What is this game? How can I play it and improve my life?
OpenTTD is a game where you run a transport company and try to make money.
The game is free, open source, has been around for 20 years, and still has regular updates. It is available at the link above, and is also on Steam (though you have to pay for the original transport tycoon if you want it through steam). It should run on most computers, although if it doesn't I really don't know how to fix it.
You should play it, it's very good and it's free.
If you want to see things from me that aren’t related to OpenTTD, I have a few other blogs:
@network-rail for more general train related things, where I pretend to be Network Rail (I post there a lot more often)
@network-southeast for where I pretend to be Network Southeast (I don’t post there very often though)
@electric-liberty for my non-gimmick blog (if you’re confused why I’ve followed you, it’s because @badopenttdideas is my main blog instead of this one)
Have you ever had hundreds of people go "missing" in floods, die in a (completely unavoidable) train crash, or just wanted to get rid of those pesky investigators who keep exposing your generous donations to politicians? Well, with the latest update to OpenTTD, there's a solution for you!
Instead of rivers desperately trying to find an ocean or lake to drain into only to just give up and create a tiny one, now they – like the mighty Okavango – create an area of wetland. Aside from making the map look nicer, this has many other uses as well, chiefly being a great place to hide all of those bodies. Simply roll up to the bog, or swamp, or fen, or whatever, and dump 'em in! Now you may be thinking, "but wait a minute, what about all those bog bodies I've heard of? Where they've dug up corpses and butter that are thousands of years old and yet perferctly preserved? And what if the evidence gets fossilized? I don't want to get caught!" but this is foolish. After all, who ever heard of anyone finding a body in a bog after only a few years? Or some swamp butter that's still ok-ish after only a week lying about? Nobody, that's who. Your bodies will remain undiscovered for thousands of years before they really freak out some archeologist, at which point you'll have gotten away with it completely. So go ahead, use wetlands to dispose of inconvenient corpses! It's a great plan! Plus it's good for the environment or something. Probably.
Have you ever been playing OpenTTD and wondered if there's a way you could kill people without them definitely being dead? Or if you could make fun of the Dutch? Well, guess what, you can do both of these things at the same time! Follow these steps and I'll show you how you can cause hundreds of people to almost certainly die in the most dutch way possible.
We start off having lowered a bunch of land to below sea level and building a bunch of railways on top of it (here's one I made earlier). Oh, and make sure to add some levees so it doesn't flood. Yet.
After we've waited for a while, making sure to deliver plenty of passengers, the cities should start growing into the area below sea level.
Now, we just need to wait. We've set up a small rail network, just enough to make some money and grow the cities (you can also fund town expansion to make it go faster, and build some roads so they use those instead of making their own ones).
After some time, the cities have grown substantially. We're also using the Euro now. This isn't relevant at all to what we're doing, but it has happened. Now, it's time to unleash the ocean!
First, we fake a terrorist attack on the levee, so nobody blames us for what's about to happen (this doesn't have any gameplay effect, it's just for flavor). Then, we flatten part of the levee down to sea level, and watch as the ocean slowly moves in.
Now, observe what happens when the floods reach a train or train depot and it is consumed by the waves:
Floods. Constant floods. Hundreds are missing, presumed dead – but not confirmed dead, so we can argue that we haven't killed anyone. If the judge disagrees with us we can bribe them, we are a multimillion dollar company after all.
Of course, a few interesting things to note are that (1) a train has crashed into the flooded wreckage of a different train, which has definitely killed people so we aren't completely getting away with murder, (2) the flooded wreckage of trains seem to avoid being consumed by the waves until they despawn, and (3) people's houses being flooded does not apparently make the news.
Finally, we look back at what we've done: the Netherlands has flooded, the city of Amsterdam has gone from 4,283 people to 3,133 people and Hellsdoorn has gone from 1,499 to 786. Quite the accomplishment. The next step for our company should be clear:
Boats. Connect the flooded remains of the cities with boats. After all, we've still got to make money, and now a city that used to be inland gets its very own harbor! How wonderful. A happy ending after all.
Did you know that in OpenTTD, there are ALIENS!? Yes, it's true, these aliens sometimes appear and do things. What sort of things? Abducting buses, blocking train lines, and generally being a nuisance. And then the government goes and blows up a whole rail junction just to get one UFO. Honestly, why do we sometimes pay our taxes if this is what they're going to do with them? It's as if they want the world to be destroyed by aliens (we don't, that's bad for our profits). Anyways, aliens. They exist. Really. You're not crazy. Well, not for thinking aliens exist at least.
played openttd online for the first time in a while. this canal was the only thing that saved me (blue) from bankruptcy. big thanks to @national-rail for funding the left hand lock !!
no that sounds perfectly normal to me. after all what if the lake dries up? or if your opponent fills it in with dirt? then where will your boats go? build aqueducts for your boats over every body of water
played openttd online for the first time in a while. this canal was the only thing that saved me (blue) from bankruptcy. big thanks to @national-rail for funding the left hand lock !!
It's the year 1939, and it's a good day to desperately try to avoid going bankrupt.
When we last saw our heroes at the Super Illustrious Transit Co., they had just realized the dire straits the company was in after building far more infrastructure than they could afford (see here for that story. also I lied about this being in Deltarune chapter 5). We now return, only this time, the company's accountants (who had been begging for us to do something for years) have finally convinced management to have a good look at the company's finances.
When looking at the finances in depth, we see that – aside from road vehicles – every single transit mode is making more money in revenue than it loses in operating expenses. If we look at the operating ratio in 1937 (expenses over revenue), we find that for rail it is 51%, for air it's 14%, for ships 15%, and road is 236%. An operating ratio of below 80% is considered desireable for railroads, so we're clearly doing well – or are we? If we look at the operating expenses more closely, we see that the single biggest expense is infrastructure, which we did not factor into our calculations earlier. If we do include infrastructure costs (except station tiles, since that doesn't distinguish between rail, road, and sea stations), this changes things: the operating ratio for rail becomes 98.6% – just barely profitable, but far from ideal – that for road becomes 487%, which would be a problem if we had lots of road vehicles; ships go up slightly to 17%, while air jumps up to a whopping 187%. The accountants demand change. Oh, we've also been ignoring the money we gained from shutting down lines and scrapping vehicles. Since we just put all those in a big pile and lose track of what exactly was in there.
Looking at those figures, it's clear that the company's ships are doing quite well, rail needs some major improvements but could be turned around, road vehicles are small enough to be ignored, while the company's airline is very obviously a huge drain on finances. This wasn't noticed before as every airplane was making money, so the possibility that the airports were dragging the company into bankruptcy was not even considered.
It seems the world of 1939 is not ready for air travel, so every flight in the air was called back to the hangar as the Sup-air Illustrious Lines wing of the company begins shutting down.
While the last flights make their way back to the hangar, it's time to optimize the railways to bring that operating ratio down. We start by closing down the most unprofitable lines, such as the one in the above photo. If those two cities wanted to keep their passenger services, they should have used them more.
We continue to rationalize the railways. More passenger services are cut, as too few people use them. Yes, that may partially be because the trains are 31 years old and break down constantly, but if they wanted new trains they should have paid us more money. Some of the routes are even double-tracked, despite having only one service – plans for a grander network that never materialized, because the ungrateful passengers just didn't feel like using our trains. Unbelievable. We do so much for them, and this is the thanks we get? Hope you like Pacers, because once they become available, they're all you'll be getting. If you're lucky.
As we continue to look for efficiency improvements to make, we discover something shocking: the one train powered by overhead wires is losing money, and it runs on the same line as multiple other trains powered by steam that are turning a profit. The course of action for us is clear: since out of the half-dozen or so trains on this line, only one is electric and it's losing money, time to take down the wires and swap out the engine for a cheaper steam loco. It seems our company was simply too innovative and forward-thinking, and it has cost us dearly. This single line probably lost us more money than all of our road vehicles combined, and all for one electric locomotive when steam power had already shown itself to be sufficient.
Our cost-saving measures continue, but a new problem presents itself: we need money to demolish stations, bridges, and tunnels, but we don't have enough to do so. The solution is simple: borrow as much money as we can from the bank. That puts us in the positives, and we can now fill in expensive tunnels and demolish redundant bridges.
Indeed, this strategy is quite effective: this line used to have a bridge over another line, but now that that line is gone, we can remove the bridge, speeding up traffic on our profitable routes.
Finally, after a year of major service cuts (and the complete closure of an airline) we here at SITCo are starting to turn things around. Finally, the line is going up. Finally, our shareholders will be able to afford candy for their babies.
Even as we begin to make money again (it smells so delicious), we discover a few major problems: for one thing, this particular route has a parallel line built by our competitors at 2 transports too many that's stealing all of our precious salt. Not only that, but the train on the line is getting really old and desperately needs replacing, so it's time to close down that line and send the train off to scrap. This is something of a recurring problem on our network: trains get really old, break down constanly, lose money, and we can't afford replacements. The easiest thing to do is just send them to scrap and close down the lines.
Finally, in the year 1944, our company is consistently in the positive, year after year. Yes, we still have some catching up to do, but now we have a little bit of cash we can start paying off our loans and rebuilding our empire. Also the airline never existed.
Now that we have a little bit of cash in hand, we can finally clear up some of the stations and bridges that were left behind in earlier budget cuts, and make our network just that little bit more efficient.
Finally, things are looking up for SITCo: our profits are increasing every year, we have enough money to pay our taxes (stupid government. where was our big bailout in our time of need. what else have our competitors been paying their taxes for.) and to resume expansion. Indeed, in the year 1945, our operating ratios look like this:
Rail: 69% – nice and best of all it's below 80%
Road: 411% – that's an improvement!
Ships: 16% – with those margins we should expand our shipping lines
Air: never existed. don't ask questions.
Now it's time to check in with our competitors (run by @cosmos-dot-semicolon), and see how 2 transports too many is doing. Looking at its finances, we can see that it is paying shareholders around half a million pounds each year. It seems that being the good investment choice is proving to be an issue, as the shareholders start to eat the company alive. Glad that's not us.
Tune in next time to watch the oceans fill to the brim with boats.
Have you ever wanted to be evil in a video game but find yourself being too attached to the world and characters within to go through with it? Well, so have I! In fact, I almost never do evil things in video games – except in OpenTTD, and I'm here to tell you why it's so much easier (and more fun!) to be a villain in this game than in others. IN THE FORM OF A NUMBERED LIST!!!
The people are just numbers! While some games make you care about the characters by giving them personalities and such, OpenTTD doesn't do this, instead only showing people as a town's population, number of passengers, or deaths in a crash. This means you can easily cause hundreds to die without ever feeling guilty, since all that's happened is number go down!
Very little consequences! If hundreds of people do die as a result of your actions, all that happens to you is that you have to wait a little bit for the wreckage to be cleared, replace the crashed vehicle, and maybe bribe the local authority if you need to (you probably don't though, since you likely already have a station there). No protests, government investigations, union action, or even shareholders complaining! (unless it was a particularly profitable route that's now blocked)
No attachment to the characters! Not only are the people in OpenTTD just numbers, but you never learn anything about their personal lives. Sure, you could make something up, but then you'll just pick something that makes you feel less guilty about it (like that they were all racist or something). Anyway, since you know nothing about them, there's nothing to make you feel bad about demolishing half a town to build a station (or worry about what happened to the houses' former residents, or why the town's population drops) except for the pesky local government saying you can't do it anymore.
MULTIPLAYER! OpenTTD has multiplayer, and when you're competing with friends, it's very easy to make decisions that harm your competitors that also happen to devastate the local population. Like ordering road reconstruction in every city at once, trapping your competitor's passengers on a train for years, buying transport monopolies (and then bribing governments to stop your friends from doing the same). You and your friends are having fun, but what's happening to the people who live in the world? WHO CARES WE NEED NUMBER HIGHER THAN FRIENDS
EVERYTHING EXPLODES! Tanker truck full of oil gets run over? EXPLOSION! Passenger train derails at 2 km/hr? EXPLOSION! Floods consume an airport? EXPLOSION!!!!!!! Transit company sells off some land? EXPLOSION!!!!122!!!!!3! Who could resist killing so many people when it creates such pretty lights?
Anyway, that's how OpenTTD makes it so much easier for you to be a villain than other video games. By playing OpenTTD, you too can embrace your inner evil capitalist, TODAY!
It's the year 1935, and it's a good day to make money.
Indeed, with such an extensive network, one would expect 2 transports too many (run by @cosmos-dot-semicolon, in blue on the above map) to be raking in the cash. And for many years, this has been true, with the money flowing in like butter. Now, let's go and check the operating profit graph to see how it and its competitor (Super Illustrious Transit Co., run by me) are doing:
Oh dear – it seems that while the red company is doing well and even increasing profits, the blue company has had quite a few bad quarters, but oh well, I'm sure it'll all even out by the end of the year.
To the complete shock of everyone, it did not even out by the end of the year – in fact, it seems that in both of the past two years the company SITCo 2ttm has lost money. Quite a lot of it, in fact. How could this be?
Well, we can figure this out easily, by checking the game settings. Our investigation discovers that SITCo 2ttm has been losing so much money because infrastructure maintenance is turned on, meaning railways that are already built cost money in upkeep. This has dire consequences for my company. I mean @cosmos-dot-semicolon's company. Not mine. I'm doing fine, I would never forget that infrastructure maintenance was turned on and then build the same way as I always do (lots of tracks all over the place). After all it worked fine for the first few decades of the game, why would it stop working now?
Of course, with this grave revelation comes the time to make important decisions – and fast. Knowing that it's the infrastructure costs that are responsible for line go down, It can figure out a way to prevent bankruptcy. Since neither of us has ever really lost a game of OpenTTD before, this would be quite embarassing. Especially since it's not because of the other player's actions, by which I mean I caused @cosmos-dot-semicolon's company to start going bankrupt in a brilliant scheme of genius. Its poor planning and decision making ability helped. I am very good at this game.
Anyway, if we now check the company finances, we see that one company is not paying its taxes (how horrible. those monsters. it's like taking government-funded candy away from babies), but not only that, the shareholders are not recieving any dividends! As we all know, shareholder profits are the only metric any sensible company should ever concern itself with, so this is a big problem. How are those poor shareholders supposed to feed their families if we can't make number go up? Especially since the government can't afford to give their babies candy.
After a few years have passed, the company is deeply in the red. Minor reductions in service have so far had little effect, and expansion is no longer possible without cash. Severe cuts urgently needed as record losses achieved. It may end up being necessary for management to jump ship and start a brand new company, after learning the lessons of the first attempt.
Will the company salvage this dire situation through massive service cuts? What industries will lose out the most? How much debt will I be forced into? Will the reader see through my attempts to convince them that @cosmos-dot-semicolon is the one on the verge of bankruptcy instead of me? Find out next time, in:
what do you mean “no results found.” I cannot possibly be the only OpenTTD writer on the internet. surely there’s other people’s OpenTTD fan fiction out there (the game is almost as old as I am and the game it is based on is older than me), I’m just not looking hard enough. that must be it. it can’t possibly be too niche, there are multiple people I know of who play it! and one of those people I have played it with!
what do you mean “no results found.” I cannot possibly be the only OpenTTD writer on the internet. surely there’s other people’s OpenTTD fan fiction out there (the game is almost as old as I am and the game it is based on is older than me), I’m just not looking hard enough. that must be it. it can’t possibly be too niche, there are multiple people I know of who play it! and one of those people I have played it with!
