EVGE Documentation 
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            *  Expanded Village Growth + Economics  *
            *       A GameScript for OpenTTD        *
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Version: 1.2.0

Useful URLs:

Content:

1. How the script works

Expanded Village Growth + Economics (EVGE) is a game script which changes the way towns grow in OTTD. Various cargo requirements and passenger/mail percentage transported are defined - monthly - for each town. Towns only grow if those requirements are - partially or completely - satisfied. EVGE supports all industry sets.

The script only defines requirements for towns who are exchanging passengers (meaning that a delivery of passengers coming from a town is detected). Unless a town exchange passengers, it is not monitored and you will not see any cargo requirement. The check is done monthly. When a town stops exchanging passengers for longer than the “Monitoring” timeout setting (365 days by default, 0 = never), it gets out from the list of monitored towns.

If passenger delivery is detected, the script defines some cargo requirements for the ongoing month. Cargo requirements are not defined by cargo types but by more general cargo categories, each of them containing several cargo types. For example, cargo category 1 contains Passengers and Mail cargo types. To achieve a cargo category requirement, you can deliver to the town any of the category’s cargo type (for category 1, you can deliver interchangeably Passengers or Mail). If you delivery more cargo than necessary, the surplus is stockpiled to be consumed next month (towns can stockpile a quantity of 10 * cargotype requirement). Note that the cargo requirements originally defined in the Arctic and Tropical climate (food and water/food) are disabled by the script.

Depending on the used industry set, there are 3 to 5 categories. Here are the basic categories: For baseset industries (all climate):

Cargo category requirements increase relatively to town population, in two ways:

  1. Raw materials cargos, for towns bigger than 1500. Hence, little towns only need Cat.1 cargos (Public services) to grow, while towns with at least 500 inhabitants also need increasingly

Each town decides on a new Contributor at the start of a new month. This Contributor is chosen by the level of contribution to the categories of the town. The contributor then receives points for this town for the next month based on its growth and is displayed in the player’s statistics. Example of deciding on the Contributor: Player 1 supplies category 1 to 80%, category 2 to 40% and category 3 to 0%. Player 2 supplies category 1 to 100%, category 2 to 20% and category 3 to 15%. Player 1 contributes 120%, Player 2 contributes 135% and is the Contributor.

The script gives this information:

Each month, for each town, a new town growth rate is recalculated. Its level depends on the part of required cargo which have been supplied. If you deliver all the required cargo, you will have the maximum growth rate for a town (its maximum growth rate depends on its size). If you deliver only a part of cargo, growth rate will be lower. If you only deliver 50% of the requirements, town growth rate is arbitrarily set to minimum. If you deliver a larger part of requirements, the town growth rate increases exponentially. Hence, the town growth rate is at the same time progressive and exponential.

The town growth rate calculated each month for a town is not used as it: the script uses a moving average of the town growth rates from the last 8 months. This feature allows to avoid big gaps in town’s growth rate. Changes in towns growth rates are smoothened and progressive.

The town growth is stopped completely for that month if the required percentage of passengers and/or mails is not fulfilled.

Finally, note that towns data (goals, supplies, stockpiles, growth rates…) are saved, so that you can safely reload the game without losses. This release supports up to 2000 towns to be saved.

Have fun !

2. Settings

Normal settings:

Cargo settings:

Randomization settings:

Industry stabilizer:

Limit growth settings:

Subsidies:

Taxes: These settings add a monthly infrastructure tax. The tax is a money sink and has no solvency check, so companies can go into debt.

Category settings: These settings change the cargo category values and can only be changed before the game start.

Expert settings: These settings are for people who want finely tweak the script behaviour. Most people shouldn’t change them and can just change requirements level with the “Difficulty level” setting described above. Expert settings should only be changed when having a decent understanding of their impact. Changing them is harmless though and they can safely be changed while the game is running:

3. Requirements

4. License

Expanded Village Growth + Economics is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2 of the License (see file license.txt).

5. Credits

Author: AngriestBird

Renewed Village Growth was originally created by Firrel. This version continues that work.

Thanks to:

Contributors:

6. FAQ

Q: Where do I have to deliver the required cargo? A: Some of the cargo types are accepted by the towns, so they can be directly delivered there. Other cargo types need to be delivered to a industry which accepts it. The station accepting the cargo needs to be near the town. The best indicator is that if the name of the station is same as the town, the cargo will be counted towards that town.

Q: What to do when no industry accepts that cargo near the town? A: If no industry accepts the cargo, the industry has to be funded near the town. The best way to place the industry is to firstly place down a few stations and if the stations have the same name as the town, the industry placed there will be near enough the town.

Q: What to do when procedural cargo generation fails? A: Some economies cannot be procedurally created. You can choose from more than 30 supported economies or submit issue to github/tt-forums stating the unsupported economy. Another cause is that an industry is not considered raw until it is placed on the map. Having at least one of each raw industry on map will improved procedural generation.

Q: What to do when procedural industry generation fails? A: Some economies cannot be procedurally industry generated. This can be due to not enough industries with specific number of outputs to create industry randomization list or economy with not specified raw/processing industries. Another cause is that an industry is not considered raw until it is placed on the map. Having at least one of each raw industry on map will improved procedural generation.