Hello and welcome to my attempt at guiding beginners through the "I know how the controls work, but why am I constantly losing money?" stage of Simutrans. I'm going to assume you know the basic controls as there are lots of helpful guides out there on that topic like this one[simutrans.igoreliezer.com].

If you're not familiar, start a game and mess with the controls for a bit. Destroying stuff you've built costs money, and leaving them unused is wasted monthly maintenance so I don't suggest messing around in a game you actually intend to play. When you feel comfortable with building, making lines, purchasing vehicles and assigning them to lines continue reading.

Notes:

This advice is aimed at the pak128 game without beginner pricing (aka the loaded as default settings).

If for any reason you want to translate this or repost it elsewhere feel free to do so so long as any changes are credited to their author and a link to the original is provided.

Now, as is mentioned in other starter guides the basic activity in this game involves moving products/passengers/mail to their destination. Factories are your go to profit for early game, and they have production chains. Some factories produce resources, some process resources, and others act as a consumer end point. The important note is that processing facilities will refuse to order more resources if they have a full inventory, so you can't just endlessly deliver sand to the glass factory without shipping the glass produced.

In the early game, you have a rather limited amount of capital to work with. Assuming you use default settings, you're going to have enough for roughly two trains and the supporting infrastructure. If all the industries that randomly spawned on your chosen map have chains with more than two stops, that map is effectively unplayable for our purposes. In other cases, you may have one long complex chain (Car manufacturing is the notorious one for this), and one single stop chain that doesn't generate much in the way of profit (Garbage Dump > Waste incinerator).

So what you want to do is reroll your map (I like to turn tree generation off in landscape settings to make the map easier to look at) until you find a good set of industries to begin with. Using the lists button at the top of your screen, and then the industry tab you can view everything on the map. If you inspect the industry, you can see what plants it's willing to buy goods from, and where (if it's not a consumer location) it ships products. Clicking the arrows zooms you to the location of the connected industry. If there's multiple factories that demand the same resource, be sure to double check the resource you're laying track to is actually on one of those lists.

Good industries to see are oil power plants (oil>power|), and short production chains like gas (oil>refinery>gas station| ) or bakeries (grain>flour>bakery|). All three of these chains you can do from start to finish with your starting capital on trains. If possible, aim to find two of these types of chains, since a low capital expansion early on to increase your profit will help speed up your growth.

Now that we've covered the bare minimum for perpetual profit, we have to put on our business hats and talk expenses. The game does a somewhat lackluster job of providing the tools you need to see what is costing you money, and as a beginner this step definitely took me the longest.

As a transport company, you're paid per kilometer an item is hauled. There's a list that tells you what each good generates, but for our purposes they all pay "enough". This goes for goods as well as mail and passengers (which I've been specifically not talking about for a reason, more about mail/pax will come later). From this per km traveled, you'll have to deduct the cost of the vehicles hauling an item. Larger trains offset their higher engine cost with the ability to haul more cars at top speed.

However there's an important note: Infrastructure is friggin' expensive. Each tile of freight station will cost you 72.00c per month in maintenance and each unit of track will cost you 1.5c (When building things, the price in brackets beside the purchase price is your monthly maintenance fee). Because you're being paid per km hauled, short tracks have a disproportionate amount of infrastructure maintenance for their stations. How many tiles of freight station a train needs is mentioned in the depot screen when you're attaching cars.

Note: When you're designating a stop you can force the train to wait for 100% capacity with a little button in the schedule window. Very good for making sure your freight trains aren't wasting money by chugging around with less than full load.

So now that you've got the basics of the variable costs (cost per km of item hauled) and the fixed costs (cost that exists whether or not you haul anything) it's time to mention factory capacity. This is pretty important when we're talking about small output factories like garbage dumps and coal mines. It's quite easy to get drowned by the fixed infrastructure cost when your trains are sitting too much, or for super long tracks where the factory capacity isn't being fully used.

Now if you want to play fancy, you can do double tracks + signals to make longer hauls efficient for trains, but these topics are pretty complex and belong in their own guide (There's this awesome signals guide on steam, check it out if you're ready!). For a rough rule of thumb, I'd say a single train traversing a track shouldn't go more than roughly 1/4 of the length of a map edge in the early game. Super freight trains that can be bought when you're rolling in dough will of course modify this length significantly.

The basic idea here is that if your factories aren't outputting/processing at the max speed they can, you're missing out on profit from that line. If lines are particularly long, this will mean that you'll have less income to cover the fixed costs of track maintenance.

Now before we're done, we have to address depreciation. When you buy engines/railcars over time the price you can sell them for drops. If you want to upgrade the engines on that rail line at some point, this becomes a cost over time which isn't visible on the budget screen directly. In order to see if you're beating the depreciation race, watch your assets. If there's a general upward trend on assets you're profiting more than depreciation is taking away. Due to game mechanics mentioned later on, you will be forced to upgrade your trains at some point so keep this in mind.

Depreciation is also important due to how bankruptcy is determined in this game. Bankruptcy happens when the value of your assets minus your loans equals 0. This means you can take out a loan that puts you quite deep into the red if you want. The interest you pay is fairly manageable, and shows up in the "maintenance" tab of the "other" tab in the finance window. That said you'd better be sure you're profiting more than depreciation takes away, or eventually your loans will be worth more than your assets

Misc tidbit #1: The vehicle “profit” ignores fixed costs entirely. It's far better to watch your monthly profit per vehicle type in the finance menu for attempting to gauge profitability.

Misc Tidbit #2: Trains get slowed going up/down hills. Landscaping isn't that expensive so don't be afraid to edit the terrain to make a more efficient route. This has no maintenance, so the use of less tracks which have maintenance fees will pay off eventually.

Misc Tidbit #3: If you want to create a slope up to an elevated track, note that trains can only go up the “one step” artificial height elevation. Elevated tracks are two steps above the ground you're elevating them over.

As of this writing, there's no tooltip in the default pak that gives you an easy comparison between freight trains. The term for how much a train can haul is tractive effort. Now, a train needs to push itself down the line as well as its cargo, and I'll use the term useful tractive effort (UTE) to represent the total tractive effort minus the weight of the engine.

The total tractive effort of an engine ingame is derived from the power times the gear ratio. Subtracting the engines weight will then give us the UTE.

Lets look at two of the starting engines in the game.

RVg 0-4-0T (1.30c/km)

Power 340kW
Gear 0.8:1
Weight: 39t

340*0.8-39 = 233 UTE

RVg 2-5-1 "Muscle Arm" (2.45c/km)

Power 552kW
Gear 1.58:1
Weight: 73t

552*1.58-73 = 799 UTE

How UTE translates into cars depends a lot on the railcars, but the number of cars these two trains can haul will be proportional to the ratio of UTE. The ratio is 799/233 ~= 3.4, which means that at any given speed for every car the RVg 0-4-0T can pull, the Muscle Arm will pull approximately 3.4 cars. Also worth noting that the Muscle arm is significantly cheaper per UTE hauled, since each 1.00c of maintenance hauls 326 UTE, while the 0-4-0T only hauls 179 UTE per 1.0c spent on maintenance.

One key difference to note is that tracks, cars and engines have different top speeds. In the case of the muscle arm it can pull plenty of cars chugging along at the top speed of the 0-4-0T, but it also has the option to pull less cars and travel faster. The better optimal speeds will cost more maintenance per tonne per km travelled, but will likely increase the total goods hauled down the line.

While this little detail complicates things a bit we're only worried about freight tracks for the moment. The second last section talks about something called speed bonus which becomes a concern a couple decades into the game. But for now, UTE is plenty to chew on.

Misc Tidbit: Whenever you see a range of top speeds, the game is showing you what your speed will be hauling the heaviest good that car can carry (slowest) compared to the lightest (fastest). Looking up the list of goods, you can figure out which end of that estimate you'll end up on for your particular good by comparing the weight of your good with the heaviest good of that type. Sorting the goods list by category I can see for example that the lightest "perishable" item is Processed Food, while both Fresh Fish and Fresh Meat are tied for the heaviest.

Source: This post contains the math that justifies the UTE calculation based off formulas that were provided to me. Testing on trains in game confirms the formula to be roughly accurate (rounding due to cars not coming in fractions throws off the comparison ever so slightly).

Or boat or... well you get the idea.

Do note: You can mix multiple lines together very easily with how Simutrans is coded. If you have truck lines delivering coal from lots of small coal mines to a single train station, the game will automatically detect if your train is delivering to a factory those coal mines sell to. The coal dropped off at your train station will be routed automatically. Alternatively, if there is no connection the game will refuse to let you ship things to that train station.

Truck: Very short trips or Long distance via public roads, limited profit volume

+Using public infrastructure is free! Low fixed costs for many uses.
+Cheap: It's very easy to tune your truck fleet as you get more capital since individual trucks are cheap. It doesn't take an addition 200k to up the transport capacity of a truck line

-Roads are expensive for the volume of goods they can ship if you're laying your own
-Relatively higher variable costs compared to train. Around the 0.02 per km per tonne for oil, versus trains which can get as low as 0.01 per km per tonne in the early game.
-Low capacity: Due to unloading times and very small volume hauled per truck, it's hard to cap out high output industries like oil fields.

Train: Mid distance travel

+Lower variable costs
+High capacity transport: For industries with high output, you can milk every cent

-Higher fixed costs: Not good for short routes, or for long routes without multiple train shenanigans
-Difficult to organize multiple per track, limiting ability to fine tune output without large capital investment or a lot more know-how than this guide can offer. Proper use of signals should negate this, but I'm assuming beginners won't be casually implementing signalled track systems on their first try.

Boat: High volume transport only

+Massive capacity with enough vehicles running a line
+Relatively cheap vehicles for their transport capacity
+Extremely low variable costs: If you can get enough throughput to pay for the docks, the per km fee for boats is very low.

-Extremely high fixed costs: Docks are hella expensive

Monorail: N/A for beginners/early game
+Very fast
-Insane maintenance per track

Tram: Not available before late 1990s due to historical reasons (game is based off Britain)
+Can run down the middle of a road without interrupting car traffic
-Requires electricity to run
-Small volume of transport

Air: N/A for beginners/early game
+Extremely fast, ignores terrain
-Moderately high fixed and variable costs

If you've experimented with passengers, you've probably had to either sell everything you invested into it or gone bankrupt entirely. I won't lie, I bankrupted one of my earlier otherwise profitable game on them due to not fully understanding how they work.

You can click to inspect the city hall and view the passenger demand. You'll see an astronomical amount of demand for larger cities, easily into the thousands. Set up a bus route to the next city over? Four people waiting at the station and those seemingly uber expensive bus stops start eating your cash reserves.

Passengers and mail are generated in two ways. The first way is by industry demanding customers/workers and mail. An industry will have a value for local towns, and you will get guaranteed spawns of passengers demanding to travel to that factory. However, in order for this demand to spawn fully, every single building in that town has to be covered by a passenger/mail and linked into the system by a route. It's now time to thank our lucky stars that simutrans automatically routes passengers and freight through your system so long as a route is possible via your various stops.

Now here's the detail that messes up all beginning passenger moguls: The vast majority of transport demand (from cities) doesn't work that way. Passengers/mail will be generated in buildings with capacity, pick a random spot anywhere on the map, and demand to go there. If your passenger network doesn't have access to that location, the passenger gets ignored.

Since there's apparently no code to redirect passengers to somewhere more local if their dream vacation spot isn't hooked up, this means that the vast majority of passengers are outside your reach without a very very large investment in passenger infrastructure across the entire map. It's also why passenger infrastructure is so expensive, it's tuned to end game where those huge swaths of people passing through your transport system warrant the higher fixed costs.

So why not just ignore passengers entirely?

Well that's kind of the thing. As far as a sandbox goes, presumably players would like to buy new shinier engines and expand their transport networks. Passengers/mail serve two purposes. First, the % of met transport demand (this includes the ones that you never see because you aren't hooked up everywhere) determines the growth rate of the city. This makes the city demand even more passenger output, but more importantly is the INCREASE_INDUSTRY_EVERY setting. By default it's set to 5000, and that means whenever you get 5000 more people on your map you get a new industry. If it's part of a new chain, the entire chain should start popping into existence on your map. More industry means more profit, so that's pretty good!

Also, the other benefit of the workers/customers side of passengers is that it boosts the output of factories. This would be my suggested start point for passengers: hooking up your successful freight line factories to the cities they demand via buses. The stops are still expensive, but at least most of the roads are free. This way you can potentially upgrade the size of your trains/stations to generate more cash to offset the cost of all the stops. It's also worth having at least one bus with a mail trailer tacked on to move early game mail without needing to worry about how much it's being used. The trailers are quite cheap for how much mail they move and in my opinion it makes the most sense to just use the Large Bus Stop for the combined mail/passenger holding cap since smaller volumes of passengers simply never pay the bills.

As you expand your passenger network, your central infrastructure is going to get strained since more and more people will be moving from the larger cities you probably started from. At some point passenger trains will be well worth cleaning up the clutter on the roads. Also I'd advise staying away from using “wait for X%" unless your bus terminal layouts are fancy. It becomes a real hassle when the system jams because bus A gets stuck at the terminal waiting for passengers from bus B who is stuck behind them unable to unload.

Misc Tidbit: You can treat cities like a bonsai. Building/maintaining roads to direct their growth (building pop up beside roads) is one expensive option to craft the megacity of your dreams. Or alternatively feel free to prune any non-monument/tourist destinations and roads to help shape it as it grows. Remodelling may become required at points to properly set up their passenger infrastructure when busses aren't cutting it for the main arteries anymore.

So you've been a good little guide reader, set things up well, played several hours and suddenly realize your profit values have been going down. Maybe you notice your bus lines are suddenly bleeding you dry, or that the vehicle earning to operation costs ratio is a lot lower than before. What gives right?

Speed bonus gives, or more accurately Speed bonus is taking.

In the goods list you may have noticed the little text talking about the speed bonus. If things are delivered faster, they give more cash? Cool beans. If you are like me, you then promptly ignored it in favour of fiddling obsessively with buses.

The issue here is, in the default pak128, "Speed bonus" can very quickly become a Speed Penalty. The value is determined by the vehicles that are currently not considered obsolete. Namely, the speed of delivery required to get the zero percent bonus is the average speed of vehicles available over that particular transport line.

Buses are likely the first spot you'll notice this because it's pretty easy to ignore the pitiful income they generate for a dipping your toe in the water transit line and never bother upgrading them. By the 1960's and 1970s, the speed for full price quickly jumps up to 70km/h, while most of your older buses are trundeling along at 30-50km/h incurring at least a 30% penalty for tardy transit. Since buses have a lower profit margin anyway, this quickly starts showing red.

Note: the % number beside the good is the max it can receive, use the arrows top right of the goods list to see what speed is needed for the corresponding speed bonus

It's worth mentioning that the maximum possible speed bonus also impacts how heavy the speed penalty is. For any goods that never get a bonus, they also don't get a penalty. All bulk cart goods have 0%, so your coal train never needs an upgrade if you don't want it to have one. Wool gets a meager 2% speed bonus and correspondingly the income per km drops from 0.15c to 0.12c at the absolute minimum. Noticeable, but not necessarily critical (and minimum is ridiculously slow anyway). Passengers which can get as much as 18% bonus income however have a minimum price of 0.01c per km which is 1/5th of their base price!

How to avoid this? Make sure your profitability is high enough to pay depreciation and then some. Upgrade your buses, rail infrastructure and trains if they're shipping time sensitive goods in order to keep a higher profit per trip. Profitability on passenger/mail lines is incredibly speed sensitive and city infrastructure limits how fast your buses can go unless you instal your own roads. How you tackle these problems are up to you, be it by eating inner city buses being unprofitable, installing your own roads or relying on some bus/train combo (trams aren't an option until quite far into the game as was mentioned earlier).

This should cover the basics of making a successful transport company that keeps itself out of the red so you can experiment with the rest of the game without needing to enable freeplay mode.

There are a million little tools in game to help you out, so explore the interface as much as possible. Good luck and happy hauling.