Maintenance Costs In Depth

[RedKnight]

Thanks, mikeyc! That's mighty kind of you. I'm glad folks have found it helpful. I couldn't bear playing without having a handle on maintenance costs, etc. ... then I guess I got a little carried away, lol. I also found out some really important things, like, don't feed 2 resources into 1 factory... each factory can only "handle" 1 resource's output.

Lowell, it's cool to hear that you made your own maps and mods... did you post them to the wiki with a description? One potential idea re: modding maintenance costs might be to make the periodic maintenance fee be zero (can you edit that?), and set the engines' base maintenance cost to the maintenance cost at their optimal replacement time. If you can do it, it should have the net effect of "simulating" a player replacing engines at their optimal time, without the player actually doing it - IOW, overall it will keep true to the maintenance fees the developers imposed, but simply remove the micromanagement factor of replacing old trains.

Ok folks, keep your boilers stoked! - RK

[Lowell]

Interesting, I will test this idea today on Mud Skippers as the new version is now in beta test mode. Florida Gold was the one I messed with the costs. That scenario runs from 1946 to 1968. The "I-Turns" are set as;
<iTurnsPerMonth>256</iTurnsPerMonth>
This means that one hour of game play equals two years. The scenario usually takes two long or three days to complete. Set at 512, one hour equals one year of game time and so on.
In a sence I have controled time.
Take the mikado,
<szName>TAG_NAME_SOU_MIKADO</szName>
<Year>1910</Year>
<Cost>100000</Cost>
<MaintenanceCost>500</MaintenanceCost>

Default Maintance costs for the makido is 1000, I halved that.
Only because in the early days of the Florida railroads, they had much trouble, floods, huricanes that devistated the rails and cost them dearly. So at the time, the US government stepped in and helped with track, bridge and so forth. I tried to emulate that some on the bridge costs, track and trains on the florida gold mod. It is being upgraded at the moment...more trains eye candy etc.

I had makidos still running at the end of the scenario and well beyond. Full speed and they just kept running. They ran my logging run for the duration of the scenario, as a matter of fact, I have always kept using them as I know others upgraded when playing it.

The Run Length could be extended, say from default 126 to 826. That might stop that switching trains out bit for sure.
<RunLength>126</RunLength>
<RunLength>826</RunLength>

[Lowell]

oops, strike the last idea. I forgot the RunLength is about the wheelset size and animation set.

The maintance costs can be set to zero though.

[RedKnight]

Cool. Well, it's just a thought, anyway... a way to reduce micromanagement without cheating re: maintenance costs.

I never played with the timescale. If you are playng with it, you might take a look at a couple of places on the wiki:

* The Interface section says how to change it... if there's anything to add to what Dr Frag said, that'd be great.

* At Maintenance Schedules, I talk about interval ticks, but I never tested to see how changing the interval might (or might not) impact what I wrote about maintenance fees. Which is to say, I don't know if maintenance is based on ticks (and changing ticks means maintenance will occur at different game times from what I wrote), or it's based on game time (in which case, what I wrote will still be correct... it's just that the player will have more time, or less time, in real life versus the game. I think.). Clear as mud? If you figure this out, it'd be nice to add it to that wiki page. (I can add it if you'd like, if you figure it out.) Probably at this point (long after the game was published) there are other serious fans who are really getting into Railroads! like you are, and are pushing the boundaries (including playing with timescale) past what I/we wrote on the wiki when it first came out. So these folks may appreciate having a little more written on the wiki concerning e.g. what impact changing the time scale has on maintenance, how to remove the micromanagement of replacing old trains, etc.

Yes, I read about how e.g. some railroad to the Florida Keys(?) was absolutely devastated by a hurricane once. Anyway, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun... keep on modding!

RK

[Lowell]

I never played with the timescale. If you are playng with it, you might take a look at a couple of places on the wiki:

Yes all my mods use the ITurns, all have different time scales depending on the length of the scenario and a few other reasons. It works well; I have been using the ITurns all along on all my scenarios, as I think the time line for this game is way too fast.

Yes, I read about how e.g. some railroad to the Florida Keys(?) was absolutely devastated by a hurricane once. Anyway, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun... keep on modding!

Yes a train carrying veterans of WW1 from the Keys tried to race and beat a hurricane. They didn't make it; the hurricane washed the trestle train and all away. It was somewhere after WW1, 1920-21 in that time frame. It was a holiday week, the train was loaded full of Vets. It was Flagler's last stand; all the deaths and destruction bankrupted him. The State of Florida had to step in as well as the US Government and take the rail lines over. The depression kicked in around then as well. The hurricane was a direct hit on the Florida Keys, destroying several small towns. It erased them. As a newspaper report said, it scoured a couple islands clean into the ocean, buildings, trees, rails and all.

I made the maintance costs zero on mud skippers and the scenario ran fine. The game doesn't care if there is not any cost there.

[RedKnight]

Cool. So, do Dr Frag's comments on iTurns sound right? In case you are new to wikis, they are intended to be a repository of collective wisdom. Forums excel at individuals talking about things, and wikis excel at being a library of "the final answer", as best known. It's not hard to edit a wiki; they're designed to let everyone give it a shot. I've edited the main http://www.wikipedia.com a bunch of times. Mostly when some incredibly tiny detail wasn't quite right.

Did you play any of the previous Railroad Tycoon games? This one (Railroads!) has the good point of being another successor of the SM RRT line, but the bad point of being designed primarily for multiplayer. I am not dissing the designer gods... there are lots of mp players out there. But I'm into good solo strategy games, and I miss the RRT series. In one sense, it was a downer for me, but I'm grateful to see anything remotely RRT.

You're saying Dr Frag understood iTurns right? And how does changing iTurns, change maintenance?

You've also said that it's easy to make maintenance increases be zero. I am SO rusty with that R! stuff - I've been through 10 games in a huge way (compare here) since then. I can't remember the XMLs. If you can show specific ways to edit them, I can update the wiki so all users can see how to do it.

Do you know of any books or movies about the Florida Keys disaster? I know I saw it once on the History channel IIRC.

[keotaman]

Pardon me guys, for jumping in. I've been playing (a lot!) the side-to-side scenario, which has been killing me with maintenance fees, about 10 times a year! Decide to reset the ticks from 36 back to 16 per month, and guess what? The PM's went back to 4-5 per year, so they seem to be tied to the "40 ticks" mentioned by RK & Dr.Frag.

As for Flagler's Florida East Coast Lines, Lowell was close. Here's what I found:
Henry Morrison Flagler (January 2, 1830 – May 20, 1913)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Flagler
"The Overseas Railroad, also known as the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, was heavily damaged and partially destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The Florida East Coast Railway was financially unable to rebuild the destroyed sections, so the roadbed and remaining bridges were sold to the State of Florida, who built the Overseas Highway to Key West, using much of the remaining railway infrastructure."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day_ ... ne_of_1935
"In total, at least 423 people (164 residents and 259 veterans employed on the road project) were killed by the hurricane"
"The supervisor of the veterans camps, Ray Sheldon, and director of all Florida work camps, Fred Ghent, have been criticized for their failure to ensure the safety of the veterans as the storm approached."
"However, due to miscommunication between the government and the railway, government officials believed that a train could be readied and sent to the Keys from mainland Florida more quickly than was the case."

There WAS a train wreck which killed hundreds, but they were RR workers, not vets; I believe it was the "1926 Florida-Alabama hurricane - 243 are dead in a hurricane that strikes southeast Florida and Alabama in its duration from September 11th to the 22nd.", but I've not found a definitive answer.
http://www.poetpatriot.com/timeline/tml ... icanes.htm

[Jancsika]

Pardon me guys, for jumping in. I've been playing (a lot!) the side-to-side scenario, which has been killing me with maintenance fees, about 10 times a year! Decide to reset the ticks from 36 back to 16 per month, and guess what? The PM's went back to 4-5 per year, so they seem to be tied to the "40 ticks" mentioned by RK & Dr.Frag.

Since I am the guilty of writing the Side to Side scenario, I have some practical questions.
The reason that I upped to 36 turns/year to slow the action and give the player time to figure out the game goals. I always felt that the 16 turns makes the player too pressed to develop a decent looking result. If the scenario goals are performance oriented (that is move goods in quantities from A to B) it is nice to have a pleasing track layout. In my opinion to run ugly steel bridges on the top of each other is just does not look right. That is why in most of my scenarios I make the steel bridges and tunnels 100x costlier.
As for the maintenance cost, next time I will lower the cost of in accordance with the increase of turns/month.
By the way Keotaman, with 16 turns can you complete the scenario goals? Maybe I should have upped them?

Jancsika

[keotaman]

By the way Keotaman, with 16 turns can you complete the scenario goals? Maybe I should have upped them? Jancsika

No, I changed 'em back to 36, just wanted to see if the maintenance changed. I haven't won the scenario yet; closest was about 1940 when I had about 7 trains running, but with only 30 years left I had no chance. I use the pause a lot, to think, to plan, to try different things. Best I've done so far is to get the Isthmus route ready to run trains by 1918, see attached jpg, it's just sooo hard with only grapes to provide cash (Linton start town). Keo

[Covak]

Just adding my 2 cents here, as this was an issue for me recently...

We're stuck with maintenance every 40 ticks and the increases every 1000 ticks, which is annoying when making iTurnsPerMonth larger. But we do just barely have enough control to compensate! Let's say we want the game 10 times slower...

iTurnsPerMonth = 160 (10x normal)

fTrainMaintModifier = 0.1 (1 divided by 10)

And multiply the base maintenance cost of each train by 10.

So you're not really changing the base maintenance cost from default (you manually multiply them all by 10 so when the game multiplies them by fTrainMaintModifier they go back to normal), but the periodic increases are now 10 times less, which is what we want since they're happening 10 times as often! The increases are more gradual (the point of a slower game, I think!), but still on the same slope as vanilla.

I think this is the only way to do it since we have no control (that I know of) over the periodic increases aside from fTrainMaintModifier.

So in short: use fTrainMaintModifier to set your periodic increase amounts to what you want, then multiply your desired base maintenance costs by the inverse of fTrainMaintModifier.

[Jancsika]

Just adding my 2 cents here, as this was an issue for me recently...

We're stuck with maintenance every 40 ticks and the increases every 1000 ticks, which is annoying when making iTurnsPerMonth larger. But we do just barely have enough control to compensate! Let's say we want the game 10 times slower...

iTurnsPerMonth = 160 (10x normal)

fTrainMaintModifier = 0.1 (1 divided by 10)

And multiply the base maintenance cost of each train by 10.

This is the other solution. Reduce the maintenance cost in the Trains.xml file: as you said.

<Cost>60000</Cost>
<MaintenanceCost>1500</MaintenanceCost>

You can make it zero, or if you are very finecky reduce it proporionally to the increase in turns/month.

[RedKnight]

Right Covak, that sounds like a great solution... or you could do it like Jancsika says... or you can set the periodic maintenance increase to 0 (what's the variable for that?) and set the base maintenance to something near the optimized maintenance cost (adjusted for ticks like you did). Then you basically do away with the micromanagement of replacing aging trains, while still paying the game's intended cost. Actually you'd pay a small price - their maintenance will be more at first than it usually would be. Consider it the cost of making life easy, laugh.

It would be great if these options - including what exactly to look for, and where, in the files - were spelled out on the wiki. I might get to it one of these days, but it's iffy for now.

[Covak]

Right Covak, that sounds like a great solution... or you could do it like Jancsika says... or you can set the periodic maintenance increase to 0 (what's the variable for that?) and set the base maintenance to something near the optimized maintenance cost (adjusted for ticks like you did). Then you basically do away with the micromanagement of replacing aging trains, while still paying the game's intended cost. Actually you'd pay a small price - their maintenance will be more at first than it usually would be. Consider it the cost of making life easy, laugh.

It would be great if these options - including what exactly to look for, and where, in the files - were spelled out on the wiki. I might get to it one of these days, but it's iffy for now.

I may add it to the wiki sometime, too, but it needs more testing Doing it the way I described, you pay *much* more because of the periodic increases being more gradual. So you have to scale fTrainMaintModifier down way more (and the base costs up). You really need a spreadsheet to see what'll happen. If I ever get this all sorted out nicely maybe I'll do one up nice.

There is no variable for the periodic increases That's why I was trying this way. fTrainMaintModifier is the only way we can control the periodic increases, but it also affects the base maintenance cost, hence this ugly mess.

If you don't slow time too much, simply lowering the base maintenance costs a little can have the right effect (and so much more easily!), but the slower you make time, the more those periodic increases ramp up on you and really need adjusting.

I really like the idea of just scraping the periodic increases, though. The replacement game isn't something I care for in single-player. We probably can make them effectively zero (fTrainMaintModifier=0.000001 and add six 0s to all base maintenance costs, or something like that). RedKnight's wicked engine stats spreadsheet off the wiki gives us all we need to figure out those optimized fixed base costs...

Off to try and see how it goes

EDIT: Heh, you are RedKinght Thx for all the info you've posted!

[RedKnight]

EDIT: Heh, you are RedKinght Thx for all the info you've posted!

My pleasure! If the truth be known, I can't stand playing a solo strategy game with factors I don't understand, so I test them. Thank god for wikis... I did tons of stuff from before wikis that nobody knows about, like with Civ2. I really should start a list of all the game wikis I've written on.

The work I posted to the wiki was done when the game was new. At that point, it was enough to understand simply what was happening, period. Now Railroads! is in its (good!) afterlife of hardcore afficionados. This is a long way of saying, I never played with the various XML modifiers under the hood per se, IIRC.

Covak, you can't change the periodic maintenance increase (PMI) anywhere? Now that's a shame. I would have thought it's in there somewhere. Are there any game devs around we can ask?

In case anybody cares, I did search across XML tools and found XML Fox Advance, and its programmer Rustem, to be very helpful (http://www.xmlfox.com). However at the time all I was interested in was getting the RR xml files to dump out like a database I could use (and he since said he improved XML Fox to allow it - but I had moved on). If anybody tries and likes his tool, give him a hello from Mikestar. If he asks, I changed my email addy since then (my isp tanked), but anybody can email me through the board.

Chug on, Railroaders! - RK

[Covak]

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).

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.

Now if I could just slow city/industry growth...