gameplay

[some moron]

Is there somewhere that says how much a car of whatever sells for? Is wheat more valuable than corn? Is clothing more valuable than fabric? Does the distance affect the price? Does the demand? Does distance affect the value of passenger/mail? Can I see somewhere the value of express, and maybe how much the time to deliver affects the value of delivery?

How much does not having supplies slow a train? the supplies cost $30k and that's quite a lot early game, to have one on each track. I'm playing without them, and without repairs, assuming that the money is better spent on an additional train, that will also be a little slower and breakdown, and later adding the support when there are more trains per track. Does that sound like a good plan or am I hurting myself by not paying for support? Can I see the numbers somewhere how much it affects speed?

[coenvijge]

A lot of questions. Maybe take a look at the 'Guides' section over here. I'll guess you can find all the answers.

Short anwers:
1. Yes, at the arrival you see the income of the train.
2. No all goods 2.000/car but depending on staff, tech-tree, special cars et cetera.
3. See 2.
4. Not for goods. Pax and mail pay more for longer distances.
5. No, but with no demand your goods don't load.
6. Yes.
7. Don't know.

8. A little.
9. A good plan to start, but later on you can get big troubles. (Slow routes, blocked tracks by broken engines.
10. Don't know. But as said the speed isn't the problem but the risk of blocking lines/stations.

Good game.

[gardlt]

In regard to your second paragraph: replace rather than maintain. No need to build towers or sheds. Each time the notices of low supplies pop up, go into your engine room and replace engines in bulk. 99% of breakdowns can be avoided this way.

[chaney]

Excellent answers above.

I'm not aware anyone has reported any details on how express revenue changes with distance or speed. I have thought about testing it but never did.

Regarding supplies and maintenance:
Running without water etc. somehow only slows trains a little. (The game has a level of abstraction of course, and no Supplies I interpret as being a weak infrastructure in supplies, which would slow a railway, rather than a complete absence of supplies :)

The gamer method is as gardlt describes. Engine depreciation is slow, and even slower at the beginning of life (opposite of reality.) Spend no money on maintenance or supplies, just replace the train when it runs out of fuel. Halliburton did well with that method some years ago. This is likely to be the best way to keep everything in excellent operation at minimal cost. I personally don't do it. I like a little of a role-playing restriction, and some players would consider the exploit an abuse. (Nobody else cares, it is a single player game! Only for the leaderboards would it be worth discussing further, do as you prefer.) A strong method is to use The Engineer leader who gets free Maintenance at Stations and Warehouses. Bringing different lines near each other near a Station (not too close) can let you buy a single Supply Tower to serve several lines.

"Maybe take a look at the 'Guides' section over here. I'll guess you can find all the answers."
Many, not all. I heartily agree. A lot of basic game function isn't explained in the game, so I tried to make a compilation of a lot of FAQ type information. I guess I'm supposed to ask people to subscribe and like, but I genuinely don't care - but you can find some good information there :) Also watch Adekyn's videos if you like YouTube, he's reliable and knows the game - also not at all hard to listen to.

[some moron]

well it's mostly helpful. but #1 I wanted to know the value of the different goods, what he said was the value of the train, which is not what I wanted
#2 I sold a load of clothing and that seemed to fetch more than twice what I get for cotton

Yes that makes sense to me that slow trains is not that bad but breakdowns are. Seems if they just penalized the tradein value, that would make still a thing but not as abuseable.
Yeah I don't think empty water steam trains would keep going. Maybe they should stop to a crawl. and empty sand crawl uphill but unaffected on flats. Then again all three supplies are combined, that's silly why not just have one, water. Or better, make three supply types, water which needs average refills, sand only when there are grades (and I would place the sand refill just before grades) and oil hmm not sure, used most by high speed? or by old leaky trains? lol and empty oil occasionally destroys an engine? and then still the three-type supplier which combines all three to save space. A simple speed reduction for any three seems crude / unrealistic.

[chaney]

Miscommunication. Communication is full of miscommunication.

A very common question is "what is the fee for delivering freight" which is a flat base $2,000 as coenvijge reports. That is so common as to be a default interpretation of your question.

So you are asking what a good produced by your industry will sell for, right? (I don't think cost is relevant/knowable unless it is an input or product of a company's industry.) I don't know if that has been investigated/reported anywhere. Testing could be done, I'm reluctant because the variety of different goods in different games is huge, and some things like that change from scenario to scenario. I'm confident that any industry will sell it's products for more than the inputs cost.

Water/oil/sand are tracked individually with a single supplier. I SUSPECT the details of operational effect were an idea that never got fully implemented but could be wrong.

[some moron]

so you are saying a tier 1 item such as cotton sells for the same price (before buffs) of $2k and that is the same selling price of a tier 3 item such as clothing?

For example in Rise of Industry, a tier 3 item sells for much more than a tier 1 or 2, and should considering there are transportation and other costs involved.
In this game the tier 3 is not more profitable then? It's just one more item to transport except the cities demand less of them, which ultimately makes them less useful, but perhaps necessary in order to advance a city.
I suppose they also consume the lower tier items so you can move more of them.

[gardlt]

Yeah it doesn't make sense, but in this game all freight has the same rate. The difference is that the higher Tier cargoes have lower production. It's lack of high tier that in the end limits absolute city size. In larger cities, the demand for low tier is gradually drying up.

[chaney]

Originally posted by some moron:

so you are saying a tier 1 item such as cotton sells for the same price (before buffs) of $2k and that is the same selling price of a tier 3 item such as clothing?

For example in Rise of Industry, a tier 3 item sells for much more than a tier 1 or 2, and should considering there are transportation and other costs involved.
In this game the tier 3 is not more profitable then? It's just one more item to transport except the cities demand less of them, which ultimately makes them less useful, but perhaps necessary in order to advance a city.
I suppose they also consume the lower tier items so you can move more of them.

Let's be careful: "sells for" is separate from payment for transporting. Unless you own an industry, you never "own/buy/sell" the inputs or products at all. You transport things that belong to someone else, and charge a flat $2,000 (plus buffs) on delivery - regardless of distance etc. (Note that delivery means acceptance by a City. Delivering to your own City-connected Warehouse gets you nothing, but you get $2,000 when the City transfers the items to their own internal warehouse.)

So, delivering a car of items pays the same, regardless of what the items are.

When you have a factory that converts cotton to cloth or cloth to dresses, you will buy inputs, upgrade them, own the goods, and your factory will get paid when someone (City) buys the product. (I'm not absolutely sure when you would get paid if you take your own products to your own Warehouse.)

This game is not other games. The mechanics are different. This causes a lot of confusion - particularly when people bring other signaling models to the game and they don't work here. This game has more focus on logistics and less on factory production than most others in addition to a different (but excellent) signaling model. Get zen and go with the local current, it's not the same as others, but it's pretty nice.

[coenvijge]

'This game is not .......the same as others, but it's pretty nice'. Yeah! It's very good! I am glad that there are, in confront of the situation a few years ago, many different RR-games. Otherwise we all would be waiting for a release. But now one of the 'problems' is to make the choice of which game to buy/play. (And wait for RE2, TF3, ..... ;-) :

[gussmed]

In hindsight, the freight charges in earlier games (any of the Railroad Tycoon games, from 1 through 3) was weird and unrealistic, and Railway Empire’s economic model makes a lot more sense.

You’re UPS. You charge by the pound for the packages you ship. You don’t own what’s in the packages, so it doesn’t matter what’s in them. Just how many cars you ship.

Of course, in real life, freight charges aren’t flat for any distance (unless you’re the post office). Real freight companies charge by the mile as well as by the pound.

There are game reasons why it’s a flat $2000 fee per car, and distance doesn’t matter. Mostly because if it were based on distance, you’d have a strong incentive to be stupid about shipping, sending corn across country instead of to the nearest town.

[vezrilx]

Producing different goods does pay a different amount per carload if you own said business(es). It's hard to tell exactly by how much because there are variations based on workload % of the business, and I've read it may not even pay you at all if workload is below 50% despite showing income. That aside.. if you want to compare direct payment values try to open some maps with different eras and some dlc maps with different goods too, in Tome. That is one of the programs you can use to do some minor mods in this game. You will find some different payment values per business and go from there I guess. It might have been brought up in another thread before but since so many things can vary per scenario, era, and map, things can be hard to pin down in an absolute way for this.

Many times you will find payment for things like cattle, grain, logs, to be quite low compared to other resources with some being middle tier and others being high paying. Like owning the gold mines in Australia.

Also, I do not believe that you must pay for the goods supplied to businesses you own. You just don't run if you have no supply. The game -industry- pays based on the workload % over time to produce the good and have it in stock. Not to deliver it. Just to make it.

An aside.. I think it would have been quite nice if different goods paid varying amounts for shipment, and also if they weighed different amounts for a carload (volume measurement) per good. They have some of the data points available for editing in the files but it's all the same for freight.

[some moron]

Thanks all. When I said "cost of carload" I was mistaken and as has been pointed out, I was referring to the "payment for delivery".
Then if I remember that is for delivery, NOT for the goods, then it does make real-world sense they would cost the same to deliver regardless of tier (value) of goods.
And now it makes sense that cargo revenue are equal, as guss pointed out, so I have to consider whether it's worth hauling the wheat a super-long distance (my guess: not for regular sale, but yes if used for beer because that adds a second thing I can transport, hopefully a shorter distance) because if freight was actually based on distance then why not ship everything everywhere lol at all times, there would be no thinking required

PS will this game be obsolete when drones begin delivering goods? Maybe there could be a game where there are delivery drones but also fighter drones to take out the competitor drones. Why don't we have attack trains

[gardlt]

Static pathing is not realistic. No empties is not realistic. Point-to-point traffic model is not realistic. Inability to drop cargo/aka carriages at one station for a continuing journey on another train is not realistic. Long double lines for almost all traffic is not realistic. Freight volume is not realistic, we end up with a "paved with rails" late game experience. Maintenance that blocks a station platform is not realistic. No track maintenance is not realistic. No overhead/taxes is not realistic. I can go on....... There are many mechanics that aren't realistic, neither should they be. In my opinion realism isn't a great argument here.

In those older games,
1. Each cargo has a unique base price.
2. Supply and demand is simulated, max profits is gained by hauling from an area of oversupply to one of strong demand
3. Each cargo has a certain time sensitivity
4. Each cargo has a certain weight
5. Each cargo has a distance modifier (not in RRT3)

Out of all these, only #1 is unrealistic. At that point we are assuming to be the merchant as well as the railroad. But when we consider that in RE we "control" the growth rate of every city on the map, what's more unrealistic? Honestly....

2-5 are ways of simulating varying shipment rates that will inevitably occur in a competitive market.

So, RE lacks these 5 strategic elements. Freight shipments therefore dissolve down to volume over the shortest distance possible. And the strategy is mainly to grow cities very large. Along the way, we control which industry to place where, to make best use of local resources. Consumption is high enough to easily take care of any mid-tier and above production in the local area. Again, we are controlling the entire population now, and not just a few shippers.

Point-to-point, static pathing, and high demand, is not a gameplay environment where we want to encourage shipping for long distances, so #5 is out. Also simplification on the others can be necessary for this issue.

The one that doesn't promote long distance shipments directly is #1. It is rather adding a strategic element to our city growth strategy. Which areas do we want to grow first to start consuming the highest value goods? The end game result will still be similar. The experience getting there, just a bit more interesting. :)


I watched the preview of the Japan DLC, the feature where we can set our shipment rate for passengers looks good. Could a similar thing be done for freight?

Freight shipment rate could be adjustable at each city, but what should the benefit/trade-off be? Demand is out, otherwise cities can be easier to grow. Passenger/mail generation might work, but doesn't feel that good.

My best idea: freight rate relates to consumption. At lowest price, the city is willing to consume 100% of it's stated demand in goods that you have delivered. At high price, maybe 50%. With all cargoes present, assuming there is also some wagon deliveries, growth will still be possible. With a museum, 50% would be quite safe. Such a feature would definitely be fun to compete in a rate war with the AI.


PS. some moron, you should try Bounty Train if you want some battles in a train game. Maybe you have already? I picked it up on sale last week at $2.40 with DLC. Not sure if the fighting is to my taste, thankfully most of it can be avoided. The UI for supply/demand info is not quite giving me enough details/sortable options. But, overall I enjoyed it.

[chaney]

Nice tangents growing here :)

Originally posted by vezrilx:

Also, I do not believe that you must pay for the goods supplied to businesses you own. You just don't run if you have no supply. The game -industry- pays based on the workload % over time to produce the good and have it in stock. Not to deliver it. Just to make it.

Thanks for the insights! The details of the mechanics of a factory are interesting. Since a lot of detail is swept under the rug, it may be that a lot of how we think of it is arbitrary.

From your description above, it sounds like this can be interpreted as: the factory sells all its products to the local City on production, and the factory nets some value. Does that fit what you find? This buries the question of buying infeed stock into net upgrade value, and if things process quickly (no infeed inventory belonging to the factory for very long) it seems the interpretation is arbitrary and unimportant apart from our own thinking about the story. Some of us like to tell ourselves stories, while accepting a lot of abstraction :)

[some moron]

I am going to tell myself the story that we do NOT pay for materials. For the simple reason that it is not listed anywhere. Or if it does then it is taken into calculation and we nicely simply get the profit per week. It seems to me
- there is no maintenance (if the materials are missing, you don't lose any money per week)
- a factory simply uses or buys materials in a city and can produce .8 goods per week and by an unknown calculation per load makes a profit, we are not told how, but my tailor at 100% makes 5k per week which is how much i make on a successful train but without maintenance and breakdowns, but has a much higher investment to start with
- note also that even if the city is unsupplied by train, it is still supplied by wagon, so my beer factory which has no wheat trains, has still netted a nice profit because of the trickle of wheat on wagons

Conclusion, industry has higher investment, simpler management. Since I can't see the lifetime profit of a trainline, I'm not sure which performs better. I will guess 50% of my trains outperform a factory, while the other half underperform due to breakdowns, missing supplies, long routes, and incomplete loads. Actually, considering the cost of stations and supply towers and repair, and tracks, maybe they are equal investments.