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Passenger and mail classes

Until now, passengers and mail have all been of one class. Because of the way in which the routes are computed (and doing it this way is necessary to obtain reasonable performance on large maps), passengers and mail always take the exact same route between any given origin and any given destination. This route is the fastest route (that with the lowest overall journey time). All passengers and mail pay the same per-kilometre cost for their journeys.

This has several unfortunate effects. Firstly, a competing route (especially a long distance route where small differences in closeness to starting and destination stops make no significant difference to the overall journey time) will either take all of the passenger traffic or none of it. This means that a low capacity, high speed, high cost mode of transport would take all the passengers on a route for the same price as a low speed, high capacity, low cost mode of transport. Imagine, for example, competition between a DC-3 aircraft and an express train in 1935: the aircraft would be significantly faster, and would abstract all the passengers from the train (until the waiting times at the airport become excessive as the route becomes overcrowded). Secondly, it makes it very difficult to balance prices properly: passengers would pay the same per kilometre cost to travel on the aircraft as on the express train, even though the former has much higher costs. The same goes for mail.

When the passenger and mail classes feature is introduced, passengers and mail will have different classes, each of which are able to pay different amounts for their journeys, and each of which can take different routes. The number of classes is decided by the pakset author. In Pak128.Britain-Ex, there will be five classes of passengers (very low, low, medium, high and very high) and two classes of mail (normal and priority). Players will be able to designate different vehicles (and in some cases, different accommodation within the same vehicle, as with different classes on an aircraft, ship or railway carriage) to charge different prices. Only passengers who can afford to pay that price can travel on that vehicle or accommodation within that vehicle. However, passengers will travel in a lower class of accommodation/vehicle than they can afford if
(1) there is no alternative;
(2) that route is faster; or
(3) it is in the same convoy as higher class accommodation and, having regard to the length of the journey, the additional comfort in the higher class accommodation is not worth the extra price.

To give some examples: an air route in 1935 might be set only to allow passengers who can pay prices at the "very high" level. A route between the same two towns served by train might have two classes of accommodation on the train: one class for "low" (third class) and one class for "high" (first class). The first class carriages would be more comfortable than the third class carriages to attract passengers who can afford to do so to travel first class and pay the higher fare. Thus, passengers of "low" and "medium" wealth would take the train (third class), passengers of "high" wealth would take the train (first class), and passengers of "very high" wealth would take the aircraft. One might also suppose that a player might start a road coach route between the two towns, taking even longer than the train, with prices set to "very low" (as road vehicles have lower overheads than trains). Thus, passengers of "very low" wealth would be transported by coach.

Mail

As for mail, one might similarly imagine that "normal" mail might travel by rail or sea, whereas "priority" mail might travel by air. In earlier eras, where the means of transporting mail was unavoidably expensive, it might be that only "priority" mail can be carried by post boy, and that "normal" mail would only be able to be sent if its sender can walk it to its destination. As roads and coaches improved, it might be feasible to charge a lower price for mail, so that "normal" mail could then be sent by mail coach and, eventually, by rail. (It is notable that, in reality, the penny post was introduced in 1840, 15 years after the first steam hauled public railway in the UK opened, and at a time of great expansion of the rail network).

Buildings and classes

Different buildings (not just city buildings, but also industries and player buildings such as depots and signal-boxes) will produce and demand different proportions of passengers of each different class. It will be possible to see what proportion of each class that each building (aside from some types of player building at present) produces/demands by clicking on it with the inspection tool (for town halls, click on it twice).

Defaults

Each vehicle will have sensible and realistic defaults, but these will be able to be overridden by the player on a per vehicle basis (and, where a vehicle has mixed accommodation, on a per accommodation basis). Players can thus choose, for example, for how long to keep second class (an intermediate class between first and third, initially universal, but abolished on British railways between 1875 and about 1912, depending on the company), whether some railway trains are designated as workmen's trains with low fares to get workers to factories (which will now be more important: see below on the logistics feature), and whether to charge higher prices when one is in a position of monopoly.



Aside from fixing any bugs that can only be found by the thoroughness of actual playing, rather than by testing, the task that remains is adding all the data about different classes of accommodation to the pakset. I have so far completed road vehicles (motor vehicles are all "very low" by default, but horse drawn 'buses are "medium" and stage coaches mixed class depending sit inside or outside), water vehicles, aircraft and modern (post 1948) rail vehicles, but earlier railway carriages still need some work.

My current plan is to release this new feature when I have completed an initial phase of adding class data to rail vehicles. This would mean that first class carriages designed to be hauled by locomotive introduced before 1948 will be missing when this is first released, and will be added slowly afterwards. (Anyone who would like to help with this task would be very welcome to do so - I can supply detailed research material). Currently, I have nearly completed the older multiple units and giving basic data for third class hauled carriages (so that they are all set by default to "low" rather than "very low"). The fares for "low" wealth passengers will match the existing fares for passengers generally, so the absence of first class carriages for the time being should not cause the game to become too unbalanced in the meantime (and costs are not balanced yet in any event).

I am very grateful to Ves for all the work that he has done on the GUI for this feature.

Edit: Incidentally, when I first posted this, I omitted in error to mention that the passenger and mail classes feature replaces the old speed bonus feature, which no longer exists in Simutrans-Extended. Also, although the comfort bonus feature is retained, its effect has been greatly reduced by pakset settings in Pak128.Britain-Ex, although other pakset authors are free to use more traditional settings for the comfort bonus.
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