Maintenance Costs In Depth

[RedKnight]

If I'm reading things right, I can take the ARC values from your engine stats spreadsheet and divide that by the number of maintenances per year to get the optimal fixed maintenance cost, ya?

Setting fTrainMaintModifier to 0.000001 and multiplying base maintenance costs by 1000000 seems to work for killing the periodic increases. I should have seen 4 increases by now but it hasn't budged.

Yes, if we're understanding each other right. The maintenance fees in your Trains Report (F4) should confirm it. Divide the number of years (with January being 0/12 to December being 11/12... hmm... adjust for your tick adjustment... however the heck that would work ).

It's possible you hit a point where a number truncation is effectively causing a zero... or maybe you'll get 1 increase every million ticks or something, laugh. If it works, it works.

There's so much we can't change Especially anything that you'd want to change along with iTurnsPerMonth (city/industry growth rates, periodic maintenance, maintenance frequency, event/patent frequency, etc). ... Now if I could just slow city/industry growth...

You don't see anything in the files, eh? Are there any devs around? They could be willing to help.

EDIT: Is anyone seeing these Civony ads, with a beautiful Queen saying "You're kingdom awaits, my Lord"? She is beautiful - but apparently the kingdom can only afford in-house tailoring.

[Covak]

It's possible you hit a point where a number truncation is effectively causing a zero... or maybe you'll get 1 increase every million ticks or something, laugh. If it works, it works.

I'm pretty sure it does just make it zero. When rounding earnings to the nearest thousand it'll go right down to 0 for small enough loads. And for anything maintenance related it seems to round to the nearest dollar.

That earnings rounding to the nearest thousand is a real problem if you're trying to slow the game down and bringing maintenance and earnings down, too. You can end up with partially full cars earning nothing a lot!

Messing with iTurnsPerMonth seems too messy (assuming you want a genuinely slower, more detailed game and not just a slower calender with the same game speed underneath!). We just don't have access to all the variables we need :/ Fixed maintenance costs are very, very nice, though. Maybe with that change and some small difficulty increase tweaks I can get it to feel how I want...

[maestro4202]

So It looks like it's been a LONG time since this has been explored, but thought it's worth a shot so..

As far as <fTrainMaintModifier> goes, well, it's not working. It simply bumps me +500 still at 1000 ticks.

I've entered it into the scenerio file as:

<szAuthor>Firaxis Games</szAuthor>

<iTurnsPerMonth>64</iTurnsPerMonth>

<fTrainMaintModifier>0.25</fTrainMaintModifier>

<Eras> (etc.....)

.. But again only iTurnsPerMonth seems to take effect.

I was thinking of the other alternatives.

A) What if there was some way to make the Lubrication Patent occur at the start of the game, change the part where it says:
<!-- decrease maintenance costs by 50% --> <fModifier>.50</fModifier>

To something like .90. Then reduce the patent duration to .01 or something so eveyone gets it fast.

Won't do much good as it is tho obviously, since patent duration affects ALL patents and I see no way to force a bid to occur on Lubrication immediatly either..

B) Change <fTrainMaintModifier> in the difficulty settings.. er... wait... is THAT what you were referring to all along? Changing it there and not adding it to the Scenerio XMLs like we did with <iTurnsPerMonth>?

If adjusting the existing <fTrainMaintModifier> located in RRT_Difficulty.XML is what you guys mean all along - then I also see another issue not mentioned: The CPU opponents do not get the benefit of that adjusted value and that sorta puts them in an even less competitive position no?

[maestro4202]

When you refer to <fTrainMaintModifier>, you are simply saying to adjust it in the difficulty.xml, correct? As I believe that will also not affect the CPU opponents - further unbalancing things.

[RedKnight]

Hi maestro4202,

I haven't played Railroads! since back then (2009), so I am super rusty... also IIRC I personally wasn't playing with these variables, just conjecturing with the folks who were ...

In case it helps,

- I think that for most of the conversation, we weren't talking about removing maintenance costs... just trying to level them, so as to remove the micromanagement hassle of having to replace trains. In other words, in theory we would become the same as the AIs, who presumably replace their engines at the optimal time (as shown on the wiki). However, it seems to be more complicated than that, as you can see.
- I can't recall where the variable was located. Maybe the wiki says.
- I vaguely recall that you had to go through special gyrations to get changes to a scenario to work. (Can you get any scenario changes to show up?) But I could be confusing some other game.
- You might find more info on the wiki.

Sorry I can't be more specific. Hope this helps.

Good railroading!

Mike