#openttdcoop

Public server game #91 finished and was again an enjoyable game. The map was a 512 tiles square sub-tropical map with very smooth land. The plan chosen to build was XeryusTC’s plan. As it tied a no terraform plan it was agreed that no terrform should be applied. The plan featured trains of length three on two concentric ML rings, one serving empty trains, the other fully loaded trains. Building progressed very rapidly to a large amount of players active at all times, also many new players.

The factory and refinery station. The no terraform rule made the pre-signal bypass of the entry look a bit strange

The plan
The seperate ML for full and empty trains allowed for interesting hubs as one ML part only featured splits at SLHs and the other only joins. Another positive side of this is that it allows to build one joint pickup and drop station (thus nice eye candy) at the secondary industries as pickup and drop trains are seperated on different ML anyway. The small trainlength and the flat and smooth terrain made it quite easy to follow the no terraform rule. Only exceptions allowed were a small one-tile terraform in order to place a bridge or tunnel. The TL made it also possible to build quite compact constructions.

The building
With many players it was a real kick-start the game got and everything was built at least in a draft version within 24h. Two points were interesting to me: prios on side-line joins and the pre-signal bypass station. The latter (again) proved remarkebly efficient for the central factory of this plan. The factory served over 700 trains, about 550 dropping stuff there. Also here it showed that not only an efficient entry is important but also an equally efficient and load balanced exit so that trains can quickly leave the station and free it for subsequent usage.
After a while it became appearant that the 2×2 mainline was not enough for the huge amount of trains running around (962 at the end of the game) and a third line needed to be added at many points. Eventually this lead to almost the entire ring being 3×3 except from some places where 2×3 was sufficient to keep all the trains running smootly.

A flaw in the plan
The main idea of the plan was also a fatal flaw: all the trains wouldn’t exit a ring after they went to their drop/pickup. This resulted in a few lines being tightly packed and trains couldn’t join them until a drop was reached and most of the trains exited the line there to join the other line again. This was the main reason that there were many congestions in my opinion.
Normally this shouldn’t be such a big problem as the lines aren’t as tightly packed as this but over 950 trains on a 512² map is quite alot and it became a very big problem. In the past we’ve had about the same plan with way less trains (except from PS game #34) and thus it wouldn’t become such a problem.
What usually seems to be the best way to solve these kinds of problems is adding another ML line and so we did. But soon after extra lines were added these were filled too by the huge amount of trains. In the end it was enough for only one line being added per full/empty ring and thus the problem was solved. It is still very weird to see a line like the one in the north to go from about 30% full to being entirely full in just around 400 tiles and 3 sideline hubs! Something which is quite hard IMO even with this amount of trains.

All in all it has been a nice game though and we should do something like this once again, although the no terraform was quite a bit of a pain.
— XeryusTC & planetmaker