TOPIC:

Has anyone ever seen an issue where cargo being delivered causes a negative income? Specifically I have good generating train income delivering wood to a paper factory (on Winter, of course) and all of a sudden, every load started costing a significant amount of $$. In other words, instead of cashing and showing a green income, it cashed and showed a red cost. This caused all my trains to run into the red, obviously.

I couldn't see any change that I'd made that would cause that... I've been playing TTD a long time, and I'm not sure I've ever seen that issue.

Any thoughts?

Holden

Sorry but this is not an error with game.
I have seen it before and it has happened to me.
It happens when the cargo has been in transit for too long it starts to drop value.

You say you didn't change anything but your trains may have got stuck somewhere then freed off to look like nothing ever happened.

Mr_Frosty

Interesting.. I've never seen that happen like that before. So values won't drop to zero, they'll actually start to climb into the negative? That means that in some cases, it will actually cost to deliver a load...

I wonder if it happens only with loads that are in transit from a different station? That might make sense, since the game is crediting the first leg with 'transfer' income, which I would assume comes out of the profit of the final leg.

So, logically, I guess this makes sense. Thanks for the info, and helping me work through that.. I'll keep an eye on it if it happens again, and see if I can verify that's what's really happening.

Blockages on the route may of been problem but it can also occur if you are taking wood (for example) to a station hub that is further away from the paper factory than the distance between the forest and paper factory. (Where both reasons are a result of long transit times)


For example.

If your forest is 50 tiles away from the paper factory but instead of taking it direct to the paper factory you take it to your main wood hub (where you may collect all wood on the map) which is 150 tiles away from the paper factory. Then the value of the wood cargo from that forest would be only worth '50 tiles' whereas the transit has been for '200 tiles + the amount of time it was sitting in the hub station' Therefore if the direct route is shorter than going to a hub, you will always lose some money. By taking loads of wood that has a longer indirect route you start mixing that with your high income wood routes (where the hub to paper factory is the shorter 'direct' part of route) you will find that the trains will carry a mixture of the both, hence causing the income to either be very low or even negative for all trains delivering cargo from that hub. Due to the extremely long transit times that the wood has been travelling for.

Hope that helps, and wasn't too confusing, I know I had to read that several times myself

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I have been playing this game on and off since the '90s, and it astounds me that I can still find new complex things out about the engine... Great stuff.

Thanks!

- Holden