SimuTrans

Actually, you play a transport company CEO, and you have to compete with other transport companies (unless you switch them off). --Admiral

I'm too stupid then ^^;; I installed it and tried to play but I had absolutely no idea what was going on or what I needed to do to build a railway. So I gave up. --RobHu

I'm forced to agree. I built a few roads but not much happened. Could you give a brief starting walkthrough, perhaps? --CH

Well, I have managed to get it working, but I haven't managed to avoid bankruptcy yet. It isn't enough to just build a road - you need to put some vehicles on it. This means buses. However, a train is probably better for inter-city, and put buses on the already-existing roads. --Admiral

The [quick start guide] contains step-by-step descriptions of how to build infrastructure - stations, track etc. - with screenshots. You get money when vehicles deliver goods or people to a station (bus stop, freight yard...).  As for what to build: stuff costs money to build, and vehicles cost money per kilometer they move while they are moving; also, on the first of every month, a maintenance charge is levied on every piece of infrastructure and equipment you own. Immediately after the maintenance charge is deducted from your balance, the game checks to see if you are overdrawn; if you start three months in a row overdrawn, you lose. So initially you need to build something that gives you an easy stream of profit. Find a power station that is supplied by oil/coal sources that are nearby (you can use the magnifying glass tool on power stations to see where its supplies are sourced, and on oil/coal sources to see which power stations they are contracted to supply), build platforms 6-8 tiles long next to them and connect the platforms with rails (see quickstart guide for details); build a spur, build a depot on the spur, build a train of the appropriate type on the depot, give the train a schedule and start it going. All the other transport works on the same principle - you build roads/track and stops, you build somewhere to build the transport units, you build the transport units, you tell them which stops to visit in what order, and you set them going. Station parts/buildings immedately adjacent to each other count as a single station; this lets goods and people move around between different kinds of transport - you build a stop for each kind so they're all touching. With passengers, more people want to travel the more places they can get to through your transport network; passengers won't start paying for themselves until you've connected 3-4 villages, so make sure you have a steady source of income before you start building buses, and keep an eye on your balance to make sure you can survive the start of each month (the finance screen helpfully tells you what the maintenance charge will be). See the guide and wiki manual linked above for more details. - MoonShadow''

Thanks, that got me started. My errors were 1) not realising depots built vehicles, and 2) playing with the 128-pak, which apparently needs a warehouse in addition to any goods station. I've switched to the 64-pak, and things now make sense, but I might change back (the 128 graphics are much easier on the eyes). --CH

Warehouses are jolly useful for things that produce goods anyway, because things like oilfields produce way more than you can reasonably carry away in the daytime and then nothing at all overnight. I've found the "stable" 128-pak to be quite buggy still - I can believe the tip version might be better. - MoonShadow

You can find out where people from the city want to go to by examining its town hall (it'll be the big building near the city's name sign), though the map is quite hard to read in pak64. Just connecting everything in sight up with a couple of really cheap buses first and seeing what gets most congested seems to work passably well, once you can afford the roads. - MoonShadow

Downloaded.  Read "short_howto.txt" that it gives you: "Turn on / off station coverage (blue boxes)? Press v."  --Vitenka

Well, who'd've thought that a file called that would show me how to do things, shortly? Thanks - that's sorted it. Bus-stops really don't have a big catchment area, do they? --CH

Haven't played it, though I keep meaning to try it at some point. There's a copy of Locomotion on the company network I really ought to try out, too (if it still compiles) - seems a bit odd to have worked with it but not played it. SimuTrans actually has some quite complicated industry chains, mind; they appear at the start of a year when things grow big enough. I have one in my current game with two dozen different things in it that's resulted in the southeast corner of my map being pretty much completely covered in a mess of railroad. - MoonShadow

My game keeps saying things like "Created a new factory chain for supermarket with 21 factories". It has done that a few times, and I haven't even been able to link up the first supermarket yet. There must be nearly a hundred factories on the map by now. I have loads of money (25M) and loads of stuff to build - I just can't build quickly enough before it gives me yet another thing to link up. --Admiral

pak128 tip does seem to create obscene amounts of factories. But once you have a few pairs of one-way lines cris-crossing the map, with suitable signalling, adding a new factory is mostly just a matter of adding a spur, buying a new train and scheduling it to go between the new factory and somewhere suitably central. - MoonShadow

Fair enough. It appears not to be abandonware, but I have a copy (which I got for 99p...) If you like, I'll lend it to you via AlexChurchill at the next prerelease (end April, I think). 12 things is, I think, more complex than RRT2 - the longest I can think of, of the top of my head (although I'm sure there are longer) is

coal mine ---> steel works <--- iron mine
                 |                 
                 v
orchard -----> cannery ----> towns

...but you do also get an economic model including stocks & shares, and the ability to improve your stations to make your trains run better (water towers, sand towers, roundhouses) or generate more revenue (hotels, post offices) --CH

Not for me in pak128. The margins seem pretty low, especially on passenger ferries. --Admiral

Ah, I take it back. I needed to put >=1 "markets in cities". In which case, if I have that off, will I ever get more industries, and if so, how?

Build them yourself, tool in the special tools toolbox. --Admiral

Not obviously. My  special tools are: post office, big post office, warehouse, gas tank, oiltank, carpark, coal station, change player, found city, power line, transformer station, marker. --CH

They also pop up by themselves, albeit not very often.  If you have fast-growing cities, they'll appear. --MJ

Historically, I've never managed to make cities grow either. But perhaps perseverence will help. --CH

Cities will grow if a good proportion of their citizens can travel to where they want to go. If you pull up the city info dialog, and select both the "passengers" and the "travelled" lines, that's the difference between journeys that were tried and journeys that were completed. You need to make sure the entire city is covered by the transport network in order to get a decent growth rate. --Admiral

Ah, useful. I still can't work out how to tell where people want to go, though. --CH

If you look in the list of cities, you can order it by city size and thus connect the biggest cities together - this approach seems to work well enough for me.  Also, connect to tourist attractions with high passenger factors.  Incidentally, in order to place new factories, you have to first change player to 'Public Service' --MJ

I never really found telling where they want to go particularly useful - better to just try and connect the largest things together, or if possible everything. However, if you open up the city info, the two maps at the top say where the passengers want to go. A yellow dot will appear for a successful journey, and an orange dot for an unsuccessful one. Someone-or-other's law says that the utility of a network scales as the square of its size, so including as much stuff in your transport network is good. --Admiral

Gotcha. Except... why are there two maps? --CH

The one on the left is last month? year?, and the one on the right is this year, being built up. --Admiral

They've always worked for me. - MoonShadow

In which case I presume I have my track badly shaped. I have the following layout:

 ===\\         .
    ---
    |\\        .
    ||\\       .
    ||||
    # #
    # #

where # is a station, and --- is where I put my choose signal. I got trains waiting at the choose when the left-hand station (which was the second one to be built) was empty. (The dots are to stop the \s eating my linebreaks) --CH

I assume there's only one choose signal there, before the fork? (hard to tell from your ASCII art) The platforms form a single station, right? (it's possible to create two adjacent platforms belonging to separate stations if you start the platforms a few tiles apart) If so, it should work. Some recent builds of SimuTrans have a bug where a train behind some train reserves a section of track ahead of that train, causing both to get stuck; try using the magnifying glass on the track and empty platform to see if anything has reserved the track. - MoonShadow

I believe the choose signal is bidirectional, and I have normal one-block signals earlier because there are several lines ending up there. The stations are indeed identical. It's a little hard to tell from SimuTrans, but I think the signal was just before the fork, yes. Should I try putting it a little further back? --CH

Give it a go - I've not experimented with putting any signals on a tile with a fork on it at all, TBH. I usually put them on straight one-way track. - MoonShadow

With a train in the RH station, the track reports 2 waggons in block. Do I need signals at each platform end or well, perhaps?--CH

You shouldn't. Screenshot? - MoonShadow

Choosesignals will act as a presignal in the exit direction, which will make things go all horrible with that layout. Don't exit through it, make a roro station instead. - MoonShadow

Oh, interesting. So you can't build King's Cross, for instance? --CH

(MS) You might get away with something like the following:

         bidirectional track with whatever signalling / bypasses you need to make it work
  /-+--------------------
 x| |c
  +++
  |||
  platforms

 x = unidirectional signal for exit
 c = unidirectional choosesignal on entry

Hang on, maybe you've got a much simpler problem there. One of your platforms is shorter than the other. If a three-tile train ends up in the two-tile platform, its rear will still be on track protected by the choosesignals and a second train won't be able to enter. Could that be what happened? - MoonShadow

Nah, my longest train is an engine and three cars; the three-tile platform is either a click-error or future proof. --CH

Are you using the latest version or the stable version? If it's the stable version, then two trains can't occupy the same section of track between signals, so a train waiting at the incoming choose signal will block a train waiting at the outgoing signal. If it's the latest version, then that may still be the case, if the train is slightly too long. Either way, you should increase the track length between the crossroads and the choose signal, and possibly place another unidirectional signal at the beginning of that section to separate it from the crossroads. However, if you have too many trains attempting to use that station, it will still block. --Admiral

Yes, I understand that. I'm a bit bemused why, when I took the screenshot above (with one platform empty, and no-one in the "out" section), the short train stopped at the choose. And why it then started working later.--CH

Out of ideas. Try the [forums]? - MoonShadow

Ah, it looks like I also need normal one-way signals at the entrance to each platform, as otherwise the choose signal sees the next block as full. I'll give it a go later. --CH

Huh? Always worked for me without. Platforms contain implicit signals at entry and exit, I am told. - MoonShadow

Pak or version differences? V88.10.5 here. --CH

Ah, I don't think I've actually used the stable build in anger. Ignore me. - MoonShadow

That makes sense for the stable version. It's kind of perverse that way. The latest version does things much more sensibly in some ways. --Admiral

Pak128 has the British town names. --Admiral

Ah, that'll be why they're on the box, then. Are the Pak64 names hard-coded? I can't seem to find them, even grepping. --CH

The config files list various town name beginnings and ends, and they are combined to form town names. Try grepping for "Apping" or "borough". --Admiral

Aha! In which case I may be able to get actual UK towns by specifying them as prefixes, and no suffixes. Worth a go, anyway. --CH

Try reading simutrans\text\readme_citylist.txt, it explains how naming works. --MJ

Ah, thanks. --CH

You can always rename a city, you know. --Admiral

 +-------+
 |  Oil  | #
 | Field | #
 +-------+ #
           |
           |
 +-------+ ##      +-------+
 | Refin-| ##      | Gas   |
 | ery   | ##*     | Stn.  |
 +-------+ |\      +-------+
           | ------###
 +-------+ #
 |  Oil  | #
 | Field | #
 +-------+ 
(# = Station. * = Gas tank)

Is the gas station actually contracted to take its gasoline from that refinery? Is the gas station already oversupplied with gasoline? Does the route for refinery-gas station train correctly list the gas station's platform? - MoonShadow

edit: never mind. It appears that the type of station does affect what can be handled there. The Gas Station stop was only passengers. I added a gas-tank, and it all works now!. --CH

Well, yes. Sorry if I didn't make that clear yesterday. It just doesn't have to be a platform that provides the ability to handle things of that type, it can be a building. - MoonShadow