Boats

[pat]

I'm sorry if this sounds like a troll message. It's really not.

I have to admit that I'm into this game because I like trains. Trucks/buses are ok, but mostly to support the trains. I've never gotten into the boats part of the game. Recently I was playing a USA campaign, and one of the tasks was to bring goods from Houston to New Orleans. To build a rail line there, I'd have to cross two or three rivers, and either go way around, or tunnel through a couple mountains. Cash was short, so I figured that this was the game forcing me to finally set up a ship line. I chose the only ship available that could carry goods and set up a line from Houston to New Orleans.

Some rather long time later, I checked, and the boat wasn't 1/3 of the way there yet. Once it got about halfway there, I'd had it, and having stockpiled some cash, I built that expensive rail line and delivered the goods that way.

So I'm trying to figure out why people play boats. Whenever seed maps are discussed, everyone wants lots of rivers. I assume, for boats. But in the fastest cargo boat in the game goes 22 MPH. I pedal my bicycle faster than that.

I could see the point if they could carry 1500 tons and we needed to cross oceans that rail/road vehicles couldn't handle.

[maculator]

I'm not really into boats either, but I guess if you compare the running-costs they should be superior to trains. If not I don't know why they're in the game.

[canophone]

No real need for a tunnel on that mission! "Going around" on the north of the contours works well for the objectives.

[Saint Landwalker]

A couple of points:

1. Delivering goods to New Orleans is optional. (I'm told that the off-shore oil rig, which I admittedly didn't bother with, isn't really worth the hassle, but that said, the payoff for delivering Goods to New Orleans makes the effort worth it all on its own.)
   
   
2. When I was first playing that scenario, I built a rail line to the west bank of the Neches River (the first one, between Beaumont and Lake Charles), dropped the goods off to be transferred to a truck station, and then just trucked them the rest of the way to Lake Charles and New Orleans until I had the cash to link everything up by rail.
   
   
3. Yeah, boats are freaking slow. I honestly rarely use them unless I have to. The only time in a campaign I've used them so far has been USA #5 (Air Mail Scandal, to move the stone for the Hoover Dam), EUR #2 (to complete the optional objective and ship steel to the construction site), and USA #7. USA #7 was the only time in a campaign that I didn't have to use a ship but did anyway—I had trucks bring crude oil to Seattle, and an oil tanker move it up to the refinery and bring back processed oil for the chemical factory to turn into plastic.
   
   I've used them one time in a Free Play game to move stone across a large lake that overlapped the edge of the map, and therefore was not convenient to build a land line the long way around (and the town that was getting supplied by that line was not a high-priority town).
   
   
4. I would really like to see ships get larger carrying capacities. The Merlin is currently the largest, fastest cargo ship in the game, at 250 "units" of cargo. The real-life Merlin, which is a river ship on the Danube, carries about fifteen forty-foot shipping containers*. This would give it an in-game capacity of something like 300-315.
   
   (* At least, that's what it's carrying in the picture I found. They're not stacked, so I don't know if it's common to stack a second layer on there, or if the ship is even capable of that.)
   
   Which is still not a lot, given what it is. The issue is that the ships in the game aren't ocean-going container ships. They're basically river barges. They're supposed to be small and slow, and because of that, they just aren't very useful. (And because it's a river barge, the Merlin is probably very shallow on the draft, so I doubt it's prone to stacking those containers very high.)

I guess that's all a rambling, roundabout way of saying "Yup. Ships are useful in particular situations, but as a general option they aren't too great."

[Robbedem]

The best use for boats is when you need to cross a lake. Make the boat trip itself short by using trucks/buses/trains/trams on the shores to get the cargo/passengers to and from the harbours.

[SBGaming]

Ships would be far more useful if they had separate cargo holds. For instance, 1 cargo hold per 50 units of capacity, so that they have the versatility of carrying a couple different cargo types, much like trains. Atleast with trains you can add additional capacity, and give them the option of carrying multiple different goods (Boxcar).

Ships are also a bit buggy when running the game at 4x speed. They'll drop off their cargo, and then leave immediately without picking anything up, which is frustrating when you want it to haul something one way, and haul something back the other way.