Upgrading vehicles

[Oldhip]

So I get a better bus, I have 4 lines running plus some for Construction, If I want to upgrade the ones I have and retain there routes I have to go to each one , copy the route paste it to a new type and then sell the old one. Take for ever, why cant we upgrade them easier

[Stele]

You can also assign them to route and then sell old ones or send them to depot and sell all vehicles in one click. What you propose to make it easier?

[Oldhip]

To be able to click on a bus and get an option to upgrade, which would auto copy route and sell old one, you can get similar function in other games :)

[MrKrabs]

Imo the system is pretty okay the way it is.
If I upgrade a line I send all new busses to a depot. I than open the menue of the depot when all busses are in and copy the line into the slots via line manager.
From there I sell the old busses and send the new ones directly from the depot by clicking on the slot in the depot menue.
I'm afraid that there will be a good chance for making mistakes if it will be possible to sell all vehicles at once.

Don't take me wrong.
I like fresh ideas.
But here I guess it's not necessary.

[Stele]

How would that work in realistic mode? Vehicle at customs can't be assigned to route without geting depot first. There was some function lacking for me, but I can;t remember what was that now. Bring all vehicles from line to depot maybe. Similar to mass move from service building added recently.

[MrKrabs]

Ah, now I got it.
Well, at the road map there is mentioned some fine tuning and polishing.
Maybe they will look over this as well.

[WilliW]

Originally posted by Stele:

Bring all vehicles from line to depot maybe.

That is definitely needed, not only to upgrade a line, but also to suspend a line while it is (temporarily) not needed.

[melkij]

Originally posted by Stele:

How would that work in realistic mode? Vehicle at customs can't be assigned to route without geting depot first.

Suppose the nearest customs house is 4 km away... It would be a horrible idea to sell (or stop) all buses on the route before the new buses arrive.

Also, the function combined immediately with the sale of the old bus will be useless if I want to replace the buses, but use the old bus somewhere else.

[potski]

I think such a feature would be great if there was a NEED to upgrade/replace vehicles on a line. But there really isn't, when the vehicles have no maintenance requirements with an increasing cost, nor a specific liefspan. 50 passenger buses bought in 1960 can still be used in 2022. If upgrading gives you 80 passenger buses, then I would just be tempted to add one or more buses on the Line.

I think where your idea might work to make things easier, and also fit with Realistic mode, is if instead of buying a bus for example from a depot, you could buy it from the Line window, that bus appears at the nearest Customs house, drives to the route of the Line and joins. If you then want to replace an existing slower/less passengers bus, then you need to sell that yourself, but the actual introduction of new vehicles into a Line could be made easier. Not least, and I would be interested in views on this, is to remove the clicks that when a new vehicle is delivered to a depot and assigned to a Line that you need to Launch it.

Remembering to do that on Lines is a cause of errors, because you don't need to launch vehicles you add to a Distribution, Construction nor Technical Services Office. We will all have wondered why something we set-up, such as an important train delivery, isn't getting done and found the vehicle still sitting in the Depot waiting to be launched. :(

My guess is that this is a hangover on Lines when we couldn't do things like line spacing or use end-stations. You could launch one bus from the depot, then wait 30 seconds and launch a second, in order to space them out. I think that should now be largely unnecessary, and perhaps a vehicle being assigned to a line should auto-launch. If we want to delay sending the second vehicle, delay assigning it to the Line, rather than delaying the launch.

[Superbest]

"Sell buses on this line and replace them with a different model" is a very common task in the game. It would be a good enhancement if this can be done with one click.

Yes, you can do the same manually by buying new vehicles, adding to the route, then sending the old ones to the depot and selling all. But this is tedious. It doesn't add any challenge to the game, just needless clicking. It slows things down as well if you're in realistic mode and you have to wait a long time for vehicles to arrive in the depot so you can sell. And it gets worse if there's too many vehicles to fit in one depot. The game should do all this for you.

In fact, IMO the lines UI should be redesigned a bit. The idea of having lines is great, and the implementation is 80% there, but a few crucial things are missing. The dialog you get when you select a line should allow you to:

* Order replacement of all vehicles to a different model (if in realistic mode, this can automatically order them to the depot)
* Button next to each vehicle to sell it in one click
* Button next to each vehicle to replace it in one click
* Button to add buy vehicle and auto-assign it to that line (if in realistic mode, this can automatically handle routing them from the customs office)

[potski]

I agree the implementation of Lines is maybe only 80% there. Not so much that it needs some of these QoL improvements, though what you suggest makes sense. My biggest problem with Lines is that I think they were added later from the initial implementation and not made mandatory. So when you give commands to a single vehicle this creates a Line for you, names it and saves this. And while you have single vehicles such as a train running on a line, that works fine. This is not great when you have several trucks for example. Any change to the route on a singe truck will not change the route settings for them all, but will create another line, and save that with another name. You can easily end up where the vehicles have slightly different route settings, but this is difficult to spot. And lines with no vehicles assigned.

If you compare for example the (in my humble opinion) annoying interface for changing traffic signals that insists you click on a button to save and a change to a Line requiring a save, then the fact that you can change the route settings on a vehicle when that has the effect of creating a new Line, but doesn't warn you of this, nor force you to open the Line window when the vehicle is part of a multi-vehicle Line nor prompt you to save the new Line it creates, then I think that is a design that could be improved, before they extend the functionality of Lines. They could be much more useful/powerful tools.