I've just started playing OpenTTD (Thanks to Macha's blog post) and most of my train and cars are making a loss (or not much profit) how can I tell how much money the business will make? And how long they'll take to make it.
How to tell if I will make a profit
openttd
Related Solutions
The station has to accept goods:
To do that it has to have enough commercial town buildings within its catchment area (it doesn't matter that the whole town has enough, the individual buildings must be near the station!) to generate a full demand of goods.
This Small Office Building, for example, only provides one eighth of a goods need.
While this Highrise Commercial building provides one half (four eighths).
There has to be enough buildings of this nature within a station's catchment area for the total goods demand to be at least one whole.
These buildings appear much more frequently in larger towns and cities, and tend to be clustered near the centre of the town - and again, your station must have them within it's catchment area for this to work.
No, I do not believe this is possible. However, you can use x to "shadow" objects, which is very useful to solve the problem you are experiencing.
Related Topic
- Will implicit orders be removed if no longer necessary
- How to profit on vehicles
- OpenTTD – Make Train Wait for X Days Since Last Train of the Same Group Left the Station in JGR Patch Pack
- How to make the road grid for new towns fit the existing road grid
- OpenTTD – Designing the Most Efficient Rail Layout
- OpenTTD – How to Make a City Recover from a Disastrous Flood in OpenTTD
- OpenTTD – How to Make Trains Use Empty Platforms in Train Stations
- Can you synchronize & time signals over long distance
Best Answer
It isn't possible to tell accurately how much a service will make. A train makes money by delivering cargo, so the amount of money it makes in a given period of time depends on:
More information on how it's calculated: http://wiki.openttd.org/Cargo_income
To make money initially, I find a coal train from a coal mine to a power plant about a screen and a half away with 3 or 5 carriages is nearly always profitable.