#openttdcoop

Hello out there,

I’m writing a short report about the ongoing mainserver game. Starting two days ago we decided to start once again on the “alpine_valley_103” scenario. It has a lovely landscape, a nice combination of high mountains and blue water.

Our plan consists of:

• Keep terraforming to a minimum
• Make the trainroutes appear as realistic and good-looking as possible
• Create a cargo network which does not have one single drop
• Use LR lines only to preserve the landscape
• Build cargo routes in valleys rather than moving from point A to point B and ignoring the landscape
• Aim for mid-distance cargo trains
• Decide about a passenger network layout later on

As a first step, we started out with the usual moneymaker route. This time, its already constructed to fit into the landscape. Even better: because of its beautiness we decided to keep this route alive throughout the game. But judge by yourself:

As the moneymaker brought quite a lot into our pockets we moved on by creating a cargo network. As mentioned earlier we decided not to move from a point of industries to another point therefore crossing mountains and lakes. Our approach is building rails in valleys and natural favored areas and don’t target on any industries yet. This gives us the advantage of having a cool looking network by now. Later on we will see where the the main traffic points are and how we can improve our network. Since we only build it LR (which means: one track in each direction), it definitely needs an improvement somewhen.

The advantage is that you don’t need huge hubs to join sidelines to mainlines. Every LR-track is a mainline by itself and therefore it’s really simple to make junctions for these lines. Have a look at the first “Cargo Hub” (CH) built in this game, Cargo Hub 01:

We started high upon the ground level, reaching with our cargo routes to the industries in the snowy desert of the map. You can imagine that there will be quite a high traffic later on, especially at some natural bottleneck like the Littau/Herisau area:

Another important valley to the map is the whole Aarau-region since it has some industries and is quite easy to approach due to its river. We used this natural benefit to construct a cargo route straight into the valley providing infrastructure for many local companies:

In the end, I want to summarize this game as one of the most interesting yet. The idea is nice, significantly different to our concepts before. Lets see how it ends….