Post by Lord_Emsworth in Distributrains comments

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This is an awesome middle ground between OpenTTD's janky half-baked systems and Factorio's life-consuming complexity. I've been wanting to play exactly this game for a while. And I appreciate how quickly you implemented some of my suggestions on Steam.

If I could get away with a few more- It would be nice to have a tooltip (or just an explanation) of what exactly the tradeoff I'm making is when I set lumber camp tree preservation, and it would be nice to have a visual of the max range of farms and lumber camps when placing them. for optimization.

Lord_Emsworth3 days ago

Oh, and a tooltip with production chains for resources so a newbie can see what e.g. a plastic plant will require before buying a card.

Lord_Emsworth3 days ago (1 edit)

And a question: are the rain/wind/sun indicators in the lower right meant to be the same scale, i.e. if rain is 4.0-6.2 and sun is 3.0 to 5.0, then generally dams are better on this map? I can't be sure but I just generated a few maps and it seems like sun is generally higher-valued and more consistent? Is the tradeoff that solar requires semiconductors, or maybe just is worse without upgrades? I'm kind of confused about how dams work in general; it's not clear what a kilowatt-hour is in the context of this game's timescale.

Oddwarg2 days ago

The tradeoff with the tree preservation setting is lower values are more productive but lead to deforestation. The deal is you can choose to manage the forest sustainably or thin it out and then move the camp.

Wind and sun are on the same scale in that a fully upgraded solar farm has about the same output as a fully upgraded wind farm if their weather numbers are the same. Without upgrades, a wind farm is about 50% better.

Rain is a different matter. Dams are meant to be used as batteries for other power plants. When only powered by rain, they can be good early game, but building only dams is generally a poor choice.

The KWh unit is calculated under the assumption that a cycle is a month. This means with 1 MWh you can run a 1 MW engine for roughly one real second. Maybe there's a better way to present this information, but it's just the amount of energy stored in the dam.

In map generation, wind is likely to be lower than sun and rain, while sun and rain are inversely correlated. You are meant to choose your power plants based on a several factors including the climate, your resources, the terrain, and what cards appear in the shop.

Lord_Emsworth2 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks. I think my issue was that I couldn't understand why I would avoid deforestation...

Maybe it's silly, but it's weird to have a unit of resource that doesn't clearly correspond to any of the units it's consumed in, so maybe there should be a way to see a train's consumption in MWh/cycle or something, just so that number has any frame of reference. Or maybe I'll just get used to it.

edit: another suggestion with logging camps... it would be cool if trains could automatically recognize a "moved" logging camp as the same one, so that I don't have to find each train that was going to the old location and update its orders.

Oddwarg22 hours ago

I added a MWh/cycle tooltip in the train build menu, and will continue working on improvements. But for now I encourage you to see the added management effort as a cost of deforestation.

itch.io

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