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New server suggestion / Turbotukker's brainstorm

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New server suggestion / Turbotukker's brainstorm
« on: February 21, 2013, 01:49:51 am »
 

Turbotukker

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Heya everyone!

I've had some ideas on what would be neat and possibly a server. Now I'm much enjoying to play the game, but I'm afraid my knowledge on what exactly is possible to be changed is very limited so there's a fat chance some of these suggestions are impossible. If so I'm sorry I'm merely putting these out there to maybe spark an idea in someone else and end up with a neat new server!

So the random thoughts I had for settings on a server are:

- Vehicle speeds - I'm full aware that we can't endlessly enlarge maps to make everything bigger better and so on. But what about looking on the other side of the spectrum and for instance halving all the vehicle speeds? Theoratically if you halve all the vehicle speeds you in essence double the world size. The flipside of this of course would be severely limiting the bonus income from quickly transporting goods quickly. However I personally feel that that is no big disadvantage there's always a base income and the income impact won't be overly large.
- Cost for building things / landscaping - Maybe it would be cool to alter the cost of landscaping and/or building things to add to the feel of a bigger world and possibly a harsher world. The rate of increase on costs is tough to determine just like this but would make a lot of sense in some cases.

Now these combined into a probably weird server idea for me would be the following:
A map with a bit of an Alaska feeling, something along the lines of flying wild Alaska for people and goods. With flying a main mode of transportation and trucks/trains a possibility but more expensive to construct especially with long lines so mainly used to distribute goods from the airfield.

- An Arctic sizeable map with vehicle speeds halved or lessened at least. This would give the feel of a large world.
- The cities and industries a bit scarce and further apart than normal.
- Construction of roads, train tracks, tunnels, bridges, depots, stations and airfields increased to account for the harsh environment and larger "scale" and increase incentive to not use those as main form of transportation over longer distances.
- The time set in a year so that the bigger airports are already available and people aren't just stuck with the small airport and city airport but have the more efficient versions too.
- Not sure if this is doable, but airplanes able to be refitted to a wider selection of goods. Some research tells me it used to be an aircraft was refittable to more things but this was downtuned. For this setting it would be fun if the planes could carry more again, after all in Alaska timber, fuel and what not is delivered by plane often enough.
- And maybe this server could also be a citybuilder-type server. Meaning you get a small arctic village and you try to get enough food and goods into there for it to grow.

Now I realize people might say that this is just easy "slap an airport down there and one there and get it all done". But I feel that's not entirely true. First of all you still have the noise regulations so you can't just easily get an airport everywhere endlessly. Also airports have a limited amount of planes they can handle. So to get a proper chain of supply up you would probably need some transfering between airports done by road vehicles or trains and transfering into the cities. I do agree this doesn't give awesome superlarge train track infrastructures, so I would keep the games a bit short to prevent a "I got nothing to build or arrange now, I just need to wait to win" situation for too long.

Another server idea which I have no idea how tough that would be to make is:
Based on the videogame tropico roughly. You have a map with an island or a few islands and along the coast are pre-built harbours which you can claim with your HQ (along the lines of citybuilder). Once claimed on a regular interval goods will be brought into the harbour per ship. Not per say needed to actually have a ship sail it the resources could just "appear" in the harbour too to simulate being delivered in there. Now the goods are of all sorts, but needed by industries and towns on the island. So you get a complete mix of goods and passengers in the harbour and need to transport those around your island.You could spend money to upgrade your harbour and increase the amount of goods transported to it.
Naturally this would require one harbour per possible company available, so the amount of players won't be overly large probably.
In a further version this could be made so that the harbour will also accept certain goods (obviously not accepting goods it supplies to prevent silly back and forth transfering) so it could be that wood is imported in the harbour and made into goods then exported again. Or iron ore into steel and exported.

The victory condition for this could be either a normal CV and rating, but could also be based off of how many goods in total (passengers and goods combined that is) you transport from your harbour onto the island.

So there that's the ideas I've been thinking off, as I said I have no idea how feasible either of those ideas is or if this is the right forum to suggest them. But maybe they will give someone else an idea and result in a great server in the end!

Turbotukker
 

Re: New server suggestion / Turbotukker's brainstorm
« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2013, 02:01:29 pm »
 

Geert

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we talked about this on the server with him but thats already 1 week ago :(
 

Re: New server suggestion / Turbotukker's brainstorm
« Reply #2 on: May 15, 2013, 11:18:02 am »
 

Andreas

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I certainly like the idea of a server with lower speeds and higher costs. (It essentially makes for harder game play where you have to think a bit in stead of just flattening whole areas and connecting an industry to the other side of the map)

In the way you describe what you want it would require a least a newgrf and/or a GameScript, possibly even a patch. So far the bad news... The good news however:
most of what you want can be reached by server settings, only in a slightly different way!

- making vehicles slower: just use an earlier starting date where the fast vehicles are not available yet!
- construction cost: is already a server setting that can be easily changed.

setting a date to allow for large airplanes would not be possible at the same time as my fist suggestion. The introduction date can easily be changed with a newgrf, as well as changing to what cargoes a plane can be refit. The only drawback: hard servers are not really popular on n-ice and newgrfs also tend to have a negative impact on popularity.

If enough people like it though I will code a grf, and we can test it.

Without stuff like that the closest we can get to what you would like is something similar to s6 (maybe with an earlier starting date) in arctic environment. Have you tried playing on s7? What do you think about it? Tell us how you think about my suggestions and we can take it from there.

About your last idea: that would (ignoring some technical difficulties) require a gamescript. While coding newgrfs is (kind off) within my capabilities gamescripts are not. YorVeX is currently putting all the time he has to spend on the servers on CB and the scoring system, so it can not be implemented any time soon.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2013, 01:30:40 pm by Andreas »
alex879ro: "Each player has a different knowledge of the game, and then we got Andreas :)"
 

Re: New server suggestion / Turbotukker's brainstorm
« Reply #3 on: May 15, 2013, 02:47:36 pm »
 

alex879ro

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For slow vehicles you have the K3 server
For hard game, you have server 6

About the grfs...I`ve been considering myself that there might be the time to try one grf and see how it behaves (meaning the number of players) but for this we need xOR`s agreement....