IMHO the annoying thing with (Open)TTD is the economics model.
In the beginning it can be a bit though, but once you get over the initial hump you're more or less swimming in money for the rest of the game.
Secondly, it's annoying how small trains become uncompetitive later on in the game. Yes, you'll have much smaller number of these megaroutes bringing in the megabucks, but you have plenty of formerly cash flow positive routes that simply can no longer cover their running costs. Yeah, maybe that mirrors reality with rail transit, but dammit, I want to play with trains not run trucks and buses.
A long time ago, I found a trick/bug/cheat in the original transport tycoon deluxe: When a new opponent appears, buy a 75% majority share. Assume their identity as a majority shareholder, loan the maximum you can and buy anything you want, e.g. a ton of ships. Then sell the shares. The game calculates the value of the shares on the opponents assets but forgets to substract the loan.
Net result is your shares went up enormously so you made a huge profit, the opponent can't do anything except go broke as it has no more cash and spends a ton on the upkeep of the ships. And you have a lot of ships drifting around aimlessly providing some nice background views.
As a kid I loved this evil plan, but assumed it would never fly in the real corporate world. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
There was another bug in the original Transport Tycoon (not Deluxe) that gave an even easier way to make massive amounts of money. If you built a tunnel through the whole continent the price integer rolled over and instead of paying a ton of money for the you actually received billions of dollars.
Oh yeah, the game was amazing in what it did with limited resources, but once you started pushing it, plenty of interesting bugs surfaced.
Another fun one was trains drive 1 pixel of the rails before turning around. So if an opponent has a huge profit making railway station, you place one rail of your own at the end and stop a train just before it turns around. Next time his trains come around, he crashes into yours and boom goes the money maker.
And then there was the fact that a train cant collide with itself. If it is long enough you can push it through itself at a crossing.
I remember that I like bully the AI when is slowly building a railway or road. I think that I like to do, was putting a depot with a cheap train and a railway crossing his road. So I stop the train on the road and it become blocked. or make the train to collide the bus/truck...
What I used to do with the AI is when it starts running a bus route you can lead the buses into your own road, then cut it off. Then the buses will just drive around in a circle forever, constantly breaking down because they never get to the depot.
In my experience, large applications are amazing in what they fail to accomplish with nearly unlimited resources, and most of their bugs are boring ;-)
In this earlier post I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:
And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.
You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.
There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.
So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia [2] to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!
It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
[...]
[2]
Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
Indeed, I had friends who used it (I never did), from what I recall (this was over 20 years ago), the tunnel could not be removed and in some cases would get in the way of some construction later.
From memory you didn't even need to force them to borrow money, they always did. As soon as they launched with the $200,000 value buy 75%. They would within minutes borrow a million and then you sell your shares turning $175,000 into $750,000.
I always would buy up 75% of their stock. Never thought to take it as far as you did, though—I just cashed in on the inevitable rise in value over time (unless they built an impossible or unprofitable route to start, in which case I quickly cut my [relatively small] losses and sold).
I agree that this makes the moving-cargo game a lot less fun.
I therefore take a different approach to the game to find fun. I use the 2cc trainset, turn on car speed limits, turn on Cargo Distribution, spread out the map so it's a little less dense than normal, find a nice town-growth script that I can tune such that towns only grow when you move lots of passengers and mail — then I focus on passengers and mail only, and try to connect everyone into one unified network.
It thus becomes a network-capacity management game rather than an economics game. You need metros and suburban rail to collect people to your high-capacity mainline rail corridors and long-distance high-speed routes.
Thanks for mentioning Cargo Distribution. I always imagined and longed for a world in which something like this existed in this game, and now I get to find out it always did.
In short, enabling this feature allows the game to specify a specific destination for each piece of cargo. It then does a little bit of management for you in routing the cargo through whatever network you build, but it's up to you to make an efficient network with good routes that causes the cargo to flow properly.
This contrasts with the vanilla game, where passengers are just a kind of cargo with no specific destination, as is everything else, and you are allowed to just send them anywhere that accepts passengers and get money for it.
You don't even need any mods for that really. Sure after a while it spices things up, but that's basically how I played that game ever since. Build the most awesome network ever and optimize it more and more.
Sure it would be a lot easier to distribute your ore to different steel mills, but it's much more fun to optimize the crap out of that one huge station at a single mill. Same for factories. And the slowly connect every town in the game to the same network until complete chaos ensues.
The regular in-app content management service has plenty of city growth scripts. It's just a matter of finding one with reasonable rules and tweaking the parameters to be fun for you.
I struggle with both Civilization and Transport Tycoon in this way: the initial stages are so much more engaging than the management phase that comes afterwards. At least in Civilization I usually end up going to war with someone.
(but to be clear, Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD is an awesome, addictive game all the same)
Stellaris (a space grand strategy game) has "fallen empires" which are powerful civilizations that you should absolutely not challenge early and "crisis" which are galaxy-wide threats that happen late-game to maintain engagement as you progress (it does have a ton of micro-management though).
First, RoR doesn't have anything to do with engagement or even difficulty of the game. Second, Picketty's argument is not even close to "RoR increases with money", it's that return on capital outpaces economic growth, that's it.
If that were to be manifested in a game, there would be no "management phase" at all. You would just buy stocks and collect returns from them faster than other players could get money from actual business ventures.
Yes, iirc, towards the end of Capital in the 21th century, he takes universities investment funds as an example (as they can quite large and data is public). And there is a strong correlation between the size of the fund and it's return.
This is a reasonable forum in which to discuss how well video games' economics align with the real world.
I regret that it is a poor forum to discuss pop economics with a political agenda. If you would like resources which discuss and critique the various flaws of Piketty's work, I can refer you to the scholarly publications and the conferences associated with the American Economic Association, the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, the Cliometrics Society, and like academic organizations, as starting points.
In the meantime, I will continue to use this forum to discuss the realism of video games.
While I appreciate your enthusiasm to share your worldview, not to mention the unintentionally hilarious attempt at throwing shade, I'll continue to enjoy my own conversations with whomever I please, and would encourage you to take part in whatever might make you happy.
Dude, you’re in here throwing out Piketty to begin with while confusing basic concepts; I don’t think you’re the one who really gets to chide about funny attempts to inflict worldviews on people :P
civ 5 can be different with the right settings: when I played on deity, half of the time it has been a struggle until a few rounds before victory (conquest).
It's actually incredibly easy to print money early on.
Take a loan, build 2 airports reasonable far away from each other in the larger initial cities. setup 2-3 planes between them. Wait 15 minutes -> money printer.
Money earned is based on distance and speed. Planes are incredibly lucrative in the early game.
Planes crash from time to time but they bring back their costs in 5-6 flights, so your money making printer is only limited by the number of available passengers, not by plane reliability.
Try the hard server. Games end in 10 years on average. You end bu getting 50M, which makes it a lot of fun to play. To play competitively, you have to manage your economy the first 5 years really tight.
you can tweak the settings to higher maintenance and higher interest rates. but yes, even then, it becomes too easy after a while. would be nice if the settings allowed it to make it even harder (extra high maintenance costs, 6% interest rates, etc)
In the beginning it can be a bit though, but once you get over the initial hump you're more or less swimming in money for the rest of the game.
Secondly, it's annoying how small trains become uncompetitive later on in the game. Yes, you'll have much smaller number of these megaroutes bringing in the megabucks, but you have plenty of formerly cash flow positive routes that simply can no longer cover their running costs. Yeah, maybe that mirrors reality with rail transit, but dammit, I want to play with trains not run trucks and buses.