TTD Tips and Tricks

[JohnMegacycle]

Greetings fellow CEO!
So, you’ve decided to start up your own transportation company. Well, the world of Transport Tycoon Deluxe can be a difficult but fun and rewarding place. The key is to keep an eye on your competition as well as staying a few steps ahead of yourself with careful planning.
I have a few tips to get you started and hopefully this will give you a leg up in the busy business world:

– Multi-purpose Train Lines – If you are just getting started with TTD, you may be building single use rail lines. By this I mean a single track line from supplier and consumer for a single train to use. While this is a good way to get get products to where they need to go, you’d have to create more single use lines to transport more stuff.
Enter the multi-rail system. Though this may be difficult to explain via text, I’ll do my best. Imagine a one-way path that trains can travel on, loading and unloading at various parts, similar to a highway for cars. By building this sort of a structure, more trains can use the same rails which add a ton of value to your infrastructure, without actually adding more rails. This is all done with signaling and more information on it can be found here: Signal Wiki.

– Getting Paid – How to get paid and how much is paid can be a real mystery to new players, so let me try to break it down a bit. Being a transportation company, you are responsible to get raw resources, goods and people from one place to another and not the cost of producing those products. For example, taking Coal from a Coal Mine to a Power Plant doesn’t mean you have to pay for the Coal. The actual production of the Coal is determined on a few factors that I’ll mention in the next tip.
How you get paid is based on the below factors:
– Distance traveled between Producer (Coal Mine) and Consumer (Power Plant)
– How much stuff was transported (quantity)
– Time it took to transport the products
– Staleness (taking too long) of the product (Certain products retain value better than others)

This breaks down to some simple rules of thumb, based on transportation methods:
– Trucks = Small Volume – Short Distance – Small Profit
– Trains = Large Volume – Any Distance – Larger Profit
– Boats = Very Large Volume – Small/Medium Distance – Medium Profit
– Aircraft = Small Volume – Very Long Distance – Medium Profit
Now, before you say ‘Hey, I can use Trucks for a long distance too!’, let me say that you certainly could, but you would need a LOT of Trucks to pull the volume that you’d want for a decent profit. Experimentation is key, so don’t hesitate to adjust your vehicle count and base it on your needs.

– Production vs Usage – Everything on the map produces some sort of product, aside from the ground and roads and stuff… Factories, Mines, Banks, Farms and even Towns and Cities produce some sort of good or service and that will need to be taken somewhere else if you hope to see any cash flow. Where this is critical to know is how much that particular industry produces and how quickly you can transport what it produces. In short, Producers will make more product if more product is requested.
For example, let’s say that a Coal Mine produces 80 Coal per Month. By building a rail network and a servicing train that can transport 100 Coal per Month, the Mine will slowly improve and increase its production to meet the demand. The same thing goes in the other direction, though. If you demand less than what is being produced (let’s say 60 Coal per Month) the Coal Mine will reduce it’s capacity. It is also very important to note that some facilities can even close down if they aren’t used or aren’t used enough. Ensuring constant demand, like having a train waiting for a full load all the time, is a sure fire way to keep your industries producing.

My Playlist of Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe is here:
JMegs OpenTTD Playlist

Best of luck to you and your new company! Feel free to leave any tips and tricks you may have found.
-JMegs

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