Making vehicle diversity more useful

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  • I have taken a break from this game, and after this recent update I'm considering to dive in again.
    I installed a bunch of vehicle mods back in the day, and there is one thing both in vanilla what bothered me a lot, and even now I don't see mods which solved it:


    The vehicle progression is both boring and unrealistic.


    Whenever I compare two vehicles which can transport the same thing, then always, one of them (usually the newer one) has ALL the following differences:
    - is more expensive to buy and maintain
    - has a greater capacity, speed, acceleration, cargo loading rate, and power


    Therefore whenever a new vehicle appears, unless I'm broke, it's always best to replace all older vehicles with it. And a certain type of cargo at a certain time period is always most optimally served by ONE and only ONE vehicle.


    But take a look at real life: There are many types of vehicles around for the same type of cargo, because there is no single vehicle which is best at everything at the same time.


    Consider the following real life differences which I miss from the game:
    - buses: in the city, buses are slower, but have a greater capacity and a greater loading speed, because they have many wide doors. Long distance buses are faster, but only have 1 or two narrow doors, so loading and unloading passengers is slower. Same for passenger trains, intercity coaches travel faster, but have fewer doors.
    - cargo: there are specialized trucks and carriages, for example, tanks for fluids, and there are general ones which can transport anything. If both are available, then the player just chooses the generalist one. But consider transporting fuel in a tanker: it can be loaded and unloaded fast, with a pump. If you use a general purpose truck, you have to load it into barrels first, so it will be slower. So there should be trucks which have all stats the same or almost the same, but the generalist ones should load slower than the specialist ones.
    - Locomotives. In real life there wasn't a single locomotive most optimal for everything at a given time. Especially in the steam era, you had to chose between speed and traction power. Passenger and cargo locomotives were vastly different.


    What I'm saying is that there should be a variety of vehicles from the same era, when one is not superior in EVERY parameter, compared to the other one. I would like to have, for example, two vehicles where one is not clearly superior in every way. Maybe under certain circumstances one would be better, under other circumstances, the other one.


    Are there mods being planned or developed into this direction?

  • These days i am overall pretty happy with the available variety and its differentiated usefullness for specific tasks in each era ... with all the vehiclemods and mods enabling multiple cars for a tram etc. we have plenty of differences which go against your "one is best for all" impression.


    Busses: we have slow, high capacity buses with high load speed (bendy buses or double deck ones) vs high speed, inter regio buses fit for the autobahn vs tiny buses for the low capacity routes.
    Similar with trams or trucks and the different versions of length/capacity or aditional cars, you even find double deck horse trams which certainly only are smart to use for the most crowded lines.


    available trains have very distinct differences in power and cost, so that we definitly dont have "a one for all" situation anymore and certainly the number of waggons on top of it makes it far more difficult to decide what will do a better job ... here the combinations are staggering and its quiet a challenge to find the most cost effective doing the job in time without lacking or wasting capacity ... always taking the newest, fastest, biggest only gets you into poverty ... it is a balancing act alone to decide to either go for fast&small capacity or slow&high capacity.


    airplanes ... tiny 1-4seater, short, mid and long range ... it gets pretty crowded in my hangar list pretty fast throughout the years


    ships ... that part has indeed several decades with too little alternatives, on that note you still have a point


    long story short: yes, vanilla content wont do if you want variety without the one/newest-fits-all experience ... but the content available by Mods does away with this problem allmost entirely, all it takes is a lot (seriously A LOT) of downloads ... but its worth the time to do this.


    Also I strongly recommend to use the "no end year" Mod, plenty of situations where an older model stays the better option for some decades longer ... and not just on short/low capacity lines where attributes like higher speed or more capacity only wil cut into your efficiency/profit.



  • With all the available locos, waggons and railcars there is already a good balancing.


    Attention: self-promotion!


    At least for the buses, your wishes have already come true:
    Seamons ÖNV-Mod (Overview): Steam-Download


    - The version with trailer (more capacity) is always slower than the one without.
    - There are small buses until the very end.
    - There are often city- and overland versions.


    The only problem is, that some other bus-modders did not a suiting balance to vanilla and also vanilla has sometimes wrong values . This Mod can help.

  • Regarding your comparison to real life, the thing is most of what you miss don't necessarily work with the game scale and mechanics, which make balancing a bit tricky, especially if you want material that respect their real life specifications.


    For example on passengers trains, the best ones would almost always be trains that are fast to accelerate, have a decent max speed and good capacity/loading speed, because of the relatively low distances between stations. Add to that the fact that the game make no differences between standing or seating passengers and the best solution for your lines will basically be a real life commuter or some regional express trains, even if you consider your line to be a long distance one. With the very basic economy of the game, and from a profit perspective, you will have a single best train for the majority of your passengers lines, which may not even be the one with the greatest speed or capacity, but the one capable of transporting the biggest amount of people every month.


    For the same reasons, some trains will never be the best at anything in TpF, like for example some high speed train with slow acceleration and slow loading speed, because the maps are usually not big enough for the difference in speed to make up for the time lost during the loading at the station and the slow acceleration to max speed.


    Of course it's a bit of a generalization, and it depends on your map size and settings, but given the economic system of Transport Fever, sometimes you have to forgot about the "best" for the sake of variety.

  • For the same reasons, some trains will never be the best at anything in TpF, like for example some high speed train with slow acceleration and slow loading speed, because the maps are usually not big enough for the difference in speed to make up for the time lost during the loading at the station and the slow acceleration to max speed.

    With buses I could imagine the usefulness of both a slow, fast loading one with higher capacity (to gather passengers for a train station) and a faster, slightly lower capacity one to travel between two nearby towns.
    And with trucks, a single-purpose one which goes back empty, and a multipurpose (but slower loading) one which has several changes of cargo type on the route.

BlueBrixx