TRANSPORT TYCOON SEMI-FAQ
A FAQ for those who need more, more, more information and strategies about Transport Tycoon.

Part 3: Bugs and Limitations

1. Industries
2. Stations
3. Vehicles
4. Number overflows
5. Hostile takeovers and bankruptcy
6. Hardware problems
7. Miscellaneous

Industries

- Cargo accepted at oil rigs (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  Some oil rigs accept passengers and mail, some accept nothing, and a rare few accept other cargoes. From what I've seen (in TTD), oil rigs on the left side of the map (western half) will not accept anything, while oil rigs on the right side accept both passengers and mail. In one game I played a couple of oil rigs accepted wood and oil! Oil rigs should accept passengers and mail. If you use the Query tool on the squares next to the oil rig, one square will accept mail and another will accept passengers. However, half of the time this doesn't actually seem to be the case.

- Invisible oil rigs (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  Once in awhile an oil rig will decrease its production several times and then announce that it is closing. Even after the oil rig shuts down and disappears, part of it still remains. The oil rig's sign will remain. The game won't allow you to do anything with the squares the oil rig occupied. If you try, you will see this error message:

  There doesn't seem to be any way to eliminate this "invisible" oil rig. This bug only affects oil rigs, not buoys and docks.

- Farms and deserts don't mix (Affects: TTD)
  If a farm is built in the tropical climate, TTD will put farmland in the squares near the farm, even if they are in desert. However, the fields will quickly disappear, creating quite an odd sight:

  After a few seconds all of the field and most of the fences will disappear. (I bet the farmer isn't happy about all the money to plow fields and build fences only to have them destroyed later.) Some of the fences that are next to buildings and roads won't be destroyed, though.

- Trees planted in the middle of farmland (Affects: Scenario Editor)
  The plant random trees function in the Scenario Editor will plant trees almost anywhere, including farmland. Fences will be built around the trees, creating an ugly display. To avoid this you'll have to plant the trees first and then build the farms. Oddly enough, TT doesn't randomly plant trees in farmland during an actual game, just in the Editor.

- Banks in the wrong climate (Affects: TTD tropical climate)
  Usually, the banks in the tropical climate are the smaller kind that don't produce anything. However, if a new bank is constructed in a town with at least 1,200 people, sometimes it will be a temperate climate bank:

  Unlike the other banks, this one spits out 54 or so bags of diamonds per month! Also, it's possible to have two banks in the same town, one "tropical", and one "temperate"! In one game I played a town built two banks and offered a subsidy: "Diamonds from Montevideo Bank to Montevideo Bank will attract..."

Stations

- Station limit (Affects: TTD and TT)
  The TTD manual says that there is a limit of 250 stations. Two or more stations connected to each other that share the same sign only count as one towards this limit. Also, this limit applies to all stations, including yours and the rival's. While this limit is hardly ever reached, there are a few things you can do to overcome it.
  - Build several types of station together so they will only count as one. This also has other benefits, such as being able to pool resources between different types of transport.
  - Close down lines that aren't showing a profit
  - Initiate a hostile takeover of a rival (invest 100% in them) and then sell off their redundant and unprofitable vehicles and stations.
  - Don't build too many ship buoys since these count towards the station limit. Oil rigs also do, but you have no control over these.

- Station limit per town (Affects: TT and TTD)
  TT assigns names to each station you build based on what town they are nearest to. If you (or a rival) build a bunch of stations near a town, TT will quickly run out of names. If that happens, you won't be able to build any more stations near that town. You can overcome this by renaming one of your existing stations. TT will then be able to name the next station you build after the old one. This limit seems to affect the original version much more than TTD.

- Airport limit per town (Affects: TT and TTD)
  TT limits the number of airports that can be built near a town. I'm not sure what this limit is exactly; it may depend on the size of the town and the Local Authority rating.

- Station size (Affects: TTD)
  TTD doesn't permit you to build stations that are too spread out. You can't add another part to a station if it is over six (or seven?) squares away from the station's sign. This means that if you build a large airport, you won't be able to add a large train station to the south. In order to build some large stations you'll have to bulldoze and rebuild different sections in order to move the sign around. Planning ahead is the best way to overcome this limitation.

  In the original version, however, there is practically no limit on how spread out the stations are. It's possible to exploit this fact to create "megastations" that are spread out across half of the map!

Vehicles

- Vehicle limits (Affects: TT and TTD)
  TT limits the number of vehicles you can create. You can only have 80 trains, 80 road vehicles, 40 aircraft, and 50 boats. Double-headed trains count as two. If you reach one of these limits, then you have probably set your difficulty setting too low. Make them harder in your next game.

- Confused road vehicles (Affects: TT and TTD)
  In a few odd cases, a road vehicle will travel around a city block endlessly. This appears to happen when the road vehicle needs to be serviced. If the nearest depot is behind it, it will travel around a city block in an effort to reach the depot. Sometimes when it rounds the block, it decides not to go to the depot after all, and rounds the block again. Then it decides to go to the depot again, and the process continues. I've had this happen to my own vehicles, and more frequently to the AI's. The fix is to force the vehicle to go to the depot. Building more depots seems to help.

- Traffic jams (Affects: TT and TTD)
  A road vehicle station can only accommodate 2 vehicles at a time. Usually, if a station is full, all other road vehicles will turn around and not enter it. However, this doesn't always work out. Sometimes three or more vehicles will jam up at the station's entrance, and they will become stuck. The solution is to tell all of them to head to the depot at once. This should break up the jam.

- Trains that defy the laws of science (Affects: TT and TTD)
  Given the proper layout, a train can loop around and pass through itself! In this screenshot, all of the connecting tracks are occupied (the signals are red), so the train is forced to loop back around on itself!

- Airplanes and ships that also defy the laws of science (Affects: TT and TTD)
  If a train comes in contact with another train, the game considers this a crash and both trains are destroyed. However, if two airplanes or two ships come in contact, they "pass" right through each other. This is actually a common occurence, especially near airports and docks.

- Trains and depots (Affects: TT and TTD)
  The AI that handles a train as it heads to the depot is seriously flawed. The AI will pick out the nearest depot, but not necessarily the most accessible one. If it picks out a depot that is behind the train, the train must go to the end of the line, turn around, and return. This can eat up your profits. Also, if a train picks out a depot and then passes several others en route, it will bypass them completely. The partial solution is to build lots of depots and use mandatory servicing.

- Ships get confused (Affects: TT and TTD)
  Sometimes a ship that has to travel a long distance or make several turns may end up half-way across the map from where it should be. The solution is to build buoys along the route and list them in the ship's orders. Make sure that the buoys are listed on all legs of the ship's route.

- Planes circle airport for months (Affects: TT and TTD)
  Only one aircraft can use the runway at a time. This means that if a plane or helicopter is landing or taking off, all other planes trying to land must circle the airport until they have clearance. At busy airports, this can take months. Slower planes (especially if those experiencing a breakdown) and helicopters will suffer the most from this. By the time they circle the airport, usually another faster plane will beat them to the runway, and they'll have to circle around again.

  While this can't be totally avoided, you can minimize the effect of this. Always try to use aircraft with high reliability, even if they are more expensive or carry less passengers. Try to schedule your aircraft so that they won't all descend on the airport at the same time (realistically, though, this is hard to do). Limit the number of aircraft that use a particular airport. Use more powerful aircraft so that you won't need as many. Even with these suggestions, however, bottlenecks at airports may still occur.

  See a humorous cartoon about this problem.

- Helicopters fly over The Edge (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  Rarely, a helicopter will fly off the map into the Unknown. Eventually it will come back, with 0% reliability and a plume of smoke behind it.

- Helicopters become obsolete (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  After about 2020 the Guru X2 helicopter loses its reliability and eventually becomes obsolete. There is nothing to replace it, so all heliports become useless. Apparently this was an oversight when the vehicles in TT were designed.

  Since there is no solution to this, you must plan ahead. Don't become too dependent on helicopters. Plan it so you can replace your heliports with bus stations or something else.

- Aborted landings (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  If you bulldoze an airport while a plane is landing, odd things will happen. The plane will remain at its present altitude and will travel due north. If the plane was just about to touch down, it will appear to be traveling on the ground, yet it will be able to fly through buildings! When it reaches the far northern point on the map, the plane will fly around in circles until you give it different orders.

- Wrong graphics (Affects: TTD)
  Magnus Wiik pointed out a discrepancy between the graphics for the loaded and unloaded Moreland Wood Truck. The cab of the truck changes from the "modern-style" to the "old-style" when it is loaded. This bug might affect other 21st Century road vehicles.

Number overflows

When a number becomes too large for TT to handle, the number becomes negative (in programming jargon, "it overflows and flips the sign bit"). This affects TT in several ways:

- Tunnel "cheat" (Affects: Very first version of TT)
  If you build a tunnel from one end of the map to another, you'll make a ton of money! The cost of the tunnel is so large that TT interprets it as a negative number, and adds the total to your bank account instead of subtracting it! This bug was quickly fixed, and so it only exists in some of the first releases of the original version.

- Negative passengers (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  If you open up a city window two months after starting to play a scenario, the numbers may be way off:

  In the screenshot, the number of possible passengers is negative! And the amount of mail is far larger than the town's population. For some reason, these numbers will be correct the first month after playing a new scenario. But they are wrong during the second month. This doesn't seem to affect the actual number of passengers and mail sent to your stations, however.

- Negative plane income (Affects: TT)
  Sometimes when a large plane filled to capacity rolls into a airport, you will lose money instead of making it. The income from the plane is so great that TT thinks it is negative, and so you lose money! Thankfully this particular number overflow bug was fixed in the Deluxe version.

- Maximum bank account (Affects: TT, TTD)
  The maximum amount of money you can have is around two billion dollars. After then, this amount will become negative, and your company will soon go bankrupt! I'm not sure if this limit is affected by the currency in use.

TT isn't the only game that is affected by number overflows. SimCity, Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, and countless others have bugs just like this. So don't blame these on Chris Sawyer. Instead, blame all of the other bugs on him!

Hostile takeovers and bankruptcy

- Companies leave leftovers (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  After you buy out a company, an odd thing may happen. When you try to bulldoze one of the acquired company's rail crossings, this sometimes happens:

  You get an error, and it appears to be coming from the bought company, except it's called "Cannot remove obstacles on land." And you get a picture of the face of the acquired company's president. The fences along the square that you tried to bulldoze become the color of the bought company. Later, if a new company of the same color is formed, they will own that square. They will bulldoze the square and collect the money from the railroad tracks.

- Subsidies become messed up (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  If you buy out a company that has a subsidy, sometimes the subsidy becomes "scrambled." When you open the subsidies box, it might say, "Passengers from Income: $3,012,120 to @($#*@#" or something else unintelligible. (On one occasion the game completely locked up when I opened the subsidies box.) The subsidy doesn't appear to pay off like it should. It will eventually expire, and everything will turn to normal.

  Owen Rudge noted that he's experienced a similar situation. He had a subsidy, but since it wasn't paying much he destroyed the two stations. A competitor came in and "inherited" one of his stations (it had been greyed out after he bulldozed it, but the competitor acquired it by building a new station on the site of the old one). The subsidy was now credited to the competitor, but it was "scrambled" and didn't pay anything. Later, the subsidy was credited to "(Cannot remove obstacles on land)" and opening the subsidy dialog box sometimes caused a crash.

  The lesson is to avoid opening the subsidy window after you or a competitor "inherits" a subsidy.

- System crash (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  If you buy out a company while a news message about that company is showing, the game may lock up. In particular it locks up when the "Foobar Transport starts construction near Foobar City" news message is showing at the same moment you buy all the shares of that company. This is probably something no one would ever do anyways, but this bug should be fixed.

- System crash or major cheat (Affects: TTD)
  If you have a company's information box showing at the same time it declares bankruptcy, the system may lock up. Sometimes, however, the bankrupt company's value may rise to billions of dollars, and if you have invested 75% in it earlier, you can sell those shares for a bundle of money! From my experience, though, the game has always crashed in this situation.

Hardware problems

- Two-player mode (Affects: TT, TTD)
  I've never played TT in two player mode, but from what I've heard it's buggy. Typically, things will work fine until the 1990's. At this point the game will slowly go out of synchronization, slow down, and eventually crash. Even after restarting TT and loading the saved game, it is still unplayable. This appears to be a flaw in TT, and there are no known workarounds.

- Sound card problems (Affects: mostly TT, but sometimes TTD)
  TT, like most programs, has trouble with some sound cards. Sometimes the music will work but not the sound effects, or vice versa. With others the sound may not work at all. There are no workarounds for this except getting a different sound card or changing its address, IRQ, or DMA settings.

  On older computers (low end 486's mostly) TT has trouble playing music and sound. TT can't keep up with displaying the screen, simulating everything, and playing music, so it slows down to a crawl, or even crashes. While TT works on 486's, it really benefits from Pentium power.

Miscellaneous

- End of the world at December 31, 2070 (Affects: TTD)
  The day after December 31, 2070 the game date reverts back to January 1, 2070. This causes serious problems with train maintenance. If a train is serviced on December 31, 2070, it won't be serviced again until sometime in the year 2071. Since 2071 is never reached, the train goes unserviced and its reliability drops to zero. Forced servicing is the only solution.

  Chris Sawyer explains,

  > The game date is limited to 2070 so that players can continue indefinitely without all the vehicle designs becoming unusable - If the game date went much further, all the vehicle designs would become obsolete and there would be nothing to replace them with.

- Tunnel cursors switched (Affects: TTD)
  The cursor icons for monorail and maglev tunnels are switched. Not a significant problem.

- Cloned subsidies (Affects: TT, TTD)
  On occasion TT will offer multiple subsidies for the same service. The subsidies may be cloned, but the money isn't. It can look quite strange:

  Screenshot sent in by Chris Doherty.

  The only benefit from this is that the subsidies will last longer than the usual one year. In the picture the subsidies span from September 2043 until March 2045. Without the two additional "cloned" subsidies it would only last from September 2043 until September 2044.

- The subsidy is awarded to an exclamation point (Affects: TTD, TT?)
  Right before I received a subsidy, I renamed my company. This must have confused TT, because the newspaper said:

- Impossible subsidy offer (Affects: TT, TTD)
  Owen Rudge writes, "I had a subsidy offered in the desert climate: 'First Food service from Santa Cruz Food Processing Plant to Caracas Diamond Mine will attract a year's subsidy from the local authority!'. Excuse me, but I thought food goes to towns. Hmmm...."

- These aren't the right tracks (Affects: TT, TTD)
  Train tracks under a bridge or in a grade crossing can be traveled on by any train. Trains owned by a different company can travel on them. In addition, trains of a different type (railroad, monorail, maglev) can travel on them. This means that a maglev train can travel on a monorail track, if the track is under a bridge or in a grade crossing!

- Tunnel troubles (Affects: TT, TTD)
  The algorithm that controls the signals can be confused if a train line is built directly over a tunnel entrance.

  In the screenshot, a monorail line is built over the tunnel entrance of a maglev line. Even though the tunnel is empty, the signals on the maglev line are red! The AI thinks the monorail train is on the maglev tracks. This bug can occur if a train entrance is built next to a depot. One time a rival company built a tunnel underneath one of my depots, causing the signals on my train line to turn red!

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