Stuck with appaling rating in my own town!

[Jeste]

I can't get why this happened to me, I played a six year game, I was stuck at appaling rating until the end. I did not do much construction work, apart from making a city street grid. Other players were doing the same and had outstanding rating. I spent a fortune on large advertising campaigns and won the game with only one train station, because I could not make another one, or expand the existing station.

I noticed that population is wildly fluctuating and it does not really follow the passenger/mail required/delivered amounts. I was monitoring the opponents town and he was getting bigger city although I delivered much more passengers/mail.

Also: can a player score points in this type of game?

[Jeste]

here is a screenshot, I'm not sure it makes any sense. I did save the game if it helps... it looks like a bug to me.

[Andreas]

Well first of all: a much better way to get your town rating up is to have at least 4 regularly serviced stations/bus stops.  The fact that you have only 1 station is part of your problem. Furthermore building that roads destroys trees, which upsets the local authority. Last thing I can think of is that by the looks of it you had to blow up some houses to build that station.

So in conclusion:
-plant trees
-have 4 regularly served stations/bus stops
-keep destruction too a minimum.

If you do that you should be fine without having to spend a lot of money bribing.

As for the scoring: it is mentioned on a lot of locations that CB is still is testing phase and scoring will be implemented when the new scoring system is finished. (try reading the post about 2 new server on the homepage again  )

[Jeste]

Thanks for the answer, I am pretty sure I did not destroy buildings in my town, it was rather small when I built that station, it was the first thing I did in the game, making that (only) 5x3 station. Later I got so involved in making other stations in other towns to connect to it - I did not get into making more stations in my town. I am not sure how I got into appaling cycle, I realized it was a problem when I tried to make a first bus stop, it was too late after that. Good idea about planting forests, I will try that.

And BTW, bribing did not work at all. I made a company owner statue and made about 10 large campaigns, I was stuck at appaling to the end.

[imus]

Those campains have no influence in the rating (afaik). The best way to get the rating back up is to first blow up all the trees around the town. The rating can't get lower then that so blowing up trees first has no more effect.  Planting trees after that has a possitive effect so your rating will go up again.
This trick is way cheaper than trying to bribe.

[Andreas]

Indeed advertising campaigns and statues only influence station rating, not town rating. Be careful with that blowing trees up trick though. You would not be the first one to accidentally destroy roads or houses used by an opponent that might get a bit upset.

For the growing of the town part: except for the amount of pax/mail you deliver there are also 3 other things to consider:

-the delivery has to be as smooth as possible, delivering double the needed ammount in 1 month, and nothing the next is useless
-the road layout plays a big part in how fast your city expands. Won't go into detail here but if you want to know more take a look here: http://wiki.openttdcoop.org/User:Mfb/Towns
-also it's a good idea to move (large) train stations as far away from the city center as possible. It leaves more room for houses to grow.

The reason a town is shrinking while it says that it is growing is usually that smaller/older buildings get demolished to make room for newer/bigger buildings which will increase the population again

[imus]

Now that was one very very very useful link when playing CB games =D Now the only thing left to do is figure out how to make towns follow the desired layout without first remodeling the town yourself. And here I was thinking that the town growth depended on how much you could transport there... can't believe I missed that page ^.^ probably added after I quit playing on coop servers.

[Andreas]

Cargo delivery IS the most important part, but there are a lot of other factors that speed up groth indeed