CPU train spamming

[Cash on Wheels]

Is there a way to stop the CPU with just 3 stations but 12 trains.? It can get amusing watching 8 loads of alumimim & 8 meat move back & forth. The cpu was "unmergarable" after 5 years! I know this has been discussed, but I do not see another thread dedicated to this problem.

[Cash on Wheels]

Example B: I have a city of four houses & a brewery in the top corner of a map. There aren't many other houses around. It gets a train ~once year. Yet 50% loads on the trip away from tiny town were what it brought to tiny town last time.

[Wolverine@MSU]

When cargo gets moved from A to B (assuming auto consist) it's because the demand (price paid) at B is higher than the current price at A. Once the cargo leaves A and arrives at B, there is a surplus of it at B and a deficit at A. Before too long, assuming that there's more of the cargo at B than at A, the demand shifts, and there's a higher demand at A, especially if there's a glut of the cargo at B. A train leaving B and headed back to A will then pick up that cargo and deliver it. The balance then shifts back again and when the demand at B is higher than at A, the cargo will ship from A back to B. These demand changes can happen fairly quickly, especially with infrequent service or if the destination is a long way away from the source.

[RulerofRails]

"Natural" re-hauling is a by-product of the dynamic demand calculations. You have noticed some bad cases. There is no cure-all for this problem. What I would recommend is a good seeding setup where the regions and cities are setup to facilitate a flow outwards from a cargo source and especially with double-up recipes in nearby cities being avoided. I like Oilcan's seeding style. He consistently comes up with nice setups where much of this "natural" re-hauling is minimized.

Of course, there will always be special cases like near the edge of the map, very isolated towns, and some land-locked areas surrounded by rugged terrain. There is the timing issue (this is why long-distance hauls are more susceptible). Timing is interesting in this game, and probably a factor that most people don't pay lots of attention to. It can add that extra something to your company growth. Exponential stuff. Circumstances must be right, and for me finding/using them is most of the fun of playing.

[Cash on Wheels]

On most of the back & forth runs the some of the individual car loads are worth $7k or less. Now the auto manage minumum haul amount I believe is $2k or $3k. Is there a way to turn this up in the hex editor to lets say $5 or $6k each? That should help some.

[RulerofRails]

Not a bad idea. Would probably have to modify the exe file. Haven't heard of anybody who tried to edit that in the exe file. Modding the exe is above my skill level unfortunately.

[Gumboots]

The default minimum is $2k, as far as I can tell from actual gameplay. Cargo will move at $2k/load, but won't move at $1k/load.

I have no idea where this is set in the .exe, so no idea how to change it. It's another one of those RT3 things that is a no-brainer in principle but virtually impossible in practice, due to us not having a map of the file.

[Cash on Wheels]

Its my only gripe about the otherwise well done 1.06 patch

Either the ship@loss feature or the train drop-off /pick-up feature is causing too many short haul transfers.

[RulerofRails]

There were two obvious changes to the AI in 1.06 that I remember. The first taught the AI to always route their engines with a one-car minimum limit on the first stop on the routing list. The other taught them to look for good industry purchases at the beginning of every month instead of only once or twice per year. But neither of those things change their train profitability a lot from all that I have seen.

I'm curious as to what makes you say this is only a 1.06 thing? I know for sure that I wasn't being specific about 1.06 when I commented before. I doubt Wolverine or Gumboots were either. The AI don't know about using the custom consist feature so it's impossible for them to use ship-at-a-loss.

Which map are we talking about? Could it be a price increase bug that they are exploiting?

I'm interested in seeing for myself. Perhaps you could post a saved game. Reason this can be a pain: if you were using custom stuff on the map I need to know what stuff so I can make sure to have it available for the saved game to load. Happy to try in any case.

[Cash on Wheels]

Here are the lab results on a test 64x64 map. Auto consist 8 car loads max, 0 min

town 1.05s (45% density, no indies) has a warehouse supplying 4 each of autos, pulpwood, corn, coal & alcohol.

town 1.05c(55% density, no indies) has a warehouse demanding 2 each of autos, pulp, crn, coal & alcohol.

Im using 3 thirsty red devils for five years.

Example 1: v1.05 only. The supplying town only received 22 express loads from 1.05c. not one freight

Did the same thing for 1.06 but got a much different result. 156 loads!

So the 1.06 has a bigger "return to sender" problem than I though! Unit Auto trains were being returned by oct2020!

[Cash on Wheels]

Southern pacific, a coast to coast map can also have this problem while playing on 1.06.

Did a test on expert, not much diffrence 118 loads.

I have 4 versions installed 1.05 1.06 trainmaster & my own. So no extra content is interfering.

[RulerofRails]

Interesting test. One thing I would point is that you have different pricing in your 1.05 vs 1.06 tests. This means that your testing environment is not constant.

One of the changes in 1.06 caused the behavior described here. Among other things, in 1.06 there is no way to control the density of houses in regions other than cities. Possibly this can be reverted by tweaking the settings for the house.bca file?

I am almost sure that extra houses and other seeding differences are the reason for the difference in your pricing. And may even goes a good way towards solving the "return to sender" issue you describe.

[Cash on Wheels]

The real problem is a lack of station price stabilization in 1.06. In this 1.05 SS look economic cell price colors for alcohol in the town 1.05s. Notice how the price of alcohol is lower @ the cell where the station is? That feature is disabled in 1.06.

Even if you switch the city density around. 1.05S (73%) vs 1.05c(42%) there are no freight return loads to 1.05s. The houses in the supplying warehouses city(1.05s) get dibs on what comes out of the warehouse first. The the leftovers get shipped to 1.05c. where it stays until the load gets consumed or rots.

BTW If you change the department stores BCA footer settings you can have a many as you like. . Those sliders for the municipal buildings in the editor have no effect that I notice.

[Cash on Wheels]

(most of this post was removed by cash on wheels 9/15/16)


On expert in 1.06 I shipped 130 loads back instead of 155. Little differnce.

[RulerofRails]

I setup a test with the same parameters you described and got the same results. In 1.05 there was no back-hauling, in 1.06 it happened a lot. Good find.

If the changes in 1.06 that affect the train routing cause this, seems that those calculations are more powerful than we would expect. Similar to my finding that price outbreaks for the increase price events only occur when trains are run. More info.

I went a little further and tested having a Meat Packing Plant (warehouse supplied 4 Livestock) in one city with no warehouse demand in the other. I did eventually get a back-haul in 1.05 with this but it was after 3 years or so. So we can't say that back-hauling doesn't happen, just that it's far less common.

I will also state that a station at the edge of the map and at the end of the line is in a unique position in terms of the demand map. I'm pretty sure you will see more back-and-forth in 1.05 where the areas in question are in the middle of the map and on a larger network. Also, the warehouse demand acts a bit differently to the blanket effect of the miniature house demands that are easy to overwhelm, encouraging re-hauling.

---

In that modified test when I ran the Meat Packing Plant, I also removed all the other supply functions in the warehouse and deleted the demand warehouse completely. Because I did the modifications to a saved game (originally made it at game start in 1.05 so that I could get identical seeds in both 1.05 and 1.06) I already had some Autos, Pulpwood, Coal and Corn on the map. This is how the price map for Autos looks at the end of 5 years.

Price of the red square is $286. Other cells are right around $345. These price islands have been mentioned before, and thanks to your investigations we can say that they are mainly a 1.05 thing.

These price islands sometimes take 2 years before they will suddenly "break" and jump back to the price of the surrounding cells. Frequency of service could have an impact on their strength and duration.

In starting off some scenarios such as the fictional "Impossible" I relied on these breaks to get hard-fought capital for expansion. That scenario has many topographic features that help slow cargoes progression overland so that it can be re-captured by your station. On flat ground, most of the cargo will drift away before the island disappears, so they aren't exploitable and you lose control of the cargo. These price islands can be annoying when trying to send resources to an industry (it's 1.05, so no ship-at-a-loss).

I feel it's a "cheat" because of the profit involved, but the player can build a Small Station on an adjacent cell. Then haul there for a high one-time profit. That tends to break the island.

[Gumboots]

Some interesting stuff being turned up here. I'm starting to think that the best game would be one that applies some, but not all, 1.06 changes to 1.05.

[Cash on Wheels]

Finally found out how to turn on the price islands in v1.06! It took me 3 hours to find something that I looked at 3min into the .exe search!

Offset dec: 183100 / hex: 2CB3C needs to put back to 74 from EB.

I will give it a field test tomorrow. If you custom consist automoblies, the train just goes back and forth for $0K in between the two cities on my test map.

Messing with the .exe MAY turn your 1.06 into version 0.00 for some reason @ the main menu.(not the reason)

[RulerofRails]

If all custom consist loads are moving for $0k, that would create different gameplay problems. Hopefully I understood this wrong.

[Cash on Wheels]

Those Islands pop up after you custom consist something from green to red. So, you can still have negitive loads. If you force something from its natural source (i.e. bauxite from a baux mine) to an aluninum mill it should have little effect. However if you decide to take bauxite from an established aluminum mill, where the price of bauxite is high. Then force move it to your new alum mill were the price for bauxite is still low. That move will disrupt bauxite movment all over the map.

[Gumboots]

By "islands" you're talking about the depressed prices at station, right? They appear in 1.05, and in 1.05 you can't ship at a loss, so in the case of 1.05 they have to be caused by something else.