[DONE] Terraforming limit

[ZeroIncome]

Can the terraforming limit be raised? and / or can the terraforming be raised for companies with multiple players.

While I understand the need for a terraforming limit I feel it's cranked up to a point where it is detrimental for legitimate players rather than deterring for griefers.

I often bring up this topic when I play with other players with remarks like:
-"fuuuu terraforming"
-"terraforming limit is too damn low"

These remarks are received with great understanding and it's like I'm preaching to the choir. Never has a player said: "Sorry Zero, but I completely disagree with you the terraforming limit saved my life once when I was trapped in a burning building with my three cats. It's a necessity to global healthcare and should be elected for president."

Yours truly
- ZeroIncome

EDIT: To further concretize my suggestion: I'm suggesting to double the terraforming limit.

[ST2]

Well, I'll start with a oldie image, originally posted on Kurt's forum: http://stefan.bleibinhaus.de/ottd-archive/Start-Dateien/157hva0.png on Jan 30, 2009 by mc21.
After all these years, the overall idea is still the same (and it's cheaper): adapt your tracks to the terrain and not the reverse; or find a middle ground due the terraforming limit. Since is a value ingame daily updated... best solution is using the limit wisely and not massively.
Since the OpenTTD mechanics revolve around the concept of "competition among companies", values available to each company must be the same, no matter how many players are in the company. And of course, if players are in same company, there must be coordination between them in dealing with the limitations (loan, available cash, vehicle limits, terraforming limits, etc, etc). Change this is giving further advantages to companies that have more players on it.
Since we're using the default values for that limitation (terraform_per_64k_frames = 4194304; terraform_frame_burst = 4096), you can check in this example that's not that low. Full text explaining how it works is here. Only needs to be used sparingly.
Somehow that limitation "fell from the sky", mostly because of 10. No unnecessary land modifications.
Zero, I have to say: Many times, in many games, terraforming limits have saved the map "sanity". Possibly we can discuss increase a bit the "terraform_per_64k_frames" on long run servers (mostly #5), but in my opinion making it double is a bit too much.

Constructive ideas are always welcome

[YorVeX]

nobody said it's about life saving, but it's about saving the map from becoming ugly. just try to look at it as a challenge.

if you raise the limit what you achieve is that the players found their whole 500 tiles long track on land they terraformed for it, but because of the limit they can only do it slowly so while waiting they type things like "fuuuu terraforming" and "terraforming limit is too damn low".
the threshold where your so-called "legit" players stop complaining is the setting where an evil player floods a full corner of the map easily.

while on the other hand players that have learned to build with the landscape don't even notice there is a limit, because if you think about it you really only "need" minor corrections here and there and nothing more. this game is called transport tycoon and not landscape tycoon. 

[ZeroIncome]

Well the time it takes to reroute a track around a lake compared to going straight through it, plus the fact that the trains will take less time to go down a straight track. And the fact that I'm lazy makes me prefer just flattening land.

Anyway I can agree with the fact that this is probably not needed on all servers and I was suggesting it for #5.

From what I understand from those links ST2 posted and what he said you should be able to raise a 64x64 tile area in 1 burst? Which is indeed not low at all!
But I don't think #5 is running the default settings. This is a screenshot I just took:


I created a new company and tried to raise a square of 24x24 tiles. In the picture is the result of what happened. It only raised an area of 77 tiles. (Should be able to do 4096?)

As I was typing this I thought I might have misunderstood and that you could only do 74+- tiles in one burst, but be able to do multiple bursts after each other. So I went back and tried to do 2 bursts after each other, but after the first burst I've already hit the terraforming limit.

You also don't recover 74 tiles per 2.2 seconds. (pretty obvious when you can only do 77 tiles in total

Also I prefer the challenge of other players not the terrain and I don't really care if the map is ugly otherwise I wouldn't be playing openttd at all... (2D graphics from xxx years ago  )

To make a counter argument against: "the threshold where your so-called "legit" players stop complaining is the setting where an evil player floods a full corner of the map easily"
Is that you'd have to be pretty dedicated to the dark side to get enough money to then do something like that with the additional fact looming over your head that you will probably be banned by the very active admins on the n-ice servers. 

[Geert]

i have to say after a few games you know there is a terraform limit. and now i rarely hit the terralimit.

I agree its anoying when building with 3 guys on one company. But on the other hand you can build 3 times faster with 3 guys (should be)

I also build bridges when im low on money and i use the channel + landdestroy trick much on big waters. (aks me ingame if you dont know how that works)

[alex879ro]

I would support raising the terraforming limit with 25% or 50% when there is more then 1 player in the company, since it`s hard to co-op build with the actual terraforming limit...and i`m talking about normal building ...not flattening the lakes. However, i do not know if raising the limit wouldn`t cause the players to help each other by entering each other`s company to raise their terraforming limits. So , after thinking at this argument I do not know what to say.

@Geert : You can hit the limit if there are 2 people or more in the company and both of them start building.

[ZeroIncome]

I frequently hit the limit playing alone... Just look at that screenshot that is not much terraforming. That's why I suggested it be increased.

Just image on the longrun server I make a 20 x 6 station, but half the station requires some terraforming. That is already more than the terraforming limit so I start building tracks, but I immediately come across another structure so I need terraforming again. Or as previously stated traversing lakes takes quite a long time with the current settings.

The channel + landdestroy is a viable solution, but costs way more money.

I don't think it's a good idea to give companies with more players a higher limit for the already stated reasons, but a higher limit for all companies would be nice.

[alex879ro]

If you hit the terraforming limit alone, it means only one thing: You must change your playstyle. Also a little tip: terraforming must be used only to cross the water or to make decent curves(rare case). In every other situation, if you place enough locos, trains can climb mountains and they slow down only max 10km/h which is decent.

I use 1 loco for 5-7 wagons
2 locos for 5-10 wagons
3 locos for 10-15 wagons
4 locos for 15-20 wagons

Depends on the weight...for goods trains u can use 3 locos for 20 wagons. But server 5 has the realistic acceleration setting which means that trains do not slow down at slopes(very little slowing down) but they have a max speed of 60 km/h when entering and exiting a depot (or at least that`s what i remember:)  )

[Geert]

jup many loco's are the solution

i even use more loco's then alex (before maglev arives)

[YorVeX]

first of all: we don't have default values, ST2 was mistaken there. our current settings (on all servers) are:

Code: [Select]

terraform_per_64k_frames = 886
terraform_frame_burst = 50

the idea for these values came from this thread:

74 tiles in a single day (2.3 seconds) is quite an ammount. if you want to limit this further to define that a company only gets a single tile added to their allowance every day:
1 (numer of tiles to add per day) / 74 (number of frames per day) * 65536 (numer of frames behind the per 64k frames variable) = 885.621653504
so setting the per 64k frames variable to 886 means a company gets an allowance of a bit over 1 tile per day.

you see that the settings are a bit weird, it's not easy to get even "real life" values from that. so this is what i wanted, 1 tile added to your allowance per day. it's also something everybody can easily picture and use to calculate.

I frequently hit the limit playing alone... Just look at that screenshot that is not much terraforming. That's why I suggested it be increased.

your screenshot is a bad example. it was pointless to raise the land there. ok, sure, that's only because it's an example. but when you're already build something only for a screenshot to demonstrate, why not show an example where it would really be necessary in your eyes?

but even if i fade out that fact and try to imagine that way of land raising in a place where it would "fit" (e.g. land at the start and end of it is higher) it's an ugly way of building and again is more like "landscape tycoon" than "transport tycoon". what's the problem with just letting the train go up a tile and down again?

Or as previously stated traversing lakes takes quite a long time with the current settings.

there is a reason why this game isn't just flat land with no obstructions in the way, it would be too boring. it's a lake, jesus, deal with it, use bridges, dig up small tiles of land here and there if they'd get too long, be creative. i don't accept as a reason for raising the limit that you want to kill lakes.

Just image on the longrun server I make a 20 x 6 station, but half the station requires some terraforming. That is already more than the terraforming limit so I start building tracks

finally, the first example i see that at least might be a little valid, simply because the game requires you to have the full station at the same level (except with satellite stations, which is another story). and it would be bad to change the land bit by bit, meanwhile a nearby city might start to hate you and eventually forbid any station building when you are done.
so with a maximum station spread of 20 "half of the station" would be 20x10, right? so my offer would be to raise the burst limit from 50 to 200. that's a huge raise, but i'd leave the 64k setting as it is, so your allowance still only regenerates one tile per day. but now you are able to do the big changes in one turn (ofc use up your total allowance faster with that).

[alex879ro]

finally, the first example i see that at least might be a little valid, simply because the game requires you to have the full station at the same level (except with satellite stations, which is another story). and it would be bad to change the land bit by bit, meanwhile a nearby city might start to hate you and eventually forbid any station building when you are done.
so with a maximum station spread of 20 "half of the station" would be 20x10, right? so my offer would be to raise the burst limit from 50 to 200. that's a huge raise, but i'd leave the 64k setting as it is, so your allowance still only regenerates one tile per day. but now you are able to do the big changes in one turn (ofc use up your total allowance faster with that).

Stations don`t have to be at the same level.Platforms can be on different levels. Only a platform must have the same height on all the surface.
And ofc, the difference between platforms is not allowed to be more then 1 (the height difference), the only exception is the satellite station

[YorVeX]

yeah, sorry, i only had length in mind but not the fact that you can place the tracks beside each other. alex has made a good picture example which shows a way of building without use of terraforming even on a hill.

[ZeroIncome]

I don't really understand why you are against it. Why not grant the player the freedom to choose his own play style rather than force your own ideals upon him.

I also only suggested to double the current value which would then be 100. Imo 200 is probably too much.

[alex879ro]

I don't really understand why you are against it. Why not grant the player the freedom to choose his own play style rather than force your own ideals upon him.

I also only suggested to double the current value which would then be 100. Imo 200 is probably too much.

We`re not against terraforming. We`re trying to maintain a solution that has helped the map to remain attractive. Imagine if a player from our "hero" list entered, after his ban expired and he finds out no terraforming limit. We could find all the map was made to be ocean....or too hilly...

Another reason is because u don`t need to terraform so your track is all straight. As i told you before and Geert confirmed, if you use the right number of locos, your trains won`t slow down on slopes.

The third reason is that you could start building rails on valleys. You open the map and search for a corridor to build your mainline. That`s how it is in the real world. Nobody terraforms the mountains and only few rails make it there.

[ZeroIncome]

We`re not against terraforming. We`re trying to maintain a solution that has helped the map to remain attractive. Imagine if a player from our "hero" list entered, after his ban expired and he finds out no terraforming limit. We could find all the map was made to be ocean....or too hilly...

I never suggested to remove the terraforming limit in it's entirety, I merely suggested doubling the current limit. Which after your explanations of how it works and the current values seems reasonable.

Also I don't know what a hero list is, but if a player returns and does this then ban them for a longer period? Just seems kind of absurd to limit everybody (so severely) just to deter a handful of malicious players

Another reason is because u don`t need to terraform so your track is all straight. As i told you before and Geert confirmed, if you use the right number of locos, your trains won`t slow down on slopes.

They might not slow down, but the distance is still greater. (Probably unnoticeable on a shorter track, but definitely noticeable on a long track) - This point refers more to having to go around large obstacles that just going up and down hills obviously.

Also if you only double the current limit it would still take years to make a completely flat track.

The third reason is that you could start building rails on valleys. You open the map and search for a corridor to build your mainline. That`s how it is in the real world. Nobody terraforms the mountains and only few rails make it there.

Even if you double the limit it would take years to level mountains and I don't think anybody would. It's much easier to combine small adjustments and tunnels.


Seems like you are taking my suggestion to extremes. I'm not suggesting to completely remove the terraforming limit since it has a purpose, but right now it's just a bit too low imo.

As for Alex's screenshot, I'd like to see if you can find a perfect hill like that in a normal game. Most of the time you need to terraform to make the side of a mountain even that flat. You'd also most likely need to do some terraforming at the exit and entrance tracks.
This would take quite sometime with the current settings and this is what I'm trying to say.
Who builds a station that far up a hill anyway?