It's actually the opposite in the US-- the DOT will build them for you for free, but they won't pay for the maintenance. This is the trap that leads so many cities to go bankrupt.
BTW, having a net worth of 1GBP* is NOT a sign that you're doing things wrong. It's unavoidable early on. Look at it this way: you start with 100k GBP which are loaned, so if you laid down some track, that track is acting as the collateral (I hope I used the correct term here) for the loan. In a layman's words, that track is, like the money, not yours. It _will_ be yours once you repay the loan. To save some expenses, one should always aim to (a) repay as much of the loan as possible or (b) use the loan as fully as possible. For example, if you can afford either track A or track B connecting a coal mine to one of two coal power stations, and let's say A (including a train) takes 80k GBP to build and (B) takes 130k GBP to build but delivers the coal to a more distant power station (which increases the payments you receive per ton of coal delivered even in cases where it wouldn't make any sense), try to get 130k GBP on hand and build B. If B is beyond your limit, build A instead and repay as much of your cash on hand as possible. (You pay interest on both loans and cash below zero, but you don't _receive_ any interest for cash above zero.) Never start small ("Oh, that oal mine is only 20 squares from a power station, let's do that!"); due to the distance increasing your income, going small is a noob trap! In fact, I'd recommend creating a 512x512 map for your first game, or at the very least 256256, as little water (one edge is OK) and as flat as possible, and without rivers. Slopes and water are just obstacles you want to minimize until you get the hang of the game. Also, you shouldn't play on Easy except for your first game. Easy takes 25% off all prices, but the economy of the game is still easy on normal and hard. Play normal after that, because the normal prices are easier to memorize. And if you really want a bit of a challenge, play Normal with infrastructure upkeep enabled. That'll become gradually harder with time (actually with network size, so you don't get penalized for stagnation). You can think of it as the game "taxing the rich." *I always play with GBP, since that's what the PC uses; every currency except GBP is that internal price or value times a fixed conversion factor, e.g. 1:2 for $, 1:4 for DM, and 1:40 for yen (not 100% sure about the last one).
I had to try this myself. First run I did from 1950 to 2050 because I wanted to experiment with all train types including maglevs. Copied your approach with several train rings around the city and made it to approx 500k by 2050. Made some interesting observations during the first run regarding ships. So for the second run I`m going completely nuts with ships, exploiting their ability to pass through each other and stack at stations. Already passed the 500k at the halfway point in 2000. I`m achieving 70-80% transportation rates for passengers and mail. At the moment the city has crossed the 700k mark and there are still ~40years left until 2050. Fingers crossed that I get it to 1M.
@@hoovyzepoot dude, 1M is absolutely no problem with this method. But the micromanagement towards the last few years is complete mayhem. I could hardly keep up with buying new ships and build new blocks. I used a 3x3 base grid and connected 4 of those "blocks" linearly with 2 ports, each in the center of block 1 and 4. This gives you a 100% port coverage of a 6x5 "main block". And inside the small channel between the ports you can run as many passenger and mail ships as you want, exploiting their stackabaility. These main blocks are horizontally and vertically tileable to cover the whole map and only like 8% of the space is actually occupied for transport. It's nuts.
This gives me strong Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs vibes, if that mad factory owner protagonist was a transport company owner/city sponsor and planner instead. The Cult of the Almighty Grid arises.
I have thousands of hours into this game, both the original and TTDpatch and OpenTTD. Was even a developer on OpenTTD back in the day (my code was what paved the way to having maps bigger than 256x256 tiles). There are dozens of tips and tricks that could help you do better in OpenTTD (And beat the yogs at jinglejam every time without fail). If you ever need a tutorial on proper signal usage, or how to make that city growth work even better for you, I'll gladly set some time apart and do that.
Thanks for helping improve the game. Hard to tell how many hours I sunk into it (starting from TTDpatch times), wouldn't call it many thousands, but definitely more than thousand. I remember the times when stations could finally get longer than 5 tiles, "station walking" wasn't necessary anymore, overall better usability. And then the whole newgrf system. Almost always had dbsetxl enabled in a game and the station sets like "industrial stations", "japanese stations" and "newstations" (these are the ones I remember, even though I haven't played the game in over a decade). The game music still makes me feel nostalgic. 😅
@@superdau The game music is nostalgic, without fail. Not just the theme song (both TT and TTD versions) but also in-game songs like Little Red Diesel. The game having was one of the first ever where you had an in-game song selector system (and people figured out how to put their own midi's in it long before ttdpatch was a thing). The TTDpatch era at peak was an amazing thing. So many developers with their own ideas that just refused to work together, but somehow people made it work anyway, sometimes to their chagrin (I'm nudging at original db set developer here). But it was still an assembler patch on an assembler written mess of a game code. I remember the first time someone ran the ttd code through an asm-to-c converter and just posted the results online even though that was illegal. People were scared the whole community would get a cease-and-desist any day while that stuff was around. But some C coders went through the white-lab process and replaced every single line of auto-generated code to arrive at what we call openttd now. There was uproar the day openttd got its own subforum on the tt-forums. But it didn't take long for its features to surpass ttdpatch, and the future was clear. The game we have now is so much better that it makes the original games unplayable (even if you manage to get them to run in the first place). But it's still true to the feel of the original that I don't miss it. If you have a group of friends that enjoy this game, I highly recommend playing a long-term game using daylength settings (still not in the base game, you have to download a patch pack version for it). One server running the game on REALLY hard settings with an in-game year taking an hour or more. Log in, build a bit to spend your money, min-max your routes and log out again until the next day. I posted some After Action Reports on the tt-forums if you're interested in how that works out.
Your work is very much appreciated and loved. Tutorials from the source of how to better use signals would be incredibly helpful, it’s been the biggest bottleneck in growing my cities and systems.
this was probably one of the first games I ever played, I don't remember how I found it or how I even learned to play but there were some great times had as an 11 year old with his first laptop so thanks for being a part of that
A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... i got in.
I like how at about the half hour mark, the game morphs from "I want to build a big city, here's how I'm doing it" to "The grid is love, the grid is life, long live the grid."
This. Was. Fun. I don't really need more TTD. I don't mind more TTD. But just the concept of "I have a wacky or interesting idea, I want to do something insane for fun, let's see if this can be done, etc..." is some of the content I enjoy most. It's hard to get something like this constistently, but it's not necessary. A rare gem to find in one's recommendations every few weeks or months makes it special, genuine, memorable.
Found this in my recommendation two nights ago and finally watching it afking on OSRS. This gameplay makes me want to play this so much I installed it, and I'm greatful its free and opensource even on steam.
@@ianmesser9289 its such a timeless wonderful game, used to play it a lot when i was younger cuz i had a mac and didnt want to pay for games. For an OpenSource game its really just maximised all possible gameplay options for a tycoon, and honestly its better than many of the more prestige Transport Tycoons that cost more
I thoroughly enjoyed watching a man slowly loose his mind challenging himself with such a pointless task and then realizing that in fact there are even more pointless challenges out there to do!
A few tips for people who might be new to the game: You can also hold down crtl when placing stations to "combine" them. So for example, if you build a bus station in the center of the city and then you build a train station at the northern end of the city with crtl+click, you can have those two stations act as one, meaning that trains will immediately pick up any passengers from the bus station, and vice versa. You can combine any type of station, bus stations can be combined with other bus stations, cargo truck stations, train stations, airports, and so on, everything can be combined with everything. (That is what he did towards the end of the video to increase the coverage of his feeder bus stations - he basically just combined bus stations that were a short distance away from each other) An issue that can happen when you build stuff is that sometimes your rating with the city will drop down to a point where you are no longer allowed to build anything, not even a bus station. The most frequent reason for this is terraforming (elevating/lowering land, or deleting rivers), but I think you also get a minor penalty for just building over trees. If you don't have any stations yet, because you're still planning out train lines and whatnot, or maybe because you initially overlooked it while going past to some other destination, you might consider it "lost". However, cities like it when you plant trees near them. So, if you happen to want to build something in a city and for whatever reason your rating has dropped to the point where you're not allowed to build anything, just plant trees until you're allowed to set up at least a small bus station or two, then you can use those to slowly improve your rating again.
I have thousands of hours in this game, albeit the Transport Tycoon Deluxe version, in MS-DOS, on our old 1993 486DX 33mhz... First of the bat, you could do a scenario with a pre-built grid. And then plop the city down in the middle, and with a scenario, you can get rid of lakes and rivers and heights too. Second, you should ensure the ground is at least 3 tiles high. So you can eventually replace all the tracks with tunnels that can cross each other underground. Third, you should refrain from building anything but train networks. Trains have the highest throughput, and if managed correctly, do not crash as often as planes do. Placement of industries on your scenario map should be in the farthest corners of the map to ensure the greatest profit. Also because they wont take up precious space you city needs to grow. You should go around the city and kill all the water fountains. They, like churches in simcity2000, only cost room and provide nothing to the almighty population limit. And you should built lots of stations in unpopulated area's and connect them with underground rails to anticipate future growth. And it would probably help to start in the year 1950 as you can almost right away electrify the grid and save on expenses early game.
@@MarijnRoorda or yonky spooky it halfway off the screen just saying it will auto delete if it’s halfway or more but not entirely off the screen which is inefficient but really fun actually.
Two things I was thinking of when watching this. 1. When he was speaking about the Grid... "The Gri(p)d was loose!" 2. Suddenly the video evolved into a AmbiguousAmphibian video xD
Pro Tip: you can start with a city of ZERO population. Just found a subsidiary and put the headquarters in the same city, a bit away from your main headquarters. Both headquarters count for bus passangers. So while you haul your employees between the two headquarters, you will actually make a profit and the city will grow.
Buses just don't cut it for cities, so if you are not playing with trams then you need to build a much denser network of rail lines. My technique for carrying maximum passengers is to build the entire network as primarily an array of single track lines that are far enough apart that the coverage zones don't overlap, and have infrequent cross-lines. But, here's the key thing, all the lines are underground! Lower the ground to build the stations and then put most of the track in tunnels, with lowered land at junctions and to allow signals. This gives you more building space at ground level for houses. Then have trains running in one-way loops around, to minimise conflicts. You can achieve quite phenomenal throughput in this way!
Back in '95, I got my first PC. It came with a CD full of games. Jazz Jackrabbit, Warcraft 1 and 2, X-com, Breach, and also Transport Tycoon (not the deluxe version). Most of these (and others on the CD) have held up very well across the years. While I enjoyed the others quite a bit, it was TT that would eventually eat up years of my life. Ironically, this game made by one person (using only Assembly of all things) has remained my favourite over the years. It has taught me so much over the years. I would like to thank the Bulgarian pirate CD factories, and the especially the person that made that particular selection. Much like PotatoBoy here is shaping Megacity, so too that CD has shaped my life.
I've been in a similar situation, but it's been 1998. A paper sheet with a long list of games and how much space they take was circulating through the elementary school, you've picked whatever you wanted until you've filled the 650 MB capacity of the CD, then paid to a guy who knew a guy, and in about a week, you've got your freshly burned CD. My order included TTD, SimCity 2000, Warcraft 2, Duke Nukem 3d, Starcraft, both Dooms, Dune 2, GTA 1 and a bunch of other stuff I can no longer remember. In retrospect, it's impressive how much stuff fit on a single CD; everything having its cinematics ripped out to save space helped.
Very emotional tale of a PC gamer living in a poor country in the 90s
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I love how you remove any slope because "it makes it faster" but you decide to remove any diagonals making your distances way, way longer, that's brillant !
I can only speak from my experience with factorio, but I've found that troubleshooting trains is less finding a needle in a haystack and more like a man holding a gun to your head, screaming at you to find said needle
Its even worse when you got multiple cities and multiple industries all connect willy nilly. The headaches I got from this game shortened my lifespan by 50 years but it was worth it. Sometimes I want to play the game but I think about the potential consequences of ever troubleshooting shit again - then you find out it was just one signal light.
OpemTTD's rail signals are actually really reliable and useful compared to Factorio. (Especially the path signals). That's sorta the issue, because they allow you to do anything you'd do IRL, so you end up trying to do really complex builds.
45:45 Yes, if you've ever seen any multiplayer OTTD server, eventually every single map ends with a completely flat map that's just endless urban sprawl.
To maximize growth: - Turn off allow cities to build their own roads in options, so the city doesn't make any dead ends, at the expense of extra road maintenance cost for your company - The way the growth mechanic works is it starts from the center, at the city name, checks along a random road for an empty plot of land, OR small houses to upgrade after a certain total population has been reached, be aware that the mechanic will give up if it can't a spot within a given timeframe, which is a very common occurence in 100.000+ population cities. To minimize that issue, the best solution I have found is to make a single spiral road with no intersections, apart from the center where you'd put your 5 bus depots. Given the 2 digit population start, even with all 5 bus stations serviced mothly, city growth will be painfully slow (once every 200 days) So naturally, you'd want some other income to keep funding new buildings which speeds up the early stage significantly.
@@AngryKettle no, but eventually the "main" city will eventually flood into other nearby cities/towns, which has their own agent, but even if you demolish those down to 0 population, they will not go away.
The bestest way to extend the coverage of a train station is Bus/Truck stops. You just make a chain of stops coming out of the train station, as long as they are next to each other, they will link up and be considered to be a part of the same station. And when you've extended as far as the game lets you, you just demolish the extra stops in the middle of the chain and leave the last one. The game will still consider it a part of the train station, and the train station will pick up stuff from town accordingly. Also works with airports.
The constant mentioning of the grid and making things perfect makes me wonder if Potato was really become more like Clu from Tron. Not to mention transforming everything to serve the grid plays well into Clu's vision of the Grid and the plans for the rest of the world.
I've always dreamed of sort of a mega combo game with all different sims. Like you would have a giant map where anyone can do anything. Some people play Simcity and build the city for you and then the TTD player is responsible to bring you the goods, meanwhile Flight Sim/Bus Sim/Train Sim/Truck Sim are actually driving the routes that you prepare... and so on. Other possible inclusions could be like Farm Sim, Hospital/Mall/Prison/Fire dept. Sim etc...
We are the Grid. Lower your hills and surrender your water. We will add your residential and transportational essence to our own. You will be gridsimilated. Resistance is futile.
You can actually propagate a city in OTTD by building a tunnel from the middle of the city underground to the desired location. The town will start then building an offshoot at that location.
Wow, this hour passed way quicker than I thought! This video was surprisingly entertaining, and I like your calm voice :). And I also learned something new about city growth, one of the most fun part in the game for me! While watching the first part I was about to leave a comment about automatic vehicle replace, but, thankfully, you quickly started using them as well :). I remember also filling one map completely by a 3x3 grid, although there were 9 cities instead of one, and I usually followed a pattern about roads crossing railways: North-South is a bridge, West-East is a tunnel. And I admit that minimizing diagonal railways like you did makes for a prettier look, but they really slow the trains down, especially the fast ones.
I really liked that video! That was until I noticed tiny pixel roads spreading on my desk, like an amoeba that keeps on growing. My entire apartment is now part of T H E G R I D If you watch this video be advised: your home, your yard, your neighborhood, even your city may be next.
I imagine the "I must feed the grid, I must become the grid" is how Robert Moses felt about highways. And I'm terrified to think... how long WOULD it take this Megacity to fill this entire map grid?
passing sidings are still very important for railroads (unless you're csx and you run trains 3x longer than your sidings and yards...) you just have to make sure to signal them with a chain signal so that if the block on either side of it is occupied, the passing train only has the siding open
Basically, the single track between sidings must be one long signal block, and it _must include the switch squares_ on both ends, or a train will eventually occupy the switch while waiting, causing deadlock. The important thing about "single" signals is that they're never truly single, but are perma-red at the back, except for _one_ signal where it's clearly stated that it can be passed from the other side. When I was a n00b in the game, I tried forcing traffic directions with chains of waypoints. It didn't work. I thought that single signals wouldn't outlaw traffic in the other direction, but then I started reading the OpenTTD wiki, which is a goldmine of advice and information. For example, diagonal track saves distance (but no building cost) and can help with speed, esp. if your accel is poor or top speed is high. I too try to keep track as level as possible, and mostly consisting of the two directions the closest to the target (i.e. mostly one straight trak and one diagonal track type).
you absolutely don't need chain signals for functional passing sidings, normal pathing signals will do fine (I'd say better even). Potato is just bad at signals :D
First time watcher of your content, absolutely loved it!! Used to play this game all the and I now very much want to take on this challenge and feel a beckoning ... the beckoning. Of the Grid 😅
I came here for an interesting video on openttd and I got weirdly compelling poetry on a fucking road grid… absolutely fantastic. Great first video to discover the channel with
Around the middle of this video, I felt like you were reciting an amazing poem about “The G R I D” and I was mesmerized. I hope to see you play more of this!
OpenTTD taught us that public transportation is the driving force behind the economy. Euro Truck Simulator taught us that there's no speed limit in the shoulder of the road. Roller Coaster Tycoon taught us that the secret behind building a great park is never allowing anyone to leave. And people say video games are a waste of time! 😁
I´m feeling ships, and a city wide canal network is the way to go. Them not colliding with each other seems very useful, and you can transport all the cargo on the same network.
"The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day I got in." -Potato McWhiskey, 2023
"Believe it or not, as in the real world, the main driver of economic activity is people getting on buses. This is why I'm running for election in 2024 based entirely around a campaign of replacing every single car on the road with a bus." HEAVY URBANIST BREATHING. I'd unironically vote for you. Potato for Prez 2024.
GRID FOR LIFE!!. i can't to see a episode 2 of this playthrough. you really did great job it makes me feel want to life in your mega city. keep it up hope you always well
When you're upgrading trains, you can just drag the old engine straight to the bin and then buy the replacement. The replacement engine will inherit the orders from the old one :)
I have watched a handful of OTTD videos before, and I have never enjoyed them. However, this was super fun! Great video, and glad I found your channel!
Next time you should make a metro by putting the stations into depressions one lower than the city and connect them by tunnels. Increases the number of possible houses in the catchment area.
only watched the first 17 minutes now, but just saying: you don't need to manually replace the trains, you can order all, or certain groups you created (eg. Passenger, transport), and make them automatically replace themselves when they are ready for it. Works really well if you have many buses or like 40 trains
Fun fact: Prehistoric (and some very rural communities) used favors instead of currency, a complex series of favors is what makes the most sense in an era of complex scarcity. It is often said that barter predates currency but barter doesn't make much sense because of the exchange problem, and such systems are too impersonal for small-well connected groups.
20:00 - If you put a max sized rail station in the center of a city, and later add an airport next to it, you can actually manage the flow of passengers and mail for a city of any size. But that requires a lot of very long term planning.
When you want to manually upgrade a train engine, drag the new engine just behind the old engine. Then, delete the old engine. This way, the train maintains its route, settings, and train number.
If you want to expand your stations' coverage, just hold CTRL and place down a bus/cargo/train/airport station like 5 or more tiles away (not too far tho) and you will get the choice to either make that station you justp ut a new station, or conenct it to an already existing station that is next to it. So you can increase the coverage rate by a lot by just placing random bus stations that are as far as possible. Note that there is a max station width limit so you just can't make an infinite line of stations and make them a single station.
"It is very importand not to have any slopes with that train." *proceeds to refuse to build diagonal rails, which means train will have to slow down duing multiple turns*
