Mod for operating expenses?

[Jarl Thidrandi]

As much as I love this game, the simulation side of things leaves much to be desired. I think there should be daily costs for insurance, taxes, and garage upkeep, as well as having to hire a dispatcher as someone under their own authority would be required to do. I curently play with the realistic economy mod, and am wondering if there are any mods adding daily bills like what I described?

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

there should be daily costs for insurance, taxes, and garage upkeep

I agree, but it should be monthly (or weekly at most), not daily.

as well as having to hire a dispatcher as someone under their own authority would be required to do.

It's not necessary because all hired drivers find their own jobs and have to go back to home base every time. There aren't any long term contracts to manage, just a lot of single jobs that don't have any effect on other jobs. But if they changed the way these jobs work I'd be fine with it. Each garage would need its own dispatcher. But I, the owner of the company, should not have to obey a dispatcher.

[Twelvefield]

The bank bites you daily, so it makes sense that your other costs are daily as well. Well, that makes sense as far as the game goes.

A real mortgage or business loan would bite you monthly or maybe bi-weekly or even weekly if you were very friendly with your bank. A ledger would help for budget, since without daily financial notes I suspect a few gamers would lose track of their funds. Or even more realistically, you'd hire an accountant - even more expense but your numbers should line up.

[Jarl Thidrandi]

Originally posted by Hypertext Eye:

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

there should be daily costs for insurance, taxes, and garage upkeep

I agree, but it should be monthly (or weekly at most), not daily.

as well as having to hire a dispatcher as someone under their own authority would be required to do.

It's not necessary because all hired drivers find their own jobs and have to go back to home base every time. There aren't any long term contracts to manage, just a lot of single jobs that don't have any effect on other jobs. But if they changed the way these jobs work I'd be fine with it. Each garage would need its own dispatcher. But I, the owner of the company, should not have to obey a dispatcher.

I agree with weekly or monthly too, but I figured daily would be easiest since theres already the daily loan installment scripts. While a dispatcher might not be necessary, I believe ( could be wrong) that in most states, to be a truely independent owner operator and be under your own authority, you must have an office in the state you operate out of and have a dispatch officer.

[room217au]

The "simulation side of things" is the driving. the other stuff is candy.

[Jarl Thidrandi]

Originally posted by room217au:

The "simulation side of things" is the driving. the other stuff is candy.

Sure, but what I'm asking is whether or not a mod exists that adds more business expenses, since I like to play with a realistic economy mod already, It would really round out the experience of Owning a trucking business, where I'm fighting the bills and driving to keep my fleet fueled up and maintained etc. Oh well, I guess I'll move this over to mod requests.

[Asigion]

The business side of the game could use some improvement even if the simulation is driving trucks. At the moment there are no costs associated with running a business. Pay for fuel, have the truck repaired (which in ATS is nominal) and that is it. No upkeep on garages or anything else.

It would not take a great deal to improve the business side of the game and have it so players could get rid of the enormous amount of money you get if you play the game long enough. Each garage could have weekly operating expenses and the more drivers within that garage the more it would cost. Adding the ability to upgrade garages beyond their current upgrades so they can have workshops where you and your drivers can have trucks repaired and the costs associated with that.

Just adding a main office to the game which could be upgraded from a tiny office into an international company as the game gets bigger with more states could take care of the enormous amount of money you end up with. It could cost millions to upgrade and cost huge amounts to run.

I don't even bother with hiring drivers now and apart from my main profile in ATS and ETS2 which I only play when I do WOT contracts, which is usually only for events now, I play my modded profiles, I play them until the game updates and then I create new profiles to play. My main profile in ETS2 has over 100,000,000 Euros and over 200 drivers and it has always been vanilla. It was the second profile I had in ETS2 since I started playing and I only lost my first profile when I changed computers and didn't know about saving profiles and that had a huge amound of money.

The game needs a way to spend money and/or a difficulty setting so that you can keep playing with incentive rather than just the love of driving trucks. I do love driving the trucks but the game needs more for players who want to run a business and want to spend the enormous amounts of money the game offers.

Add it as a DLC so players can choose whether they want it or not. Or simply just add a difficulty level.

Anyway, that is my opinion.

[Jarl Thidrandi]

^^^ Pretty much where I'm coming from. The mod I play with isnt super hardcore, but the average payout is aroun $2.80 per mile, so I get a real sense of attachment to my truck as we put down the miles and I dont feel like the games handing me anything, but like you said, theres not much to spend money on besides new trucks and upgrades. And since they already have a billing system setup I imagine it wouldnt take much to add expenses similar to farm sim. I can do some basic scripts and coding, maybe I'll look into it myself.

[room217au]

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

[..] I can do some basic scripts and coding, maybe I'll look into it myself[..]

It's obvious to me that this game (and ETS2) was never intended to focus on the business side of things. I say that because a great chunk of the demographic is young folks. The popularity of the "quick money and XP" mods is a good clue to that. While some players are using that mod to quickly return to previous game status after losing profiles because of no kind of backup regime in place, the main reason for its existence is impatience.
The hard economy mods are the go in your situation.
As far as "more" business expenses - as in extra ones - any attribute/variable must exist in the first place for any kind of script to take advantage of it. SCS don't make public ALL of these variables (eg. "truck_speed_limit: 20" can be added to config.cfg and this limits the maximum speed of ALL trucks to 20mph. I use 20 as an example) but I'm sure there are some which may be useful in your scenario.
If I remember correctly there is a list somewhere.

[Jarl Thidrandi]

Originally posted by room217au:

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

[..] I can do some basic scripts and coding, maybe I'll look into it myself[..]

It's obvious to me that this game (and ETS2) was never intended to focus on the business side of things. I say that because a great chunk of the demographic is young folks. The popularity of the "quick money and XP" mods is a good clue to that. While some players are using that mod to quickly return to previous game status after losing profiles because of no kind of backup regime in place, the main reason for its existence is impatience.
The hard economy mods are the go in your situation.
As far as "more" business expenses - as in extra ones - any attribute/variable must exist in the first place for any kind of script to take advantage of it. SCS don't make public ALL of these variables (eg. "truck_speed_limit: 20" can be added to config.cfg and this limits the maximum speed of ALL trucks to 20mph. I use 20 as an example) but I'm sure there are some which may be useful in your scenario.
If I remember correctly there is a list somewhere.

i was hoping to dissect the real economy mod I already use and see how the bank loan system is accessed, since they were able to adjust the rates and loan limits etc, Im thinking maybe I can take advantge of this and tack on some kind of basic daily expense that hits at the same time as the loan payments, which applies all things (insurance, operating expenses etc) Into one payment. The only thing that might be tricky is dynamicly calculating a tax based on daily income. I haven't looked yet, so maybe what I want to try isn't possible but if I can add even a simple flat daily fee, that would be much better than having the world best truck insurance provided to me at no cost.

I really don;t understand the popularity of the quick xp and money mods except in the situation you described, as a means to restore a lost file. I understand that not everyone wants to spend months earning enough to buy a new truck, but the base game payouts are so absurdly high I cant Imagine why anyone could possible need more. I see this crap on My Summer Car as well. The game is about owning a junky old datsun and restoring it, and keeping it running while working for money to buy food and make your car awesome and repair it as it wears out. But, a ton of people download this mod that builds the car for them and keeps it in 100% condition. Now I don't care what people do with thier lives, but then they turned around and complained to the devs that theres nothing to do.

[room217au]

Impatience. First starting out with ATS or ETS2 it does take a while to get enough money to buy a truck. Then the advancement to higher levels to buy better accessories and so on. It's the "I want everything now" brigade at their finest.

The bank repayments (and all other calcs) are done by the game. What you see in the economy_data and so on, are merely modifiers and multipliers fed to the equations existing in the game code. You can increase the interest rate, but not the frequency.
You could try some backhanded approaches too, like..

..pay your drivers more per mile. This will reduce your profit by proxy.

.. I don't know if you can increase the price of the motel when resting there, but you could try and increase its price to something realistic like a few hundred dollars. Akin to this, you could also always stay at motels.

.. you could unpack def.scs, make your own mod and only have accessories in it. Increase the price of tires, for example, to maybe $1000 (this includes fitting lol)

.. you could drag the "preferred job length" slider further left to reduce the longer, better-paying jobs at the same time as editing economy_data and reduce your drive hours to, say, 8. This would add a challenge aspect by having to juggle distance with available time on shorter jobs.

.. you could increase the damage co-efficient(s) so that if you do have an accident, it's really expensive.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by room217au:

First starting out with ATS or ETS2 it does take a while to get enough money to buy a truck.

No it doesn't. Do 3 jobs then take a loan and buy a cheap truck. No problem. That's not even enough jobs to try out all the trucks and see which one you really like!

.. I don't know if you can increase the price of the motel when resting there, but you could try and increase its price to something realistic like a few hundred dollars. Akin to this, you could also always stay at motels.

Motel resting fee was patched out a long time ago. Does it somehow exist again in hard economy mod? (I don't know as I haven't used it)

[Jarl Thidrandi]

[quote=room217au;1698300679774062019
The bank repayments (and all other calcs) are done by the game. What you see in the economy_data and so on, are merely modifiers and multipliers fed to the equations existing in the game code. You can increase the interest rate, but not the frequency.
You could try some backhanded approaches too, like..

..pay your drivers more per mile. This will reduce your profit by proxy. [/quote]

I like that idea, My main gripe is the fact that my insurance basically pays all my mainantence/repairs for me at no cost to me. I've got over 500,000 miles on my main truck, so Insurance more than likely paid for my entire truck at this point and then some. I like the Idea of paying my guys more as well, maybe I can simulate bills and insurance by tacking it onto the pay per mile. Thanks for the suggestions

[room217au]

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

I like that idea, My main gripe is the fact that my insurance basically pays all my mainantence/repairs for me at no cost to me.

take a look at "def/bank_data.sii"
As well as loan repayments, overdraft warnings, blah blah.. it also has coinsurance attributes.
Thus:

insurance_data : .insurance
{
	coinsurance_fixed_base : 1000
	coinsurance_fixed_min : 200
	coinsurance_fixed_max : 10000
	coinsurance_fixed_inc : 500
	coinsurance_fixed_dec : 100

	coinsurance_ratio_base : 0.1
	coinsurance_ratio_min : 0.02
	coinsurance_ratio_max : 1.0
	coinsurance_ratio_inc : 0.05
	coinsurance_ratio_dec : 0.01
}

[Jarl Thidrandi]

Originally posted by room217au:

Originally posted by Thidrandi:

I like that idea, My main gripe is the fact that my insurance basically pays all my mainantence/repairs for me at no cost to me.

take a look at "def/bank_data.sii"
As well as loan repayments, overdraft warnings, blah blah.. it also has coinsurance attributes.
Thus:

insurance_data : .insurance
{
	coinsurance_fixed_base : 1000
	coinsurance_fixed_min : 200
	coinsurance_fixed_max : 10000
	coinsurance_fixed_inc : 500
	coinsurance_fixed_dec : 100

	coinsurance_ratio_base : 0.1
	coinsurance_ratio_min : 0.02
	coinsurance_ratio_max : 1.0
	coinsurance_ratio_inc : 0.05
	coinsurance_ratio_dec : 0.01
}

Awesome, thanks for all the ideas and help guys.

[dnthomps]

One of the biggest expenses is not modeled [as far as I know] and that is the depreciation of the truck. As a vehicle ages the maintenance cost increases and the frequency of the repairs increases. At some point the owner decides the 'Ole girl' needs to be retired ie. the upkeep is more then the money earned. A few of these variables are fixed in the above .sii files but really they should change as the mileage increases. I'm not sure how to mod a changing variable myself, just an idea starter.