It's actually the opposite in the US-- the DOT will build them for you for free, but they won't pay for the maintenance. This is the trap that leads so many cities to go bankrupt.
BTW, having a net worth of 1GBP* is NOT a sign that you're doing things wrong. It's unavoidable early on. Look at it this way: you start with 100k GBP which are loaned, so if you laid down some track, that track is acting as the collateral (I hope I used the correct term here) for the loan. In a layman's words, that track is, like the money, not yours. It _will_ be yours once you repay the loan. To save some expenses, one should always aim to (a) repay as much of the loan as possible or (b) use the loan as fully as possible. For example, if you can afford either track A or track B connecting a coal mine to one of two coal power stations, and let's say A (including a train) takes 80k GBP to build and (B) takes 130k GBP to build but delivers the coal to a more distant power station (which increases the payments you receive per ton of coal delivered even in cases where it wouldn't make any sense), try to get 130k GBP on hand and build B. If B is beyond your limit, build A instead and repay as much of your cash on hand as possible. (You pay interest on both loans and cash below zero, but you don't _receive_ any interest for cash above zero.) Never start small ("Oh, that oal mine is only 20 squares from a power station, let's do that!"); due to the distance increasing your income, going small is a noob trap! In fact, I'd recommend creating a 512x512 map for your first game, or at the very least 256256, as little water (one edge is OK) and as flat as possible, and without rivers. Slopes and water are just obstacles you want to minimize until you get the hang of the game. Also, you shouldn't play on Easy except for your first game. Easy takes 25% off all prices, but the economy of the game is still easy on normal and hard. Play normal after that, because the normal prices are easier to memorize. And if you really want a bit of a challenge, play Normal with infrastructure upkeep enabled. That'll become gradually harder with time (actually with network size, so you don't get penalized for stagnation). You can think of it as the game "taxing the rich." *I always play with GBP, since that's what the PC uses; every currency except GBP is that internal price or value times a fixed conversion factor, e.g. 1:2 for $, 1:4 for DM, and 1:40 for yen (not 100% sure about the last one).
I can only speak from my experience with factorio, but I've found that troubleshooting trains is less finding a needle in a haystack and more like a man holding a gun to your head, screaming at you to find said needle
Its even worse when you got multiple cities and multiple industries all connect willy nilly. The headaches I got from this game shortened my lifespan by 50 years but it was worth it. Sometimes I want to play the game but I think about the potential consequences of ever troubleshooting shit again - then you find out it was just one signal light.
OpemTTD's rail signals are actually really reliable and useful compared to Factorio. (Especially the path signals). That's sorta the issue, because they allow you to do anything you'd do IRL, so you end up trying to do really complex builds.
This gives me strong Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs vibes, if that mad factory owner protagonist was a transport company owner/city sponsor and planner instead. The Cult of the Almighty Grid arises.
A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... i got in.
I had to try this myself. First run I did from 1950 to 2050 because I wanted to experiment with all train types including maglevs. Copied your approach with several train rings around the city and made it to approx 500k by 2050. Made some interesting observations during the first run regarding ships. So for the second run I`m going completely nuts with ships, exploiting their ability to pass through each other and stack at stations. Already passed the 500k at the halfway point in 2000. I`m achieving 70-80% transportation rates for passengers and mail. At the moment the city has crossed the 700k mark and there are still ~40years left until 2050. Fingers crossed that I get it to 1M.
@@hoovyzepoot dude, 1M is absolutely no problem with this method. But the micromanagement towards the last few years is complete mayhem. I could hardly keep up with buying new ships and build new blocks. I used a 3x3 base grid and connected 4 of those "blocks" linearly with 2 ports, each in the center of block 1 and 4. This gives you a 100% port coverage of a 6x5 "main block". And inside the small channel between the ports you can run as many passenger and mail ships as you want, exploiting their stackabaility. These main blocks are horizontally and vertically tileable to cover the whole map and only like 8% of the space is actually occupied for transport. It's nuts.
I have thousands of hours into this game, both the original and TTDpatch and OpenTTD. Was even a developer on OpenTTD back in the day (my code was what paved the way to having maps bigger than 256x256 tiles). There are dozens of tips and tricks that could help you do better in OpenTTD (And beat the yogs at jinglejam every time without fail). If you ever need a tutorial on proper signal usage, or how to make that city growth work even better for you, I'll gladly set some time apart and do that.
Thanks for helping improve the game. Hard to tell how many hours I sunk into it (starting from TTDpatch times), wouldn't call it many thousands, but definitely more than thousand. I remember the times when stations could finally get longer than 5 tiles, "station walking" wasn't necessary anymore, overall better usability. And then the whole newgrf system. Almost always had dbsetxl enabled in a game and the station sets like "industrial stations", "japanese stations" and "newstations" (these are the ones I remember, even though I haven't played the game in over a decade). The game music still makes me feel nostalgic. 😅
@@superdau The game music is nostalgic, without fail. Not just the theme song (both TT and TTD versions) but also in-game songs like Little Red Diesel. The game having was one of the first ever where you had an in-game song selector system (and people figured out how to put their own midi's in it long before ttdpatch was a thing). The TTDpatch era at peak was an amazing thing. So many developers with their own ideas that just refused to work together, but somehow people made it work anyway, sometimes to their chagrin (I'm nudging at original db set developer here). But it was still an assembler patch on an assembler written mess of a game code. I remember the first time someone ran the ttd code through an asm-to-c converter and just posted the results online even though that was illegal. People were scared the whole community would get a cease-and-desist any day while that stuff was around. But some C coders went through the white-lab process and replaced every single line of auto-generated code to arrive at what we call openttd now. There was uproar the day openttd got its own subforum on the tt-forums. But it didn't take long for its features to surpass ttdpatch, and the future was clear. The game we have now is so much better that it makes the original games unplayable (even if you manage to get them to run in the first place). But it's still true to the feel of the original that I don't miss it. If you have a group of friends that enjoy this game, I highly recommend playing a long-term game using daylength settings (still not in the base game, you have to download a patch pack version for it). One server running the game on REALLY hard settings with an in-game year taking an hour or more. Log in, build a bit to spend your money, min-max your routes and log out again until the next day. I posted some After Action Reports on the tt-forums if you're interested in how that works out.
Your work is very much appreciated and loved. Tutorials from the source of how to better use signals would be incredibly helpful, it’s been the biggest bottleneck in growing my cities and systems.
Pro Tip: you can start with a city of ZERO population. Just found a subsidiary and put the headquarters in the same city, a bit away from your main headquarters. Both headquarters count for bus passangers. So while you haul your employees between the two headquarters, you will actually make a profit and the city will grow.
This. Was. Fun. I don't really need more TTD. I don't mind more TTD. But just the concept of "I have a wacky or interesting idea, I want to do something insane for fun, let's see if this can be done, etc..." is some of the content I enjoy most. It's hard to get something like this constistently, but it's not necessary. A rare gem to find in one's recommendations every few weeks or months makes it special, genuine, memorable.
Found this in my recommendation two nights ago and finally watching it afking on OSRS. This gameplay makes me want to play this so much I installed it, and I'm greatful its free and opensource even on steam.
@@ianmesser9289 its such a timeless wonderful game, used to play it a lot when i was younger cuz i had a mac and didnt want to pay for games. For an OpenSource game its really just maximised all possible gameplay options for a tycoon, and honestly its better than many of the more prestige Transport Tycoons that cost more
I like how at about the half hour mark, the game morphs from "I want to build a big city, here's how I'm doing it" to "The grid is love, the grid is life, long live the grid."
I thoroughly enjoyed watching a man slowly loose his mind challenging himself with such a pointless task and then realizing that in fact there are even more pointless challenges out there to do!
I have thousands of hours in this game, albeit the Transport Tycoon Deluxe version, in MS-DOS, on our old 1993 486DX 33mhz... First of the bat, you could do a scenario with a pre-built grid. And then plop the city down in the middle, and with a scenario, you can get rid of lakes and rivers and heights too. Second, you should ensure the ground is at least 3 tiles high. So you can eventually replace all the tracks with tunnels that can cross each other underground. Third, you should refrain from building anything but train networks. Trains have the highest throughput, and if managed correctly, do not crash as often as planes do. Placement of industries on your scenario map should be in the farthest corners of the map to ensure the greatest profit. Also because they wont take up precious space you city needs to grow. You should go around the city and kill all the water fountains. They, like churches in simcity2000, only cost room and provide nothing to the almighty population limit. And you should built lots of stations in unpopulated area's and connect them with underground rails to anticipate future growth. And it would probably help to start in the year 1950 as you can almost right away electrify the grid and save on expenses early game.
@@MarijnRoorda or yonky spooky it halfway off the screen just saying it will auto delete if it’s halfway or more but not entirely off the screen which is inefficient but really fun actually.
The bestest way to extend the coverage of a train station is Bus/Truck stops. You just make a chain of stops coming out of the train station, as long as they are next to each other, they will link up and be considered to be a part of the same station. And when you've extended as far as the game lets you, you just demolish the extra stops in the middle of the chain and leave the last one. The game will still consider it a part of the train station, and the train station will pick up stuff from town accordingly. Also works with airports.
I imagine the "I must feed the grid, I must become the grid" is how Robert Moses felt about highways. And I'm terrified to think... how long WOULD it take this Megacity to fill this entire map grid?
Back in '95, I got my first PC. It came with a CD full of games. Jazz Jackrabbit, Warcraft 1 and 2, X-com, Breach, and also Transport Tycoon (not the deluxe version). Most of these (and others on the CD) have held up very well across the years. While I enjoyed the others quite a bit, it was TT that would eventually eat up years of my life. Ironically, this game made by one person (using only Assembly of all things) has remained my favourite over the years. It has taught me so much over the years. I would like to thank the Bulgarian pirate CD factories, and the especially the person that made that particular selection. Much like PotatoBoy here is shaping Megacity, so too that CD has shaped my life.
I've been in a similar situation, but it's been 1998. A paper sheet with a long list of games and how much space they take was circulating through the elementary school, you've picked whatever you wanted until you've filled the 650 MB capacity of the CD, then paid to a guy who knew a guy, and in about a week, you've got your freshly burned CD. My order included TTD, SimCity 2000, Warcraft 2, Duke Nukem 3d, Starcraft, both Dooms, Dune 2, GTA 1 and a bunch of other stuff I can no longer remember. In retrospect, it's impressive how much stuff fit on a single CD; everything having its cinematics ripped out to save space helped.
A few tips for people who might be new to the game: You can also hold down crtl when placing stations to "combine" them. So for example, if you build a bus station in the center of the city and then you build a train station at the northern end of the city with crtl+click, you can have those two stations act as one, meaning that trains will immediately pick up any passengers from the bus station, and vice versa. You can combine any type of station, bus stations can be combined with other bus stations, cargo truck stations, train stations, airports, and so on, everything can be combined with everything. (That is what he did towards the end of the video to increase the coverage of his feeder bus stations - he basically just combined bus stations that were a short distance away from each other) An issue that can happen when you build stuff is that sometimes your rating with the city will drop down to a point where you are no longer allowed to build anything, not even a bus station. The most frequent reason for this is terraforming (elevating/lowering land, or deleting rivers), but I think you also get a minor penalty for just building over trees. If you don't have any stations yet, because you're still planning out train lines and whatnot, or maybe because you initially overlooked it while going past to some other destination, you might consider it "lost". However, cities like it when you plant trees near them. So, if you happen to want to build something in a city and for whatever reason your rating has dropped to the point where you're not allowed to build anything, just plant trees until you're allowed to set up at least a small bus station or two, then you can use those to slowly improve your rating again.
Wow, this hour passed way quicker than I thought! This video was surprisingly entertaining, and I like your calm voice :). And I also learned something new about city growth, one of the most fun part in the game for me! While watching the first part I was about to leave a comment about automatic vehicle replace, but, thankfully, you quickly started using them as well :). I remember also filling one map completely by a 3x3 grid, although there were 9 cities instead of one, and I usually followed a pattern about roads crossing railways: North-South is a bridge, West-East is a tunnel. And I admit that minimizing diagonal railways like you did makes for a prettier look, but they really slow the trains down, especially the fast ones.
45:45 Yes, if you've ever seen any multiplayer OTTD server, eventually every single map ends with a completely flat map that's just endless urban sprawl.
To maximize growth: - Turn off allow cities to build their own roads in options, so the city doesn't make any dead ends, at the expense of extra road maintenance cost for your company - The way the growth mechanic works is it starts from the center, at the city name, checks along a random road for an empty plot of land, OR small houses to upgrade after a certain total population has been reached, be aware that the mechanic will give up if it can't a spot within a given timeframe, which is a very common occurence in 100.000+ population cities. To minimize that issue, the best solution I have found is to make a single spiral road with no intersections, apart from the center where you'd put your 5 bus depots. Given the 2 digit population start, even with all 5 bus stations serviced mothly, city growth will be painfully slow (once every 200 days) So naturally, you'd want some other income to keep funding new buildings which speeds up the early stage significantly.
@@AngryKettle no, but eventually the "main" city will eventually flood into other nearby cities/towns, which has their own agent, but even if you demolish those down to 0 population, they will not go away.
I've always dreamed of sort of a mega combo game with all different sims. Like you would have a giant map where anyone can do anything. Some people play Simcity and build the city for you and then the TTD player is responsible to bring you the goods, meanwhile Flight Sim/Bus Sim/Train Sim/Truck Sim are actually driving the routes that you prepare... and so on. Other possible inclusions could be like Farm Sim, Hospital/Mall/Prison/Fire dept. Sim etc...
I have watched a handful of OTTD videos before, and I have never enjoyed them. However, this was super fun! Great video, and glad I found your channel!
The constant mentioning of the grid and making things perfect makes me wonder if Potato was really become more like Clu from Tron. Not to mention transforming everything to serve the grid plays well into Clu's vision of the Grid and the plans for the rest of the world.
First time watcher of your content, absolutely loved it!! Used to play this game all the and I now very much want to take on this challenge and feel a beckoning ... the beckoning. Of the Grid 😅
I love how mental health goes slowly but surely out of the windo... G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D
11 месяцев назад+2
I love how you remove any slope because "it makes it faster" but you decide to remove any diagonals making your distances way, way longer, that's brillant !
We are the Grid. Lower your hills and surrender your water. We will add your residential and transportational essence to our own. You will be gridsimilated. Resistance is futile.
I really liked that video! That was until I noticed tiny pixel roads spreading on my desk, like an amoeba that keeps on growing. My entire apartment is now part of T H E G R I D If you watch this video be advised: your home, your yard, your neighborhood, even your city may be next.
I came here for an interesting video on openttd and I got weirdly compelling poetry on a fucking road grid… absolutely fantastic. Great first video to discover the channel with
GRID FOR LIFE!!. i can't to see a episode 2 of this playthrough. you really did great job it makes me feel want to life in your mega city. keep it up hope you always well
Unironically, I would vote for @PotatoMcWhiskey. He understands a lot of bigger planning problems well, but more importantly, he's smart enough to know how stupid he is (in certain domains). That latter thing is what most leaders are lacking.
It’s very interesting seeing CLUs descent into madness. Created to form the perfect system and in doing so drives himself insane in service to the grid.
passing sidings are still very important for railroads (unless you're csx and you run trains 3x longer than your sidings and yards...) you just have to make sure to signal them with a chain signal so that if the block on either side of it is occupied, the passing train only has the siding open
Basically, the single track between sidings must be one long signal block, and it _must include the switch squares_ on both ends, or a train will eventually occupy the switch while waiting, causing deadlock. The important thing about "single" signals is that they're never truly single, but are perma-red at the back, except for _one_ signal where it's clearly stated that it can be passed from the other side. When I was a n00b in the game, I tried forcing traffic directions with chains of waypoints. It didn't work. I thought that single signals wouldn't outlaw traffic in the other direction, but then I started reading the OpenTTD wiki, which is a goldmine of advice and information. For example, diagonal track saves distance (but no building cost) and can help with speed, esp. if your accel is poor or top speed is high. I too try to keep track as level as possible, and mostly consisting of the two directions the closest to the target (i.e. mostly one straight trak and one diagonal track type).
you absolutely don't need chain signals for functional passing sidings, normal pathing signals will do fine (I'd say better even). Potato is just bad at signals :D
Probably my favourite video you've done, please do more! Watching your mind devolving into complete absorption by the grid was a trip. Would also love one which explains a bit more about TTD and how it works.
That was great! The challenge is interesting, but I'd also like to see how ginormous you could build the city beyond the time limit as well. Is there a cap to how quickly the city can grow? Also, since boats can pass through each other, would a network of boats and canals be better than a network of trains and busses?
Buses just don't cut it for cities, so if you are not playing with trams then you need to build a much denser network of rail lines. My technique for carrying maximum passengers is to build the entire network as primarily an array of single track lines that are far enough apart that the coverage zones don't overlap, and have infrequent cross-lines. But, here's the key thing, all the lines are underground! Lower the ground to build the stations and then put most of the track in tunnels, with lowered land at junctions and to allow signals. This gives you more building space at ground level for houses. Then have trains running in one-way loops around, to minimise conflicts. You can achieve quite phenomenal throughput in this way!
Two things I was thinking of when watching this. 1. When he was speaking about the Grid... "The Gri(p)d was loose!" 2. Suddenly the video evolved into a AmbiguousAmphibian video xD
Around the middle of this video, I felt like you were reciting an amazing poem about “The G R I D” and I was mesmerized. I hope to see you play more of this!
I´m feeling ships, and a city wide canal network is the way to go. Them not colliding with each other seems very useful, and you can transport all the cargo on the same network.
"Believe it or not, as in the real world, the main driver of economic activity is people getting on buses. This is why I'm running for election in 2024 based entirely around a campaign of replacing every single car on the road with a bus." HEAVY URBANIST BREATHING. I'd unironically vote for you. Potato for Prez 2024.
Something that is really fun is making a subway by putting train stations a tile lower than the city and using tunnels to connect them to each other, this way you can run trains within a city.
OTT is dangerous game to seek perfection in, but a great watch. Looking forward to see how your optimal infrastructure will work out vs how the city decides to work.
You can actually propagate a city in OTTD by building a tunnel from the middle of the city underground to the desired location. The town will start then building an offshoot at that location.
20:00 - If you put a max sized rail station in the center of a city, and later add an airport next to it, you can actually manage the flow of passengers and mail for a city of any size. But that requires a lot of very long term planning.
You inspired me to get this game and try this challenge. Id suggest a goal of how many people you can get in the city in 100 years. For my attempt im gonna lean on the boats far more that you have. I suspect that the fact that you can stack them for infinite throughput, cloning them is one of the only possible ways i see to keep up with the demand as things get dense.
I don't think I have ever watched your videos before. At first I was intrigued, half way in "GRID IS EVERYTHING, GRID IS LIFE" I could watch this again, with more buses, trucks and enough nightmare logistics that it would take an entire conglomeration to decide on route names let alone everything else. I rate this 3 grid squares out of 2 wrong facing railway signals.
Next time you should make a metro by putting the stations into depressions one lower than the city and connect them by tunnels. Increases the number of possible houses in the catchment area.
After an hour of watching a video about building a mega city on OTTD RUclips advertised Lucozade Sport to me. Not sure they’re really hitting their target market! Great video, thanks! 😊
Absolutely loved this video, my first exposure to your content, will be back for more! However I spent the majority of the video shouting "REPAY THE LOAN!" at the screen
Using signals is cheaper, and efficient once you get the hang of it. Also, not sure about the game version, but there should be a "vehicle upgrade" menu so you don't have to redo the orders when you want to replace the train engine, or any other vehicle. Other than that, epic build :)
This is the best TTD tutorial ever made. I wanted to get into the game for some and watched some tutorials and still didn’t understand what’s going on. Then YT recommended me this video and I was like - ok, let’s see a pro play. But this actually was a really good tutorial. Thanks a lot, gonna go play now.
Fun fact: Prehistoric (and some very rural communities) used favors instead of currency, a complex series of favors is what makes the most sense in an era of complex scarcity. It is often said that barter predates currency but barter doesn't make much sense because of the exchange problem, and such systems are too impersonal for small-well connected groups.
Игры
G R I D
G R I D
G R I D
G R I D
Hey can you tell me what mod you used?
In this video you mention that people should give this a shot. Is there any way for me to download this scenario from somewhere?
@@dolorlux4612 wha
@@garethbgoogle9396 no mods
G R I
D G R
I D G
Builds roads: "it doesn't cost maintenance"
Finally, a local government simulator
the american suburbs dont seem like a bad idea after all!
It's actually the opposite in the US-- the DOT will build them for you for free, but they won't pay for the maintenance. This is the trap that leads so many cities to go bankrupt.
I love how Potato made a "introduction to OTTD" episode without saying "hi, this is an introduction on how to play OTTD"
OTTD is also a different game and I was confused.
Also, he does things that are called exploits and are prohibited on almost all servers.
@@piotrek29798 You realise that most people play OpenTTD singleplayer, right?
@@lbsc1201 There is some official report on this? That you are so sure? Lol id say 50/50 and we are even :)
BTW, having a net worth of 1GBP* is NOT a sign that you're doing things wrong. It's unavoidable early on. Look at it this way: you start with 100k GBP which are loaned, so if you laid down some track, that track is acting as the collateral (I hope I used the correct term here) for the loan. In a layman's words, that track is, like the money, not yours. It _will_ be yours once you repay the loan.
To save some expenses, one should always aim to (a) repay as much of the loan as possible or (b) use the loan as fully as possible. For example, if you can afford either track A or track B connecting a coal mine to one of two coal power stations, and let's say A (including a train) takes 80k GBP to build and (B) takes 130k GBP to build but delivers the coal to a more distant power station (which increases the payments you receive per ton of coal delivered even in cases where it wouldn't make any sense), try to get 130k GBP on hand and build B. If B is beyond your limit, build A instead and repay as much of your cash on hand as possible. (You pay interest on both loans and cash below zero, but you don't _receive_ any interest for cash above zero.) Never start small ("Oh, that oal mine is only 20 squares from a power station, let's do that!"); due to the distance increasing your income, going small is a noob trap! In fact, I'd recommend creating a 512x512 map for your first game, or at the very least 256256, as little water (one edge is OK) and as flat as possible, and without rivers. Slopes and water are just obstacles you want to minimize until you get the hang of the game.
Also, you shouldn't play on Easy except for your first game. Easy takes 25% off all prices, but the economy of the game is still easy on normal and hard. Play normal after that, because the normal prices are easier to memorize. And if you really want a bit of a challenge, play Normal with infrastructure upkeep enabled. That'll become gradually harder with time (actually with network size, so you don't get penalized for stagnation). You can think of it as the game "taxing the rich."
*I always play with GBP, since that's what the PC uses; every currency except GBP is that internal price or value times a fixed conversion factor, e.g. 1:2 for $, 1:4 for DM, and 1:40 for yen (not 100% sure about the last one).
I can only speak from my experience with factorio, but I've found that troubleshooting trains is less finding a needle in a haystack and more like a man holding a gun to your head, screaming at you to find said needle
as someone who plays a lot of factcorio, i just use drones or long ass belts fuck trains its too much brain power for someone as stupid as me
Its even worse when you got multiple cities and multiple industries all connect willy nilly. The headaches I got from this game shortened my lifespan by 50 years but it was worth it.
Sometimes I want to play the game but I think about the potential consequences of ever troubleshooting shit again - then you find out it was just one signal light.
OpemTTD's rail signals are actually really reliable and useful compared to Factorio. (Especially the path signals). That's sorta the issue, because they allow you to do anything you'd do IRL, so you end up trying to do really complex builds.
This very quickly went from "Let's do our best" to "the factory MUST grow!" and I'm all about it.
The Factory must Grow
This gives me strong Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs vibes, if that mad factory owner protagonist was a transport company owner/city sponsor and planner instead.
The Cult of the Almighty Grid arises.
Frostpunk but megacity is the furnace
*grid
OpenTTD but it's Factorio
BEWARE: this is not a video. It is poetry. It is life. It is...
The GRID
A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... i got in.
It is our Life, It is our Hope, It is our Doom.
It is
the GRID.
Came for this comment, It is surprising how quickly it goes from cheerful lets build into deep existential poetry.
US city planners be like
G R I D
I had to try this myself.
First run I did from 1950 to 2050 because I wanted to experiment with all train types including maglevs. Copied your approach with several train rings around the city and made it to approx 500k by 2050.
Made some interesting observations during the first run regarding ships. So for the second run I`m going completely nuts with ships, exploiting their ability to pass through each other and stack at stations.
Already passed the 500k at the halfway point in 2000. I`m achieving 70-80% transportation rates for passengers and mail. At the moment the city has crossed the 700k mark and there are still ~40years left until 2050. Fingers crossed that I get it to 1M.
So, how far did the insanity go during those 100 years?
@@hoovyzepoot dude, 1M is absolutely no problem with this method.
But the micromanagement towards the last few years is complete mayhem.
I could hardly keep up with buying new ships and build new blocks.
I used a 3x3 base grid and connected 4 of those "blocks" linearly with 2 ports, each in the center of block 1 and 4. This gives you a 100% port coverage of a 6x5 "main block". And inside the small channel between the ports you can run as many passenger and mail ships as you want, exploiting their stackabaility.
These main blocks are horizontally and vertically tileable to cover the whole map and only like 8% of the space is actually occupied for transport.
It's nuts.
I have thousands of hours into this game, both the original and TTDpatch and OpenTTD. Was even a developer on OpenTTD back in the day (my code was what paved the way to having maps bigger than 256x256 tiles). There are dozens of tips and tricks that could help you do better in OpenTTD (And beat the yogs at jinglejam every time without fail).
If you ever need a tutorial on proper signal usage, or how to make that city growth work even better for you, I'll gladly set some time apart and do that.
Thanks for helping improve the game. Hard to tell how many hours I sunk into it (starting from TTDpatch times), wouldn't call it many thousands, but definitely more than thousand. I remember the times when stations could finally get longer than 5 tiles, "station walking" wasn't necessary anymore, overall better usability. And then the whole newgrf system. Almost always had dbsetxl enabled in a game and the station sets like "industrial stations", "japanese stations" and "newstations" (these are the ones I remember, even though I haven't played the game in over a decade). The game music still makes me feel nostalgic. 😅
@@superdau The game music is nostalgic, without fail. Not just the theme song (both TT and TTD versions) but also in-game songs like Little Red Diesel. The game having was one of the first ever where you had an in-game song selector system (and people figured out how to put their own midi's in it long before ttdpatch was a thing).
The TTDpatch era at peak was an amazing thing. So many developers with their own ideas that just refused to work together, but somehow people made it work anyway, sometimes to their chagrin (I'm nudging at original db set developer here). But it was still an assembler patch on an assembler written mess of a game code.
I remember the first time someone ran the ttd code through an asm-to-c converter and just posted the results online even though that was illegal. People were scared the whole community would get a cease-and-desist any day while that stuff was around. But some C coders went through the white-lab process and replaced every single line of auto-generated code to arrive at what we call openttd now. There was uproar the day openttd got its own subforum on the tt-forums. But it didn't take long for its features to surpass ttdpatch, and the future was clear.
The game we have now is so much better that it makes the original games unplayable (even if you manage to get them to run in the first place). But it's still true to the feel of the original that I don't miss it.
If you have a group of friends that enjoy this game, I highly recommend playing a long-term game using daylength settings (still not in the base game, you have to download a patch pack version for it). One server running the game on REALLY hard settings with an in-game year taking an hour or more. Log in, build a bit to spend your money, min-max your routes and log out again until the next day. I posted some After Action Reports on the tt-forums if you're interested in how that works out.
I’d love that! This game looks so fun but to be honest it’s a bit confusing getting started in it.
Your work is very much appreciated and loved. Tutorials from the source of how to better use signals would be incredibly helpful, it’s been the biggest bottleneck in growing my cities and systems.
Pro Tip: you can start with a city of ZERO population. Just found a subsidiary and put the headquarters in the same city, a bit away from your main headquarters. Both headquarters count for bus passangers. So while you haul your employees between the two headquarters, you will actually make a profit and the city will grow.
Sounds like California to me!
but in my scenarios ...time when finally city starts to grow is really looooong or it´s just don´t start at all but it depends on game version
Imagine paying to go to work just to be filing your own bus tickets and nothing else
This. Was. Fun.
I don't really need more TTD. I don't mind more TTD. But just the concept of "I have a wacky or interesting idea, I want to do something insane for fun, let's see if this can be done, etc..." is some of the content I enjoy most.
It's hard to get something like this constistently, but it's not necessary. A rare gem to find in one's recommendations every few weeks or months makes it special, genuine, memorable.
Found this in my recommendation two nights ago and finally watching it afking on OSRS. This gameplay makes me want to play this so much I installed it, and I'm greatful its free and opensource even on steam.
36:00 Potato: There may be no mistakes. We must erase aberrations
Also Potato: _has a 3x4 column just 3 grid squares to the left_
@@ianmesser9289 its such a timeless wonderful game, used to play it a lot when i was younger cuz i had a mac and didnt want to pay for games. For an OpenSource game its really just maximised all possible gameplay options for a tycoon, and honestly its better than many of the more prestige Transport Tycoons that cost more
I like how at about the half hour mark, the game morphs from "I want to build a big city, here's how I'm doing it" to "The grid is love, the grid is life, long live the grid."
I thoroughly enjoyed watching a man slowly loose his mind challenging himself with such a pointless task and then realizing that in fact there are even more pointless challenges out there to do!
You know you've reached the ultimate money meme when you say "I have to *borrow* more I.O.U.s" XD
The US Gov in a nutshell
I have thousands of hours in this game, albeit the Transport Tycoon Deluxe version, in MS-DOS, on our old 1993 486DX 33mhz... First of the bat, you could do a scenario with a pre-built grid. And then plop the city down in the middle, and with a scenario, you can get rid of lakes and rivers and heights too. Second, you should ensure the ground is at least 3 tiles high. So you can eventually replace all the tracks with tunnels that can cross each other underground. Third, you should refrain from building anything but train networks. Trains have the highest throughput, and if managed correctly, do not crash as often as planes do. Placement of industries on your scenario map should be in the farthest corners of the map to ensure the greatest profit. Also because they wont take up precious space you city needs to grow.
You should go around the city and kill all the water fountains. They, like churches in simcity2000, only cost room and provide nothing to the almighty population limit. And you should built lots of stations in unpopulated area's and connect them with underground rails to anticipate future growth. And it would probably help to start in the year 1950 as you can almost right away electrify the grid and save on expenses early game.
Btw, you can close menu's by right clicking in them. That alone will save you plenty of kilometers of mouse travel and time spent pointing at the X's!
@@MarijnRoorda or just press "delete" key on keyboard to close all windows
OP sounds like someone about to retire telling an promising rookie about age old tricks.
more proof that trains are the best means of transport.
@@MarijnRoorda or yonky spooky it halfway off the screen just saying it will auto delete if it’s halfway or more but not entirely off the screen which is inefficient but really fun actually.
This horrific nightmare is every middle-eastern oil tycoon's sweetest dream... we NEED more of this!!!
The bestest way to extend the coverage of a train station is Bus/Truck stops. You just make a chain of stops coming out of the train station, as long as they are next to each other, they will link up and be considered to be a part of the same station. And when you've extended as far as the game lets you, you just demolish the extra stops in the middle of the chain and leave the last one. The game will still consider it a part of the train station, and the train station will pick up stuff from town accordingly.
Also works with airports.
Exactly. And there are some mods for better airports with more runways. Should actually be in by default by now.
I imagine the "I must feed the grid, I must become the grid" is how Robert Moses felt about highways.
And I'm terrified to think... how long WOULD it take this Megacity to fill this entire map grid?
“That’s no moon, it’s a grid station!” - Obi-Wan Concrete
Grids! Not on my watch! Highway-right-through-historic-downtown-ha!
Back in '95, I got my first PC. It came with a CD full of games. Jazz Jackrabbit, Warcraft 1 and 2, X-com, Breach, and also Transport Tycoon (not the deluxe version). Most of these (and others on the CD) have held up very well across the years. While I enjoyed the others quite a bit, it was TT that would eventually eat up years of my life. Ironically, this game made by one person (using only Assembly of all things) has remained my favourite over the years. It has taught me so much over the years.
I would like to thank the Bulgarian pirate CD factories, and the especially the person that made that particular selection. Much like PotatoBoy here is shaping Megacity, so too that CD has shaped my life.
I've been in a similar situation, but it's been 1998. A paper sheet with a long list of games and how much space they take was circulating through the elementary school, you've picked whatever you wanted until you've filled the 650 MB capacity of the CD, then paid to a guy who knew a guy, and in about a week, you've got your freshly burned CD. My order included TTD, SimCity 2000, Warcraft 2, Duke Nukem 3d, Starcraft, both Dooms, Dune 2, GTA 1 and a bunch of other stuff I can no longer remember. In retrospect, it's impressive how much stuff fit on a single CD; everything having its cinematics ripped out to save space helped.
Ahh X-COM from 1995 I've been playing that a bit in the past couple of weeks
Very emotional tale of a PC gamer living in a poor country in the 90s
A few tips for people who might be new to the game:
You can also hold down crtl when placing stations to "combine" them. So for example, if you build a bus station in the center of the city and then you build a train station at the northern end of the city with crtl+click, you can have those two stations act as one, meaning that trains will immediately pick up any passengers from the bus station, and vice versa. You can combine any type of station, bus stations can be combined with other bus stations, cargo truck stations, train stations, airports, and so on, everything can be combined with everything. (That is what he did towards the end of the video to increase the coverage of his feeder bus stations - he basically just combined bus stations that were a short distance away from each other)
An issue that can happen when you build stuff is that sometimes your rating with the city will drop down to a point where you are no longer allowed to build anything, not even a bus station. The most frequent reason for this is terraforming (elevating/lowering land, or deleting rivers), but I think you also get a minor penalty for just building over trees. If you don't have any stations yet, because you're still planning out train lines and whatnot, or maybe because you initially overlooked it while going past to some other destination, you might consider it "lost". However, cities like it when you plant trees near them. So, if you happen to want to build something in a city and for whatever reason your rating has dropped to the point where you're not allowed to build anything, just plant trees until you're allowed to set up at least a small bus station or two, then you can use those to slowly improve your rating again.
Wow, this hour passed way quicker than I thought! This video was surprisingly entertaining, and I like your calm voice :). And I also learned something new about city growth, one of the most fun part in the game for me!
While watching the first part I was about to leave a comment about automatic vehicle replace, but, thankfully, you quickly started using them as well :).
I remember also filling one map completely by a 3x3 grid, although there were 9 cities instead of one, and I usually followed a pattern about roads crossing railways: North-South is a bridge, West-East is a tunnel. And I admit that minimizing diagonal railways like you did makes for a prettier look, but they really slow the trains down, especially the fast ones.
45:45 Yes, if you've ever seen any multiplayer OTTD server, eventually every single map ends with a completely flat map that's just endless urban sprawl.
To maximize growth:
- Turn off allow cities to build their own roads in options, so the city doesn't make any dead ends, at the expense of extra road maintenance cost for your company
- The way the growth mechanic works is it starts from the center, at the city name, checks along a random road for an empty plot of land, OR small houses to upgrade after a certain total population has been reached, be aware that the mechanic will give up if it can't a spot within a given timeframe, which is a very common occurence in 100.000+ population cities.
To minimize that issue, the best solution I have found is to make a single spiral road with no intersections, apart from the center where you'd put your 5 bus depots.
Given the 2 digit population start, even with all 5 bus stations serviced mothly, city growth will be painfully slow (once every 200 days) So naturally, you'd want some other income to keep funding new buildings which speeds up the early stage significantly.
I didn’t know that city roads was a setting, very helpful!
Is it possible to split cities and add more city names to cause the agent to get more reach?
@@AngryKettle no, but eventually the "main" city will eventually flood into other nearby cities/towns, which has their own agent, but even if you demolish those down to 0 population, they will not go away.
there are far more effective tricks than a spiral to grow big cities
@@korenn9381 Then share them.
I've always dreamed of sort of a mega combo game with all different sims. Like you would have a giant map where anyone can do anything. Some people play Simcity and build the city for you and then the TTD player is responsible to bring you the goods, meanwhile Flight Sim/Bus Sim/Train Sim/Truck Sim are actually driving the routes that you prepare... and so on. Other possible inclusions could be like Farm Sim, Hospital/Mall/Prison/Fire dept. Sim etc...
How would you program this though? Would the players that are missing be controlled by an AI or would that fall into the active players?
I have watched a handful of OTTD videos before, and I have never enjoyed them. However, this was super fun! Great video, and glad I found your channel!
The constant mentioning of the grid and making things perfect makes me wonder if Potato was really become more like Clu from Tron. Not to mention transforming everything to serve the grid plays well into Clu's vision of the Grid and the plans for the rest of the world.
I love that this went from a tutorial of sorts to wild screed extolling the virtues of transportation and the evils of water. 😂😂😂
I LOVE the commentary! No screaming "friends" or stupid c*m jokes, just information and personality.
First time watcher of your content, absolutely loved it!! Used to play this game all the and I now very much want to take on this challenge and feel a beckoning ... the beckoning. Of the Grid 😅
As a Rollercoaster Tycoon aficionado, I appreciate now what makes a Chris Sawyer game a Chris Sawyer game.
I love how mental health goes slowly but surely out of the windo... G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D G R I D
I love how you remove any slope because "it makes it faster" but you decide to remove any diagonals making your distances way, way longer, that's brillant !
Great video.
Really enjoyed it.
I'd watch this content all day.
Do more of it!
OMG! YESSS Potato playing OpenTTD on his channel! The Armchair Admirals influence spreads!
We are the Grid. Lower your hills and surrender your water. We will add your residential and transportational essence to our own. You will be gridsimilated. Resistance is futile.
7:45 "Bulldoze the river"
That cracked me up more than it should. 😀
I'd love to see you do another challenge of a similar style. Really enjoyed this one!
Potato really channeling his inner ambiguousamphibian with those demented monologues, love it.
I really liked that video! That was until I noticed tiny pixel roads spreading on my desk, like an amoeba that keeps on growing. My entire apartment is now part of T H E G R I D
If you watch this video be advised: your home, your yard, your neighborhood, even your city may be next.
I came here for an interesting video on openttd and I got weirdly compelling poetry on a fucking road grid… absolutely fantastic. Great first video to discover the channel with
GRID FOR LIFE!!. i can't to see a episode 2 of this playthrough. you really did great job it makes me feel want to life in your mega city. keep it up hope you always well
I was captivated throughout the whole video, it almost felt like a movie. I'd love to see more of these long one-video playthroughs :)
Unironically, I would vote for @PotatoMcWhiskey. He understands a lot of bigger planning problems well, but more importantly, he's smart enough to know how stupid he is (in certain domains). That latter thing is what most leaders are lacking.
This inspired me to try it out for myself. Insanely amazing video, please do more!
It’s very interesting seeing CLUs descent into madness. Created to form the perfect system and in doing so drives himself insane in service to the grid.
passing sidings are still very important for railroads (unless you're csx and you run trains 3x longer than your sidings and yards...) you just have to make sure to signal them with a chain signal so that if the block on either side of it is occupied, the passing train only has the siding open
Basically, the single track between sidings must be one long signal block, and it _must include the switch squares_ on both ends, or a train will eventually occupy the switch while waiting, causing deadlock.
The important thing about "single" signals is that they're never truly single, but are perma-red at the back, except for _one_ signal where it's clearly stated that it can be passed from the other side. When I was a n00b in the game, I tried forcing traffic directions with chains of waypoints. It didn't work. I thought that single signals wouldn't outlaw traffic in the other direction, but then I started reading the OpenTTD wiki, which is a goldmine of advice and information. For example, diagonal track saves distance (but no building cost) and can help with speed, esp. if your accel is poor or top speed is high. I too try to keep track as level as possible, and mostly consisting of the two directions the closest to the target (i.e. mostly one straight trak and one diagonal track type).
you absolutely don't need chain signals for functional passing sidings, normal pathing signals will do fine (I'd say better even). Potato is just bad at signals :D
thought this was just a silly little playthrough but this man lost his mind 20 minutes in lmao
G. R. I. D
P.S. Love your take on it, would love to see part 2. Very soothing and nice video to watch
Ahhhhh one of my favourite nostalgic games being played by one of my favourite youtubers? I'm in for an hour of joy
Probably my favourite video you've done, please do more! Watching your mind devolving into complete absorption by the grid was a trip. Would also love one which explains a bit more about TTD and how it works.
I like how this evolved from a playthrough to a cult of the G R I D
Thanks, I play this game since 20 years (first the original, now the OpenTTD version) and still love this game!
Still learned from this video. Thanks!
I had no idea you posted right now, but this was a pleasant surprise
I remember when I drew your avatar
This delivery feels like AmbhibiousAmbhibian (or Spiffin Brit?) took over your script and voice. Blink twice if that is the case!
Trying new styles
The Amphibious Amphibian influence spreads...
That was great! The challenge is interesting, but I'd also like to see how ginormous you could build the city beyond the time limit as well.
Is there a cap to how quickly the city can grow? Also, since boats can pass through each other, would a network of boats and canals be better than a network of trains and busses?
Buses just don't cut it for cities, so if you are not playing with trams then you need to build a much denser network of rail lines.
My technique for carrying maximum passengers is to build the entire network as primarily an array of single track lines that are far enough apart that the coverage zones don't overlap, and have infrequent cross-lines. But, here's the key thing, all the lines are underground! Lower the ground to build the stations and then put most of the track in tunnels, with lowered land at junctions and to allow signals. This gives you more building space at ground level for houses. Then have trains running in one-way loops around, to minimise conflicts. You can achieve quite phenomenal throughput in this way!
I would watch another attempt to expand the
*G* *R* *I* *D*
china tall game really woke something up
Two things I was thinking of when watching this.
1. When he was speaking about the Grid... "The Gri(p)d was loose!"
2. Suddenly the video evolved into a AmbiguousAmphibian video xD
i love your style. notes taken, subscription added!
this was absolutely fascinating to watch and I'd definitely love to see more weird OTT builds!
Around the middle of this video, I felt like you were reciting an amazing poem about “The G R I D” and I was mesmerized. I hope to see you play more of this!
honestly one of my favorite videos youve ever done. the monologues were amazing! lol G R I D
This was awesome and I'd definitely love to see even more!!
I´m feeling ships, and a city wide canal network is the way to go. Them not colliding with each other seems very useful, and you can transport all the cargo on the same network.
I just spent an hour and change watching you build a 3x3 G R I D and I must admit it was entertaining.
Glad to see people still play this game, best game in my childhood atleast :)
The slow descent into madness throughout this video is perfect
"Believe it or not, as in the real world, the main driver of economic activity is people getting on buses. This is why I'm running for election in 2024 based entirely around a campaign of replacing every single car on the road with a bus."
HEAVY URBANIST BREATHING.
I'd unironically vote for you. Potato for Prez 2024.
This is probably one of the most unhinged we've seen Potato and I'm here for it
I like the immediate reaction to bad news is to develop a business growth strategy of "ohohoho-k, we need to look away from these graphs".
This video has helped me figure out passenger transport! Ive JUST started playing OpenTTD, do this helped greatly
Spending all that on roads not close to the center made me giggle at 46:00 when the city built a road close to the plastic lake😂
The head of Gridism is called Head Grid. I nominate Potato to that exalted position. All hail Head Grid Potato.
Something that is really fun is making a subway by putting train stations a tile lower than the city and using tunnels to connect them to each other, this way you can run trains within a city.
"hey this is how you buy a bus"
"THE GRID CONSUMES ALL"
Lol been years since I played TTD, but I immediately saw you messed up those passing points XD
OTT is dangerous game to seek perfection in, but a great watch. Looking forward to see how your optimal infrastructure will work out vs how the city decides to work.
You can actually propagate a city in OTTD by building a tunnel from the middle of the city underground to the desired location. The town will start then building an offshoot at that location.
20:00 - If you put a max sized rail station in the center of a city, and later add an airport next to it, you can actually manage the flow of passengers and mail for a city of any size. But that requires a lot of very long term planning.
How in the world did I watch this whole video. It's great! I really wanna see you fill the map with a city. And use your transport network design.
“The equivalent of two guys pulling A caravan down a rail line”
You inspired me to get this game and try this challenge. Id suggest a goal of how many people you can get in the city in 100 years.
For my attempt im gonna lean on the boats far more that you have. I suspect that the fact that you can stack them for infinite throughput, cloning them is one of the only possible ways i see to keep up with the demand as things get dense.
I don't think I have ever watched your videos before. At first I was intrigued, half way in "GRID IS EVERYTHING, GRID IS LIFE" I could watch this again, with more buses, trucks and enough nightmare logistics that it would take an entire conglomeration to decide on route names let alone everything else.
I rate this 3 grid squares out of 2 wrong facing railway signals.
Loved this. I would really like to see an attempt that keeps natural water features and tries to get to a million or something.
Now I want to see the city grow organically without you building the road grids
Loving this video! Can you do more about Open TTD? I'd love to see also one that goes on as far as possible on this same city!
You can feel the madness creeping in as his obsession with the grid rises.
This video is for all the real ones that grew up on Thomas the Tank engine but wanted the trains to just listen to Sir Topham Hat
Next time you should make a metro by putting the stations into depressions one lower than the city and connect them by tunnels. Increases the number of possible houses in the catchment area.
After an hour of watching a video about building a mega city on OTTD RUclips advertised Lucozade Sport to me. Not sure they’re really hitting their target market!
Great video, thanks! 😊
Absolutely loved this video, my first exposure to your content, will be back for more!
However I spent the majority of the video shouting "REPAY THE LOAN!" at the screen
Using signals is cheaper, and efficient once you get the hang of it. Also, not sure about the game version, but there should be a "vehicle upgrade" menu so you don't have to redo the orders when you want to replace the train engine, or any other vehicle. Other than that, epic build :)
Praise be to the City Grid, giver of life and of goods. Dorime. 🙏
Really hope this performs well enough for a sequel (or just more OTTD content in general)
I really enjoyed this! Would definitely watch another
This is the best TTD tutorial ever made. I wanted to get into the game for some and watched some tutorials and still didn’t understand what’s going on. Then YT recommended me this video and I was like - ok, let’s see a pro play. But this actually was a really good tutorial. Thanks a lot, gonna go play now.
I'd love to see what happens when someone this powerful gets stuck in the dwarf fortress minecart transport
grid is love grid is life
Fun fact: Prehistoric (and some very rural communities) used favors instead of currency, a complex series of favors is what makes the most sense in an era of complex scarcity. It is often said that barter predates currency but barter doesn't make much sense because of the exchange problem, and such systems are too impersonal for small-well connected groups.
Ironically, despite forgetting Ambiguous Amphibian's name, towards the end our bit Potato devolved into AA.