Points system in general

[ST2]

Myhorta is right. Btw St2, i don`t agree with Found_Town=0 because if you start the game in 2000 (after 40 years) the number of industries dramatically decreased so basically you need to fund industries and you can`t start searching all over the map on where are the places where industries dissapeared so you can fund a new.It`s simpler to fund a town and then fund an industry even if...it`s quite expensive. However, i would agree with Town Growth Rate decrease.

As for Geert`s complaint, i would advise him to record his data more accurate (no of trains, duration of game, duration of his company.......) and the answers will come themselves

Only to clear out my opinion/suggestions:
- lets seperate primary industries from secundary industries among other important things:
  * primary industries decrease production because not served... if on the "delete" level, they'll disappear, as you noticed and I've warned you about a situation - it's a "some" random code stuff --;
  * -- Same random stuff that makes a 0 pop town grow up, even if have 5 named stations transporting coal; (this parts are funny, but real )
  * secundary industries disappear after some time if not served;
  * if you start late, where do you have cash to fund a town and a industry to get a propper profit, as you stated?; (lets NOT give unfair advantages to late starters - they started late... must adapt to the game);
  * continuation of the previous point: what you build for late starts? Pax service! (hope you're getting my point now);
  * it's not other players fault that you'd started in late years, with all advantages of new trains (actual loan allows you that). So, lets try to make game with some advantage to older companies (logical) but with oportunities for new companies;
I could continue and give many reasons... but no need, i think...

[geo]

Myhorta is right. Btw St2, i don`t agree with Found_Town=0 because if you start the game in 2000 (after 40 years) the number of industries dramatically decreased so basically you need to fund industries and you can`t start searching all over the map on where are the places where industries dissapeared so you can fund a new.It`s simpler to fund a town and then fund an industry even if...it`s quite expensive. However, i would agree with Town Growth Rate decrease.

As for Geert`s complaint, i would advise him to record his data more accurate (no of trains, duration of game, duration of his company.......) and the answers will come themselves

Only to clear out my opinion/suggestions:
- lets seperate primary industries from secundary industries among other important things:
  * primary industries decrease production because not served... if on the "delete" level, they'll disappear, as you noticed and I've warned you about a situation - it's a "some" random code stuff --;
  * -- Same random stuff that makes a 0 pop town grow up, even if have 5 named stations transporting coal; (this parts are funny, but real )
  * secundary industries disappear after some time if not served;
  * if you start late, where do you have cash to fund a town and a industry to get a propper profit, as you stated?; (lets NOT give unfair advantages to late starters - they started late... must adapt to the game);
  * continuation of the previous point: what you build for late starts? Pax service! (hope you're getting my point now);
  * it's not other players fault that you'd started in late years, with all advantages of new trains (actual loan allows you that). So, lets try to make game with some advantage to older companies (logical) but with oportunities for new companies;
I could continue and give many reasons... but no need, i think...

geez, ST2, u think too much(answer to the challenge)

[ST2]

geez, ST2, u think too much(answer to the challenge)

yup, better than the opposite    (re-answer to the challenge)

[Geert]

lol
geo.ro is right about you thinking too much

But I agree on decreasing pop growed especialy on server 8

Before I started this topic I knew it would be very hard change anything. Its not like I wanted things to change now but I only wanted to give give stuff for you to think about.

I think the penalty thing is a good idea on longer server, most players who play on s5 or s8 dont bother with the end at all because they dont know how to make a 100 mil a year anyway.

[Batt]

I think the penalty thing is a good idea on longer server, most players who play on s5 or s8 dont bother with the end at all because they dont know how to make a 100 mil a year anyway.

For the 'most players' I must add that they don't care about winning the game, but they are enjoying that it is a long server and their stuff and effort won't be lost after several years as any Cossack or ST2 will come on the short goal servers. It's not fun for a lot of players to start over every hour, if they're not competing directly 

  * if you start late, where do you have cash to fund a town and a industry to get a propper profit, as you stated?; (lets NOT give unfair advantages to late starters - they started late... must adapt to the game);
  * continuation of the previous point: what you build for late starts? Pax service! (hope you're getting my point now);

So, +1 for the slight penalty. It may seem that starting late is harder because resources are depleted, BUT... there are two cases:
1. It's a late game, but there are active companies who developed resource production ->> compete them for resources
2. It's a late game and server is empty with no resources ->> !voterestart and play. This will attract more players by the way.

In the 1st case it's even easier. Cities are usually grew too. Lot's of resources, fast trains = easy game.

[ST2]

In the 1st case it's even easier. Cities are usually grew too. Lot's of resources, fast trains = easy game.

I don't want easy games for some when others had lots of work... "Points system" was the original subject and since that's directly connected to server balance, Batt, what's your suggestion(s)?

[Batt]

I don't want easy games for some when others had lots of work... "Points system" was the original subject and since that's directly connected to server balance, Batt, what's your suggestion(s)?

1. Suggestion is to add a penalty for the late starts.

2. As for the initial question, my suggestion is to take quarterly pure income (it's possible to extract this, right?) into account together with vehicle count.
I think it's a great sign of the overall efficiency. E.g. 250 mil income / 400 trains vs 75 mil income / 80 trains. It will be 0,65mil vs 0,93mil factor, the difference is not that mad if comparing to only 400 trains vs 80 trains.

[YorVeX]

2. As for the initial question, my suggestion is to take quarterly pure income (it's possible to extract this, right?) into account together with vehicle count.
I think it's a great sign of the overall efficiency. E.g. 250 mil income / 400 trains vs 75 mil income / 80 trains. It will be 0,65mil vs 0,93mil factor, the difference is not that mad if comparing to only 400 trains vs 80 trains.

taking the income at time X has some problems. what if you do a monorail conversion and have all your services stopped while another player wins the game? your income would be really bad at this time and your score would suck.
so we would need to maintain an average value of all quarterly incomes over time. the problem is that you cannot query historic data from the OpenTTD server, only the current value. xShunter would have to query the current value every quarter and track it. i didn't implement such things in xShunter for a simple reason: when we got a crash of xShunter and it is restarted e.g. 1 game year later you got absolutely no data of that year anymore (and even the historic data needed to be saved and restored after the crash, not an easy task). so score calculations could get affected by operational/infrastructural problems on the server - something that we don't have now and i'd also like to avoid in the future.

as for the vehicle count: that is already considered (and the reason why Geert got more points for his "lazy" game). it also works as penalty, because before we had this some players cheated the score system by buying lots of unused vehicles at the end of the game to boost their company values.

[Batt]

taking the income at time X has some problems. what if you do a monorail conversion and have all your services stopped while another player wins the game? your income would be really bad at this time and your score would suck.
so we would need to maintain an average value of all quarterly incomes over time. the problem is that you cannot query historic data from the OpenTTD server, only the current value. xShunter would have to query the current value every quarter and track it. i didn't implement such things in xShunter for a simple reason: when we got a crash of xShunter and it is restarted e.g. 1 game year later you got absolutely no data of that year anymore (and even the historic data needed to be saved and restored after the crash, not an easy task). so score calculations could get affected by operational/infrastructural problems on the server - something that we don't have now and i'd also like to avoid in the future.

I mean there is a graph in the OpenTTD that counts only the pure income, not the company profit. It is stored as 'income' in the CompanyEconomyEntry structure. As far as I understand, you're already taking CV and perf. score from the current CompanyEconomyEntry, that is calculating quarterly. If you're taking two values from there each quarter, I thought that you can take the other one too.

[YorVeX]

it seems you haven't read my text. read again 

[Batt]

  okay, I just misunderstood why do even need to keep track of it.
Number of points does matters only at the end of the game. Income is like the perf. score, that goes up and down. No one stops the service or converts rails right before the end, since you can't win when you're not delivering cargo. I think perf. goal is a good safeguard in that case.

[YorVeX]

No one stops the service or converts rails right before the end, since you can't win when you're not delivering cargo

it was rather about "right before someone else wins". maybe you missed the last goal announcements because you're focused on the game and you didn't notice how close another player came to winning the game when starting your conversion.

it only needs to happen once and we will have just the same thread like this one, where someone does not understand what has happened and complains about wrong/unfair score calculation.

Income is like the perf. score, that goes up and down.

it might go up and down but not as much as income in some certain situations.

another thing is that i think the income idea misses the task you want to accomplish. the income has the same problem as all other values: you can raise it faster when you join later and start with better trains.
furthermore it would be redundant. we already measure the income indirectly by taking the time you needed to win the game into account. if you get 50 million in 10 years and someone else needed 5 years for 50 million apparently he had twice your income (average over time) - which makes later-joiners benefit who naturally need less time to get the same income, as they can start right away with better trains, hence get a better score. now if you additionally consider the income you increase the advantage of the late-joiner even more.

let alone the fact that i still don't agree with the idea to penalize late-joiners in general. Geert has only shown one special case where apparently he wasn't being competed during his AFK time. ofc this can happen but special situations will lead to special scores, nothing unusual about that. he just got lucky i guess.
what Geert has shown is that you get a better score when
- you're in luck that the server just started (and/or is empty) the moment where you still got some time to set up some good lines for 1 our 2 hours before you need to go AFK (school, work, sleep...)
- you're in luck again that when your AFK time ends the game is near the end and you just need to do one last big coup like conversion to mono or maglev
- you're in luck once more that nobody has been competing you during AFK time
- you play on long run servers (it really doesn't make a big difference on shorter servers)

there is so many things that just have to match by good fortune that i still don't see why i should change a formula that has calculated thousands of games in a way that complaints are relatively low. actually the fact that issues are only found on such special cases confirms me that the current formula is good (there exists no such thing as a perfect algorithm that has some disadvantages in specific situations).
whatever change i make to this formula has a big chance of breaking fairness in hundreds of other games - only for fixing this one thing Geert encountered. i have yet to see a good reason to take that risk.

[Geert]

well thanx for the answer Yorvex
I can live with that

I am glad its been discussed anyway, now I know some answers about how things work, or why things are working like it does.

[Geert]

I have thought of a solution for the lower points for bigger games.

Sell 2/3 or 3/4 of all the trains short before the end and you will be veery ''efficient'' and get a crap load of points

[alex879ro]

Well, WTF from South Africa did that. And ST2 banned him....and i agree with that...if i`d caught someone selling his trains right at the end just to score more points , i`d ban too.

As for your idea of penalizing late entries...I just got one question....WHY?
It`s hard enough for a player having to catch up....but being penalized....seems totally unfair...and also will ruin the number of players that actually try to catch up even if the oponent is far ahead.
Beside...xor is right...as soon as he changes the calculation formula ,a new thread will appear asking him to get back to the old formula.