildingTypes folder. Over-write the old file. In a folder I have included the old version so you don't have to worry about making a backup if in the future you want to switch back. There shouldn't be a reason to do this, but just in case.


The technical stuff:
A Demand Only function has been added that will consume 0.7 loads of Gold in a year. The Gold -> Gold conversion is 0.9:1.0. This is the only conversion for this industry, so it is nicely controlled by the limit of conversion which has been set at 0.3 loads per year.