TOPIC:

for example, in a city where the streets were made rather messy, (only where 1 lenght straights) I build a 1 bus station tile and 1 cargo tile. wich were on 2 ways of a corsroad, thus making it 1 station with 2 types... i'm not sure if this is also wrong, or only if both are the same type.

I believe this is okay, after all it would otherwise be impossible to cover some city layouts for both passengers and mail. (which would be silly).

While I agree with Blup that players should have some freedom in their own town, total freedom can be abused quite a bit. While the mechanics of the standard LL town layout are excellent, they truly maximize town growth, it looks very silly. Of course in a dream world we could have YACD for pax to support networking, but that is still a ways off, though the CD branch is already being merged.

Even with a spread of 7 this is 14 tiles you can teleport things. With the new EGRVTS this can add up to quite a lot. Furthermore, the addition of trams, SUPERSTRONG, and metro trains means that theoretically, you should not -need- road vehicle switches to get significant output.

Second point is that the server's settings are not yet final. For example, cargo % requirement can be tuned as well to make higher population easier to reach. Currently all CB servers have 40% non-pax requirement plus some pax requirement tuned to the particular town set in use (town NewGRF determines building passenger output!).

Anyway, there's some major gameplay differences between LL's servers and these. For example, there's no funding towns and/or industries. Whenever the openTTD devs actually implement an event or flag for it I can support the former, by making it not work when the town is not growing, and increase # of houses spawned if it is. Most likely via a multiplier. This is all theoretically possible right now but the house timer reset means you get a free house for funding if I implemented this now, which is quite the spanner in the works as you can then ignore all goals and spam the button to reach the goal provided you have the ca$h to make it work.

As for Industries, I myself believe funding industries, in particular with FIRS, reduces gameplay depth/complexity. If I can just stick all my factories in one industrial park and bring everything there then where's the network? The higher starting funds seem to be across the board for all BTPro servers. The FIRS test server has some hefty base costs modifications so has effectively lower starting funds. If we -do- lower the starting funds then maybe some care has to be taken to remove the 86% success rate on aircraft starts (with a 150K starting loan and standard aircraft, if you get a crash on your first 3 flights you are royally hammered by the RNG and cannot play this game). Perhaps by removing aircraft crashes entirely, perhaps by removing small airports entirely.

On the server with NUTS (12K or 18K), there's this fun trainset in use that really changes the dynamics of the game and requires you to think diffrently. There's the type of train that works well as 7-tile (SUPERSTRONG, Tesla, Monorail Local, Maglev Express, Slugs, Nyancats*), and then there's types that better support 4-tile trains (Strong, 2x Medium, Most Expresses), 3-tile trains (Medium, 2x Strong), or even 2-tile trains (chameleons, Dogstar/Gravastar). Some trains work very well for an interconnected network (high power/TE), while others work better on a simple loop (high-speed, low power, long). Even the station loading times differ wildly between different train types. Because space around the town is at a premium, trains that have low loading times are excellent for dropping off into the town. I even suspect we will see transfer hubs to these other types of trains outside town before long

* These are currently not available because of some graphics issues. Ask V (NUTS author) how long it'll take before we see them again.

And on the FIRS/2CC server (41K) to be introduced, there's the 2CC trainset with accompanying trackset. Tracks, and especially lucrative high-speed electrified tracks are very, very expensive. This means re-using existing track is going to be very economical, perhaps even required. Thus using large expensive feeder stations may be uneconomical. The sheer amount of different cargoes means merging tracks is the usual strategy.

Last but not least, a station with more than 7 platforms is sometimes nice to have. When using TL4, a station can have up to 32 platforms with SS12. With SS7, you can have only 10.

So here's my opinion on these:

[1]: This should be carefully discussed. Do we -want- the road vehicle switches from LL, or do we want our players to engineer actual workable metro systems? And -if- we allow road vehicle switches, do we allow a smart player to make a significant amount of money on them?

For some figures: 20 goods 20 tiles is about one truck's worth in a switch on top of what it does to break even, that's 300 pounds per RV per trip. Each truck can do ~10 trips per month, so that's 3000 pounds per truck per month. If we have a 20K city with ~5K goods delivered in ~20 trucks, that adds up to 630,000 per year. Getting 36K per truck is quite generous, as a truck tends to cost about 2K. Especially on the FIRS server it will be a major income source and screw with balance, meaning that truck purchase prices must then go up by at least 4x.

So there's four possibilities:

1 Disallow any spreading of any type, even by one tile, and disable it.

-> Advantage: This is a simple and clear rule that has one interpretation only. A station must be a continguous object.
-> Disadvantage: There's many workable station designs that are NOT in the 'spirit' of this rule that are still allowed.*
-> Disadvantage: Not having ctrl-click makes building things annoying, especially transfer hubs.
-> You need many Road stations in a town to cover both passenger and mail output.

2 Disallow spreading, but enable ctrl-click.

-> Also a clear rule that has one interpretation.
-> Again there's the problem of workable stations that are not in the spirit of the rule.

3 Allow spreading inside the town.

-> Again, simple clear rule.
-> This will allow people to build 'RV switches'
-> Spreading can be used in two major ways: To reduce the travel time of a vehicle, and to increase the capacity of a road vehicle station beyond what a single set of length 3 can cope with.

4 Allow all spreading inside the town, allow to a certain extent outside of it.

-> I note that this is the novapolis way,

5 Allow to a certain extent in the town only

-> This is where problems occur as this is the current stance. A consensus is needed to directly specify what that extent is. If we do NOT want LL road switches but don't mind players being a bit 'creative', what needs to be limited is that spreading is allowed -ONLY- to increase station capacity when this is actually needed (some slack towards newbies is needed here then), and two stations are NOT allowed to intersperse eachother. E.g. have a straight road which passes through two stations four times or more within a few consecutive tiles each, with at least two passes for each station.

*Consider two coal mines with a strip of flat land, 8 tiles wide, in between. Suppose they both have 90t/month production. The total production is 180t/m. If a train platform supports 600tpm, then there's no reason to build a station with two platforms. Yet players will do so to not have to buy a road vehicle or two.
** What if you think this is okay? Where do we draw the line? 9 tiles wide? 10? 11? Note that by making station tiles more expensive via basecosts this problem can be solved too.
*** Note that if spreading is allowed, economic cheating using spreading should be dilligently policed whenever encountered. Doing so is a known exploit. Imho, it can be significant profit only in your own town, see the above example, so probably not wise to allow this. (E.g. on your bus switch the signs then must be adjacent)


[2] While it is true that building extra roads can be damaging competition, on a server with no time-out games can last quite long. It's possible for a game to run for 50-60 years. By that time cities will revert to their natural population density, which is lower than their starting density. Building extra roads for such a city usually results in extra houses, because all towns restore to their starting population if they have the space to build the necessary things. Building roads without purpose or meaning aside from blocking another player's rails is already forbidden under the rule that forbids 'blocking' another player from access to industries/towns.

Note that growing a town that is not your own is not strictly forbidden either. It may be a waste of your time in most games, but if you are short on pax on a busy map this may be needed. (It only takes a few truckloads of water/food to startup most towns anyway).

[3] There can/may be some exceptions to this.

Trying to fully cover a city with an 'original' type road plan without accidentally overlapping coverage areas, destroying buildings, or missing buildings will be in most cases impossible. A small amount of self-competition to feed passengers/mail to intercity trains may be permissible/necessary.

Inside your own town there's nobody else allowed to compete with you. Thus, the self-competition rule should not apply here.

[4] This I 100% agree with should be a rule. Even if station spread is disallowed you can still make a lot of teleportation money abusing this. Try attaching stations perpendicular to eachother in various ways to boost $ rate for example.

Actually, in an ideal world a vehicle should use actual distance to compute profit, not manhattan distance. A vehicle should also use min(d_t, d_s) where d_s is the distance between two stations and d_t is distance travelled in tiles. (which means you can't make money by spreading or driving circles period.) The timetables already keep track of d_t so it's not like it's much more expensive on the processor. Try poking the OpenTTD devs for these details, they tend to play #openttdcoop games where money plays no role so some basic flaws in OpenTTD's economy that were present since 1994 have been overlooked.

[5] Funding buildings has the interesting effect of allowing players that are over 140% of the goal and still having extra money and time laying around a way of increasing the growth speed of their city. In essence it is possible for me to code it in. Unfortunately each click awards a free house, and I can NOT get rid of that behaviour via script (yet). That one free house is enough to cause serious balance issues, even on the non-FIRS servers. For example, I played a game on CB #01 while it was accidentally on where I didn't bring stuff to the town at all and won fairly fast, through just spamming the fund buildings.