TOPIC:

Theres a thing I dont get.
Why are the basic trains (not monorail/maglev) in desert and winter are that really much slower than the ones in temperate?
The best engine on winter or desert map is the Turner Turbo with its 160 mph. Its equal to the temperate Floss 47 or sh 30 engines. There are 4 better enginies on temperate: sh 40 (177 mph), sh 125 (201 mph), TIM (241 mph) and AsiaStar (265 mph). The Turner Turbo comes out in 1976. Why they dont get any better engines until the monorail (1998)?
The AsiaStar is faster than the Turner Turbo with 105 mph, its more than 60%.
So is there any specific reason that winter and desert trains are so bad?

For example I played on server 1 (temperate short goal) and on server 4 (desert short goal).
With 14 square long goods trains with (2 AsiaStars in it) on temperate I can get ~380k pounds.
On desert with 14 square long goods trains (with 2 Turner Turbos in it) I got if I remember well (really didnt played much on desert servers) ~200k pounds. (of course with the longest distance through the map, from one corner to an other and well built rail, with no sharp turns or going up to hills)

So the difference the train speed causes is really big I think.

I think the only way to play effectively the desert short goal would be to start a company at serber start, afk 8 years, then reset and start an other comany and play with monorail. So why not just start the server in at least 1998 to have it from start?

hi

many of the questions are on OpenTTD devs field! and reason is related to don't exist electric tracks on desert/arctic (only possible using some newgrf's, making servers less user friendly - for some, at least)
Taking this in account, there's a couple options to avoid that gap of no new/faster trains: an earlier or a later start! And both have their own advantages but I'll say: a later start means less chances for late starters - it's more balanced on earlier starts - my opinion, ofc

But SH-125 is not electric And its going with 201 mph, so its "possible" to go faster on normal rail than 160 mph
I know u cant change the default trainset, I just was interested if theres any reason behind that thing.
I dont want earlier start, trains wont be faster only monorail comes later, and thats not good

Well now late starters have more chance than early starters because the mono comes a little later.
If u have a complete system built up from normal rail, its kinda impossible to change to monorail.
And the late starters can go with monorail.

I played 2 games on desert short goal. In the first started at 1990 in the second at 2000.
I basically did the same thing in both games, still in the first game I managed to finish in 12 years and in the second in 8. So the difference is 4 years, and only because the different rail.

Trains are the same as they were in the original Transport Tycoon.
You can ask Chris Sawyer why he made it that way, but it will probably have no big reason.

Ok, so there isnt really a reason. I thought that maybe on desert it would be too 'good' to be able to build sawmills (they r bringing so freakin much money) and even have good trains to transport the wood.
However with that slow trains desert goal is not even fun.
Maybe for better playability the desert short goal could start at 2000 with monorail, like at n-ice desert short goal.
In desert quick goal maybe that slow desert trains are ok, because in temperate quick goal the trains are quite slow as well (no electric yet), and I dont really care about long goals, never played em, they are way too long

I would like to add to the mix of the consersation that desert will always take slightly longer than temperate due to oil and goods being the better of the cargos, whereas on temperate you have a lot more choice and can do several lines using a combination of coal, farm and goods. But to the point, on desert 150 mil using diesel trains it is possible for a reliable 8 year win if going for oil and goods and throwing a little bit of pax in as a potential start depending if there isnt a great oil well start.

As for the long goal desert server we run, we did have it set to 2000 for awhile till it just got abused by people going for wood, achieving silly amounts of points for ridiciously quick wins. So to counter this the start year was placed back to 1975 however ALL city populations were increased significantly on map generation, therefore pax starts are highly profitable which therefore remove quite a number of years off your game. Players would complain that they preferred the 1975 over 2000 to a starting year as well.

So overall it is a balance of people wanting faster games because they feel like it is slow and boring and other people just wanting to spend an afternoon or evening on a server playing for fun.

With that said though, you can take a step back and look at it from another angle. There are four different climates that are playable which are temperate, desert, winter and toyland. Each climate has different gameplay elements and the speed at which you can achieve a goal value is vastly different. If you want the fastest possible win ever the order of climates actually stands as the following: Toyland, Temperate, Winter followed lastly by Desert. Which can be seen as quite weird because the toyland trains are actually slightly slower than that of the desert trains.

Toyland is the fastest because there are three "Goods" producing industries which are Sweets, Toys, and Fizzy drinks which are all very similar in its cargo payments, and the primary industries for these cargos are all high producing industries therefore any map generated on toyland will be inheritedly quick. My personal fastest time on a 25 million euro goal on toyland on a 512x256 map is 3 years and my slowest time 4 years. Compare the same to the temperate 25 million euro goal where yes, you can achieve 3 years but it is extremely difficult (connecting everything farm you can see as quick as humanly possible then going early goods) and fast paced, 4 years is the time that the best players thrive to achieve. However a lot of players do not like the toyland landscape at all. They mostly have prejustices about it or dislike the more intense colours or mostly just hate the trees (which are easily disabled via the server settings so none appear on map generation or you can change your transparency settings)

So in my honest opinion the way the trains were programmed is quite well thought out. Catering for basically all types of players personal tastes. On toyland you can have faster games with various "goods" producing industries with slow trains of around 150 km/h but if the climate puts you off you can play on temperate. On temperate you can go via the goods route or the coal route to win so this gives players the chance to decide how much work they want to put into their game to make lots of money. Also giving them the chance to choose faster trains to give a real sense of speed and break up the monoity of slow trains (160 km/h or less) till 2000. Desert has always been more of a relaxed climate, something you can play over the course of an afternoon, moving cargos about and trying to grow little towns on desert tiles to make them huge cities to generate more and more passengers. Not as simple as a temperate climate but offers more a challenge to players who are little bored playing the same old climate time and time again. Then we come to winter. It's perfectly placed between temperate and desert with the fact there is the famous wood -> paper -> goods line which offers players to go for a three tiered manufacturing line rather than just the one or two tiered lines. With the presence of coal on winter too this allows players to have good incomes with slower trains therefore taking a lot of so called "wasted years" out of your game time as you barely have to wait for long till you have enough money to build like crazy.

So as I have said its all personal preferences to which you play, and the reasoning for the train engine speeds could have been chosen to better suit these preferences.

Though the case will remain, the faster you can build, and the better you plan your routes (to give maximum income per tile) the faster you will always win regardless of the actual train speed. Because from either a 1990 or 1975 start, all the company value servers we run can and have been beaten before the release of the monorail engines (this includes the 1 billion desert server). While it is a fact that the game is inheritably quicker with monorail or maglev, the games we run shouldn't reach that ingame year if played optimally unless it was to start at 2000 or 2020. But playing optimally isn't always fun nor is it relaxing because as a game the top propority should always be enjoyment and taking pride that a network you build is starting to flourish.