Fixing Customer Anger, Time-TAbles, and Time Scaling interactions

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One of the problems with the game at present is that there is a conflict between the time scale, time-tables, and customer satisfaction.

Time-tables are a nice idea to add a little realism, but the fact that a commute takes 3 days to get across the really screws up the timetable itself. If the customer arrives at the transfer in the middle of the night they will not benefit from the rush hour trains even though they left at rush hour. They sit there waiting for the morning train to arrive and satisfaction plummets, unless you schedule an unrealistic midnight train, or change the schedule to run trains continuously and put an upper bound on the disatisfaction.

My suggestion is:

For each station and for each line maintain a time offset to the depot. This offset would assume that there is no traffic to slow down a vehicle. So a bus on route X with no traffic and no passengers to pick up at other stations, would arrive at station Y, Z hours after leaving the depot. Scale satisfaction by the time of day modified by the offset.

So if an agent gets to station Y at time T compute the effective time at station Y to be T-Z. So noon for that station is effectively 9am because it takes 3 hours for a train to arrive from the depot. The rate of disatisfaction would then be scaled by the effective time. Satisfaction would fall quickly at rush hour, but would be almost unchanged at midnight.

When a multi-line trip across the map dumps the passenger at a station which in ideal traffic would not expect a train for hours (the effective time is midnight and the line is shutdown) the passenger waits patiently for the morning train. If they morning train doesn't arrive/is full they start to get a little angry. If rush hour comes and goes without a train they can get on they get very angry, but the player is not penalized while they wait from midnight to 3 am.

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Thoughts?

 

[revco]

I completely understand where you're coming from. Essentially, for the "rush hour" time tables to work effectively, you have to start the rush hour load at exactly the number of hours before the vehicle completes it's line and stop it at your effective rush hour completion time. This will insure that the entire line is receiving rush hour schedules during the rush hour. Meaning, if your rush hour goes from 4-6 PM and the line's length is 8 hours end-to-end, you have to start rush hour at 10AM and complete it at 6PM. To handle morning rush hour, from 7-9 AM, you'd have to start at 11PM to insure the last stops are receiving service at 7AM. Effectively, this means you're running rush hour schedules practically every hour of the day and you're flooding your line well outside of rush hour traffic.

Night service is the same way, since if a line's length is 8 hours, you'll be getting night service at your last stops during rush hour on an 8 hour line. It's a "little" better if you stick to shorter lines, but the problem still exists even with "short" 3 and 4 hour lines.

For me, I've mostly abandoned this concept and just use a daily schedule. Sometimes I play around with weekend schedules. But for the most part, I just set the same schedule for every hour of every day, usually around 1 hour dispatches and more if required. Customer sat usually turns out OK in this type of schedule and I'll increase frequency if they get impatient. When the loads become too great for the schedule to handle, then I'll use the rush hour schedules to flood the line with additional vehicles to pick up the slack. I usually start with a 4 hour rush hour dispatch, 24 hours a day, and modify as necessary. Customer sat does usually take a hit when the game gets to this point and there's not a great way to handle it.

I think the problem is the time scale of the game and the speed of the vehicles. It shouldn't take 4 or 8 hours to get around an island or up the street and back. If we were working on a more realistic scale, where a trip took an hour or two on average (a reasonable time frame to travel 40 or 50 blocks, even with frequent stops), then rush hour schedules would work within reason.

I'm not particularly bothered by it as I've worked within the game's construct to determine the best way to manage things.