Hello I enjoy playing on the n-ice servers and i never meant to brake any rules, therefore i carefully read them when i started to play here a few weeks ago. But i was very surprised by the reaction that i got from the admin alex879ro, who refused to listen to my arguments, and simply said I was in violation of rule four, and then finished the conversation with the sentence "the rules are clear END OF DISCUSSION" before calling a restart of the server. But i beg to differ, after the restart i talked to Batt, another admin, who listened and explained his interpretation of rule four, by making signs on the map, and i must say it is not very clear from the rules listed on the website that it meant what he explained.
Rule four states:
" Occupy at maximum 50% of the space around an industry/town. "
The phrase "of the space around" is where the misunderstanding lies, by Batts demonstration I am lead to believe it means
the area in which, if a station is placed, it will cover the industry/town, in other words, it is the
cover area of a potential station. My original understanding of the phrase was
the area consisting of the tiles around it My reasoning is as follows:
In rule four, the phrase used to describe the cover area of a station is different from the cover area, and i therefore thought the area that was implied was another area than the cover area, since the wording is different. This could of course be interpreted in both (or possibly other?) ways. But the part that is the most deceptive about the rule is that the proper term
cover area is used in rule three:
" Don't build stations or station parts that serve the sole purpose of increasing the coverage area "
There therefore exist two references to the same area, but using two different wordings, which i would say is unnecessarily confusing, and it is what lead by to think that they were two different areas, and i would suggest that either the same term is used in both rules, preferably using
cover area, or that the non existing difference between them is explained on the page containing the detailed rules, which currently just uses both terms, as the page with the regular rules.
Furthermore, the rule I was told my building around the town of "Aberwyvern" is also rule four, that states in the first part:
" Don't block other players. Reserving land to keep others out of a place is also considered blocking, as is placing obstructions in front of where others are currently building. "
Since, as you mentioned, I was alone on the server, I could not possibly have been in violation of rule four. firstly because there were no other players to block, secondly: there was plenty of room inside the rails and signs, so it can not be considered keeping others out, I believe that most OTTD players who looks at the way the roads are placed, that the ring was in place to contain and steer the growth of the city, not to keep outsiders out (since the town had only 772 inhabitants at the time of your screenshot, the transport of the passengers, mail and goods to the city, would only have caused it to grow faster, and since my station was already in place, and so close to the city center, i would benefit from this).
Another thing that bothers me about rule four, is that the limit at 50 %, seems to have been quite arbitrarily chosen, since something as common as a four row station with a bend at the beginning, goes over this limit:
The unconnected rail tiles outline the cover area of the coal mine Whether or not players should be allowed to build industries close to each other as I did, is up for discussion, I think it should have been in a post by itself (perhaps in the suggestions section), and not together with references to the player that did it, since it is currently not against the rules, there is no reason to write a rant about me because i make a legal move, that you think should be illegal.
But to start the discussion I will make some arguments for keeping the current system of allowing players to fund towns and build industries close to each other:
It does not harm other players, they might make money off it as well, since competition is allowed
It is an investment just as any other in the game, and it takes quite a while to breakeven:
This is a graph from the same game that your screenshots are from, and it shows the high cost of funding both towns and industries, and it also shows that there are not huge sums to be made from this, since the company value only rises slightly faster after each investment, and for this reason, this practice is markedly different from other "tricks" such as building very long trains entirely out of locomotives to get your company value up.
I hope you will have some use of my suggestions.
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