Stops in Simutrans Extended

Also see: Passenger Stops and their coverage

Station capacities and costs

In Simutrans-Standard, until recently, the capacity, purchase price and maintenance cost of all station/stop buildings were tied together in fixed proportions. Pakset authors could only change the "level" of a station/stop, which changes all of those parameters proportionately. Recently, however, the feature described below that was initially written for Simutrans-Experimental (as Simutrans-Extended was then called) was added to Simutrans-Standard.

In Simutrans-Extended, it is possible to set the capacity, purchase price and maintenance cost of stations individually.

The aim of this feature is to allow for some stations to be more cost effective than others, and to allow for more economic fine-tuning of paksets generally.

Overcrowding handling

The handling of overcrowded stops in Simutrans-Standard varies depending on the configuration option selected. One "avoid_overcrowding" causes goods or passengers to be lost from the player's network when they detect that their next transfer station is overcrowded; another, "no_routing_over_overcrowding" stops any route being found at all if one of the stations on that route is overcrowded. Other than that, there is no limit to how overcrowded that staitons can be. In some cases, approximately 27,000 passengers have been known to be waiting at a station with a capacity of around 7,000.

In Simutrans-Extended, "avoid_overcrowding" means that the passengers or goods are discarded when they reach the station that is overcrowded, not when the next transfer is overcrowded. There is no "no_routing_over_overcrowding" setting, because that often leads to unrealistic deadlocks that are likely to be confusing and frustrating for players. Also, if passengers or goods (except for goods, such as coal, that do not care about how fast that they are transported) have been waiting more than a certain amount of time to board a convoy, they will leave the network entirely, never to return. A refund will be payable in respect of these goods for what has been paid for their journey so far (approximately). This is shown in a "refunds" graph in the line or convoy that would have transported the goods/passengers onwards had they not had to wait too long. The amount of time that goods or passengers are prepared to wait is proportionate to the estimated journey time. Whenever passengers leave in this way, they record as "unhappy" on the station's graph, which affects the revenue of all passengers travelling from that station for that month; likewise for when passengers leave an overcrowded station with "avoid_overcrowding" enabled.

Overcrowding will also increase the transfer time of an overcrowded stop (i.e., the time that it takes for passengers/mail/goods to make their way through the stop and transfer to their next connexion or enter/leave the stop).

Note that the behaviour on overcrowding, including the time that passengers/goods will wait before leaving, can be customised in simuconf.tab.

The aim of this feature was to avoid the overwhelming levels of overcrowding possible in Simutrans-Standard, and to provide the player with a realistic monetary incentive not to have stations overcrowded for any significant length of time.

Goods and passenger loading

In Simutrans-Standard, goods and passengers (including mail) load onto convoys in ascending order of the route distance of their destination: e.g., if a convoy's schedule is A>B>C>D, when loading at A, the convoy will load all the goods for B before any of the goods for C, and all of the goods for C before any of the goods for D. This is irrelevant if there is enough space on the convoy to load all the goods to all destinations, but is important when there is insufficient space.

In Simutrans-Extended, goods, mail and passengers will load onto convoys in the order in which they arrived, irrespective of the destination. This is intended more accurately to reflect reality, to cause waiting times to be recorded more accurately, to reduce the likelihood of discarding/refunds and to reduce unevenness of the distribution of goods to multiple destinations.