TOPIC:

Anybody oldschool enough to remember Kurt's competitive goal servers? They were amazing:
- Small to medium maps
- Mostly difficult terrain (except for the desert tileset which had high variety distribution)
- Few industries and cities, leading to real competition between companies
- Rotating starting year and tileset (the winner of the previous game could choose if he wanted)

I may be remembering some things wrong, feel free to correct me please.

These made for awesome games where the challenge didn't come only from difficult to navigate terrain and long goals to achieve, but from actual competition between players.

I played on SRV #7 - Temperate Hard Goal, but there are so many industries, everyone can be playing in their own little world and just build as fast as possible. And 1935 Temperate gets old quick.

SRV #K3 seems to always be empty.

So, at the very least, a server like #7, but with far fewer industries and cities, would be great. But to keep things fresh, rotating between tilesets (with different terrain parameters), starting years, and terrain size (256x256, 256x512, 512x512, 512x1024), would be incredible!

Any chances? =]

I remember and played on Kurts (just to take a peak on how page was ^^) and Speedy servers ("the winner of the previous game could choose if he wanted" - it was settings on player's profile). And I agree with you, it was awesome! But, if not mistaken, Kurts ended in 2008 2009 and, at the time, there wasn't so many offers of online servers (good ones, at least) and most of the players from the time are now taking kids to school xD

And, ofc, there was no CityBuilders (as now)... and that, currently, are the preferred of the players (neither BusyBee or any other game modes that are available now). All this makes players to disperse among the online servers (only BTPro has 27 now).

On Kurts (and some other online servers) got their features by changing game code - and only that way. We use some server code changes but there's another ones that are incompatible with our server controller software ( xShunter ), like for example the possibility of rotate some settings (servers #31 and #33 rotates climates, on a random way - not DB related). Maybe some other changes would be possible but you'll understand why so hard on next sentence.

Server #7 is only hard due the train limits and, ofc, the early ages of choo choo trains. You need to balance the use of trains and RV's. K3 it's a bit harder (at least the start) and works like waves: sometimes has a lot of players, others it's empty. I almost got the impression that people nowadays don't like hard games, over easy and relaxing games (only a feeling and related to OpenTTD). About K3, the abundance of water is what makes it harder too, despite for months I've been thinking on make it less "watery" but changing costs of other things. But real life never give up of my nails and free time goes faster that my money xD

And here's an example that you aren't the only one with that feeling: here ; - Guess that's why we made this Tournaments: 1 - 2 - The feeling was closer ^^

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. If at any moment you come with a perfect set of settings, accordingly to what you like, feel free to share the openttd.cfg file. We have a couple test servers, stopped atm. One is reserved to a training server to the (possible) Tournament coming up. The other can be used... if the admin team agrees on give it a chance ^^

Enjoy the games

Edit: if want to talk with some other members, IRC is still the way. Details here .