OpenTTD Strategies

I don't want to add any cheats for this game, in my opinion, it's more fun to play without them. I'm including this strategy because I don't think it's a cheat although you can make some money fast this way.

It's especially helpful if you start running low on cash and you need some extra money to continue building your transport empire.

In OpenTTD industries will make only as much cargo available to your stations as completely necessary. That means, if your trains won't visit the station often enough, less and less cargo will be waiting for them when they arrive.

There are 2 basic ways to deal with this, transport the cargo to a nearer target or use more transport vehicles. If you choose a target that's close by, you won't get big profits. On the other hand, if you use more trains, the running costs could outweigh your profit.

There is another way of dealing with this problem, basically a mixture of the above two solutions. You just have to build a feeder service for your station. A feeder service, sometimes called a "piglet", is another vehicle, that picks up the cargo at the factory, transports it to your station and drops it off.

Usually feeder services are used in situations where there is no other way, like at Oil Rigs. You use a boat to transport the oil from the Oil Rig to your nearby train station and use your trains to transport it from there.

But feeder stations can also be used for maximizing available cargo at train stations. Lets suppose you have a train station near a coal mine and you transport the cargo to a power plant that's far away.

The profit for one load is maximized cause of the distance. But there is not much cargo to transport cause your train only picks it up every few days. If you want to make more money off this train route, you have to get more cargo.

And the easiest way to get more cargo is to build a feeder service. Build 2 lorry stations, one near the coal mine and one near your train station. When you're done, connect them with a road and build a road depot.

Connect the road depot to your road. Now build a coal truck, set it to transport coal from the coal mine to your train station and you are done. It doesn't matter if the piglet picks up coal from a lorry station, both stations, including the train station, will fill up on coal in a matter of minutes.

Your trains will always leave the train station filled up and you will get a better profit. The only thing you will have to get used to is the piglet's income. It will always be negative, cause it doesn't actually transport cargo to an industry but to your own train station.

Such a strategy is an easy way to earn a good amount of money, but it also makes this game a little to easy and you get bored pretty easily. So use it only if necessary.