“Rails? who needs rails…” a new kind of game for coopers

This is a bit unusual picture for any game, especialy #openttdcoop ones, however it turned out to be quite fun. 1000 trucks and busses… no trains… small revenue of about $15,000,000… 180,000 units of cargo delvierd yearly… quite nice actualy considering tiny amount of networking required and it definately a good learning experience. I did not know that road vehicles can not overtake eachover at bridge rams and tunnel entracnes, as well as at any point when speed changes. And hence arrangement for slopes and tunnel/bridge length is quite different from regular railroad kind of networking.


A long slope like this lets faster moving vehicles to finish overtaking and even do it faster than on straight piece of road, and slopes, while still being quite damaging on low speed and ignored mass makes it less of a pain than it would be for rails. Turns are different issues they are just baaad and since no way to smooth them – should be avoided if possible.

Also, based on some experiments conducted by Sedontane in game 51 – few different shapes for terminal came up. Staring from small and scalable ro-ro shaped primary pickups that remain balanced:

And groing to efficient large scale pickups with dequeing techniques:

First one is quite decent however vehicles have chances of getting stacked, but requires less turning in some cases, while second aproach is better balanced (more chances of trucks taking different platforms but slighly bigger)

Drops are a bit different, since they are less prone to vehicles blocking each over while waiting at station, and they can be made even more compact:

It is quite important to get vehicles to enter roadside stations from both sides and get the most out of it. Right one due to some YAPF quircks were not willing to use southern aproach with road coming to middle of station. in thatc ase 6 platform station has ultimate throughput, handling any pretty kind of laod a single road can provide, such as constant stream of trucks even. As tested it was handling 20 trucks in 15 days (from first in at chooser instersection to last one out from merger). If that does not sound impressive – think of 80 good crates per truck, that would mean about 3200 units per month on 4×5 tiles space!

Perhaps, in case if we use such apeoaches in regular rail style games, efficient local road networks and large transfer terminals would be a good idea for regular games to save on networking development and server performance while justifying large train size for primary industries.

The save can be downloaded here.Â

2 comments so far

  1. Adm.Spock August 3, 2007 10:55

    Nice!

    I agree we should do more with feeder services. And use road, air and sea transport more, after all, the game is called Transport Tycoon 🙂

  2. PAStheLoD August 3, 2007 11:25

    Great idea 🙂

    It’s good to see that you are truly some kind of ‘explorers’ and not just playing rails all the time.

    Btw, what GRFs are used? And can we get a savegame too? 🙂

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