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Note annual maintenance costs are always 1/6th of the vehicle purchase price (with maintenance funding set to normal level).
Purchase costs scale linearly with power for locomotives, and with rate for wagons (=speed*capacity). Therefore annual maintenance does as well. I can't recall the deal for other vehicle types, it's been a while since I analyzed them.
Revenue per cargo unit / passenger ("ticket price") is based on the distance travelled (straight line) and the vehicle's top speed rating (regardless of actual speed achieved). (There's also a small bonus for climbing to higher elevation.) Details and charts here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TransportFever/comments/rj8b9l/so_i_heard_yall_were_wondering_how_payment_is/
Note there are different formula between trains, ships, etc.
Trucks are essential for final mile delivery in cities, and other small connections. But they are difficult to move large volumes because so many vehicles are required that it jams up roads and stations (especially with early vintage vehicles). Handling bigger volumes and longer distances is where rail wins. Trucks become increasingly capable and by late game can replace many shorter rail lines.
I find ships really OP. They excel at moving large volumes over long distances with very little infrastucture footprint. A rail complex needs to be much larger than a port to handle the same large volume. I start every game with them, it's the easiest profit, as you found. I eventually replace many ship lines with rail, but still usually keep them for long distance bulk cargo (iron, coal, logs, oil).
I haven't yet had success with air (maps too small). But if I wanted to send something to opposite corner of a large map that's probably what I'd use.
Towns grow by adding connections to other towns (roads and your various lines), and by feeding them the cargo they want. The town window shows the various growth multipliers.
Cheers
These combine to make them sometimes Really Good for cargo, and sometimes kind of useless, depending on the map.
Usually, the only reason to use ships rather than rail for passengers is how massively expensive bridges of any significant length can be. They're not bad, it's just harder to make them Good.
The average cost per "rate" (speed X capacity) for all road vehicles (trucks, trams, and buses) are the same and the lowest in the game. Next are ships, about 20% higher. (2 major exceptions are the hovercraft and the Damen ferry, with costs more like aircraft.) Aircraft are next, nearly double the cost of road vehicles.
Trains are a special case since we choose the engine / wagon mix, and there are also self-powered / multi-units. The average rate cost of the wagons alone is double that of road vehicles (slightly higher than aircraft), but that doesn't include the locomotive. Locomotive prices and maintenance costs scale with power. I haven't found a good way yet to combine this power-based costs with the rate-based cost of the wagons to get a total cost for the train, since any loco could be used. However since the wagons are the real revenue generator, I guess the loco is just kind of an overhead cost for the train. So safe to say then that the rate cost for trains is *more than* double that of road vehicles, with the actual amount based on which loco is used.
For self-powered / multi-units other than the 2 high-speed trains, they average about 3 times the rate cost of road vehicles (so about 50% more than aircraft). The Avelia HST is closer to 4 times, and the Speedance is more than 7 times that of road vehicles.
For reference here are my actual numbers, average $K/(unit*km/h), where unit is either 1 unit of cargo or passengers. These are based on purchase cost; for maintenance costs just divide everything by 6 (at normal funding level).
0.31 Road (truck/bus/tram)
0.36 Ships (except * below)
0.53 *Damen ferry
0.56 Aircraft
0.61 *Hovercraft
0.61 Rail (wagons only **)
0.9 Rail self-propelled / multi-unit (except HSTs ***) (ranges 0.84-0.97)
1.15 ***Avelia HST
2.24 ***Speedance HST
**Plus
$3.8K/kW Rail locomotives
All of this is just the purchase / maintenance costs. The infrastructure costs are a whole other pile.
Enjoy!
I dont know, but if I understood correctly, this means that the transport time and the average speed are not taken into account in the calculation and that only the maximum speed reached during the transport counts.
That's right?
If so, it's weird and it's going to change the way I play. I always thought it paid more to go fast, and that made sense to me.
Ok thank you, I understand better.
You still have to go fast!
That's a fair point. Reducing maintenance costs, at all costs, shouldn't be the focus. We want to increase net income. Although some vehicles types cost a lost more in maintenance, they also bring a lot more revenue. If they're used effectively, net income will go up.
This is largely because the game scales both revenue potential and max maintenance costs using the same metric: theoretical "rate" (= speed limit X capacity). So net income is basically always the same ratio.
I need to correct myself on this... I overlooked a key thing. It's still true that maintenance costs scale essentially linearly with a vehicle's "rate" = speed limit X capacity. But for revenue, speed actually appears twice, creating somewhat of a speed-squared relationship. Speed appears in the base "ticket price" for the cargo payment. But it also appears in the distance for the payment, since the distance covered is also going to scale with the speed. Faster vehicles will cover more ground in a given year.
So the result is that although maintenance costs grow linearly with the vehicle's "rate" potential, the revenue potential grows even faster. Newer vehicles with higher speed will therefore have a larger portion of revenue remain as net income after maintenance is paid (assuming they're used appropriately on suitable lines). They're better income generators, paying off sooner with higher ROI. This makes income "easier" over time, especially compared to the 1850s vintage vehicles, which have really low net income percentages (especially at higher difficulty settings). It also makes many of the high-speed vehicles really effective income producers despite their very high maint costs, including aircraft, the high-speed watercraft, and high-speed trains (though the Speedance is still relatively poor).
I made a polluted pile of calculations/charts for all this, comparing the net income potential of all vehicles, and I'm still digesting them. Maybe I can figure out a concise shareable version of it someday.