Introducing Transport Mogul Online

A new way to build your virtual corporation

For the longest time, I’ve been looking for a realistic logistics management game set in the real world. There are lots of semi-games with clunky UI and difficult game mechanics, but nothing that caught my eye or that scratched the itch I have to play a “serious” game.

See, I don’t want to just choose a cargo and a truck, I want to be able to build an empire — and not have to manage it for hours on end. I want to be able to check in for a few minutes every couple hours when I’m on a break and see actual progress.

I’ve played various logistics games, including the OG Transport Tycoon, and nothing has come close to TTD — but it’s not set in the real world and it’s not a persistent world. So, using the concepts from TTD and some of the mechanics I’ve seen in other games, I’m working on building one from scratch — or at least the background seeing as my coding skills might get an output of “hello world” after 36+ hours of work.

This isn’t an easy feat, before I can begin coding I have to build all the background details like vehicles, cargo supply and demand, and even the different types of cargo.

To give you an idea, when dealing with pickup trucks I currently have two base models: Standard and Heavy Duty. The Standard model has 21 variations and the Heavy Duty has an additional six variations. Each of these has a specific maximum weight and volume — meaning that higher-weight products will result in a smaller volume being carried.

Each vehicle, variation, cargo type, and other details are based on their real life counterparts, with some adjustments so that the level of difficulty is appropriate for a game. All of these things require research to not only find their basic information but also realistic prices for each base vehicle and their variation.

Then there’s the problem of break-case, multiple units, FTL, and LTL types of transport. My goal is for this to be as close to real-life as possible, meaning that I’d like to be able to have pathways for cargo that are as realistic as possible. As an example, here’s just one possible pathway for wood…

Forest → Lumber Mill→ FTL transport to warehouse → LTL transport to Hardware Store (with several other varieties of cargo) → individual unit transport to a house or other construction site.

Obviously this is extremely simplified, there are a lot of things that need to happen in the background for this system to work properly:

• The forest can produce more wood if certain conditions are met, or it can also be tapped out and need a certain amount of time to regenerate.
• The Lumber Mill will produce different types of lumber as well as wood chips as a byproduct — each of these products requires a background calculation.
• FTL (Full Truck Load) transport can happen either internally through the Lumber Mill owner, as a contracted trailer load (just the trailer), or as a contracted load requiring both a power and trailer unit.
• LTL (Less than Truck Load) transport requires calculations related to weight and volume and then has to be compared to the trailer capacity for each possible configuration of LTL loads.
• Construction sites will each have a unique randomly generated demand for supplies that will fall within a defined range (say the range is 12–38, the demand will fall somewhere in between that range).
• As the cargo gets smaller (breaking down a truck load to a pallet and then to individual units) the number of possible vehicles that can carry the cargo will increase — adding to the complexity.
• Theoretically, I would like it to be possible for someone to deliver a single piece of bread using a full B-Train (double unit) tractor trailer combo.

Oh…and this all has to be able to convert over to rail, ship, and air transport too. I don’t know why you’d want to ship lumber by air, but I’d like the game to be capable of handling that if you choose to do so.

It’s an expansive vision — and I’m trying to teach myself enough to bring it to life. Right now it’s spreadsheets and ideas in my brain — nothing super exciting to look at. But if I do it right, then well-built spreadsheets now will speed up the pretty parts later on.

What about you? Is this something that would interest you? Have some ideas or suggestions? Want to connect and offer some skills?

I don’t have any money to put towards this, so anything you contribute is going to be on the backend, but if this is something that gets you excited then let’s chat and maybe we can build something good together!