Overview
So, you want to make earning money a bit harder, huh?
Making openTTD harder?? waaaaaaaat
Yeah, so to make it harder, you need to go into the crypt known as the options menu. It’s that option called ‘settings’ that can be found under the drop down that appears when you click the cog that should appear at the top of your screen, when you’re playing on an existing or new game.
Now, the options menu can be a bit of a mystery, since depending on what sort of category you select at the top of the window, you may or may not actually be able to see all of the options. To change this, select the ‘EXPERT’ category.
Alternatively, you can just search up the option that you want to see, and it should show up regardless.
Infrastructure Maintenance
So, the biggest issue that most people have when they play this game, is that once you find a nice little loop to earn a ton of money from some industries, transporting goods and such, you might as well be done with the game, since you will basically never run out of money.
Notably, there’s the common situation of people just building airports, and almost immediately rolling in the cash.
How do you change this? HOW DO YOU MAKE IT HAARRRRRD?
Well, now that you should have your options menu open, you’re going to want to turn on INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE.
What does this do?
To put it simply, it turns on maintenance fees for whatever existing constructions that you might have built – Train tracks, stations, airports, etc – they all need to be maintained.
Alright, so this is already sounding promising for making things hard. But, you might ask: how does it make it hard?
Turning on infrastructure maintenance makes the game hard, because whenever you build a new loop for your train network, you’re going to need to pay for that section as well as the rest of the existing train network. In a manner of speaking, the costs scale to your existing infrastructure. If you think you can get away from this by just escaping to the airplane industry, no. You’re not.
You want to just run off with your mountain of airports, and 3 planes? With maintenance fees turned on, you better have an existing infrastructure to support your initial endeavors, as it will otherwise completely drain your coffers. It doesn’t matter if you have billions of dollars; the expenses will eat you alive in no time at all. On the flipside however, the earnings potential is still quite nice.
The difference is that now, you’re going to need to work up to that point to be able to afford it.
Disasters
If you don’t think that’s enough to make things harder, you can always turn on the Disasters option. Granted it adds in the problem of randomly suffering because of circumstances beyond your control, and sometimes that’s too much for those who are already a few chromies short, or for those who simply don’t want to put up with bogus.
Thanks to my patrons
Lastly before I combust into flames, if you see anyone who posts cancer on the web (like that image), tell them what you think. We don’t like cancer in our bodies, right? We don’t like it in our bodies, and we also shouldn’t like it online either. This has been an epic Public Service Announcement.
Don’t forget to leave a thumbs up before you go.