An experiment

[Stevie D]

I thought I would try a little experiment on TTD, having just finished
a complete game, and not having played it for a couple of months.

What I was trying to find out was what affects town growth.

I set up 12 towns, all with a population of about 600.
* Half were built around a large grid of roads, half were built as
they felt like it.
* Four had no transport at all, four had a single slow bus serving
them, and four had frequent fast trains serving them.
* Half had active industries served.

The results, after some time, were this:

Nothing - 722
Bus - 1426
Trains - 1191
Grid roads - 683
Bus & roads - 2042
Train & roads - 1745
Industry - 727
Industry & bus - 1551
Industry & train - 605
Industry & roads - 1033
Industry, bus & roads - 2447
Industry, train & roads - 1462

So, looking at average increases:
* Roads: +161% ... No roads: +72% [1]
* Industry: +117% [1] ... No industry: +116%
* Trains: +108% [1] ... Bus: +211% ... No transport: +31%

[1] The "industry & train" figure looks a bit rogue. Omitting it gives
- No roads: +87%
- Industry: +140%
- Trains: +144%

So, the not surprising news is that, as we thought, building a network
of roads helps a town to grow, and providing it with transport helps
it to grow. It also appears (see note [1]) that serving the town's
industries will help it to grow as well.

The bizarre findings there are that a solitary bus, carrying 31
passengers at 35mph actually does better for the town than an 80mph
train, three times as often, carrying up to 30 bags of mail and 160
passengers! One explanation for this is that the extra space needed by
the station and track detracts from the growth of the town, by
impinging on where buildings would have appeared otherwise. (A
suitable hole was left when building the town. None of the 600
residents had there houses knocked down so that I could build the
railways!)

What I didn't think to look at was the effect of having several buses
running across the town compared to one single, central departure
point. Maybe next time I'm bored!

The other part of the experiment was to consider how effective
different train types are at moving passengers. One thing that has
puzzled me before is, if I have lots of passengers in a town, but only
room for a very small station, am I better off running fast trains or
DMUs? So, to test it, I build two stonkin' big cities, and to one of
them ran a 150mph TIM with 2 passenger carriages (4 vehicles in
total), and to the other a 78mph Manley-Morel DMU with 4 carriages.

Initially, I had the trains running only a short distance - the MM DMU
was streets ahead, carrying about 2/3 more passengers than the TIM.
Then I made the run longer, so that the TIM's speed advantage would
have more chance to make itself known. The DMU was still carrying over
1/3 more passengers.

Conclusion: the time taken to load/unload (using Josef's Patch) is a
significant part of the overall journey time, so running one slow
train with more passengers works out better than lots of faster,
shorter ones.

By 'eck I was bored this morning!

--
Stevie D
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[SHADOW-XIII]

Yes, I found that towns with computer BUS transport growing more
faster and get bigger and bigger. But my towns with buses don't want
grow.