Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?
Railroad tycoon 3 for example had sort of dynamic elements that influence gameplay like the historical drop in rail passenger traffic in 20th century, and important choice of diesel vs electric, and of letting other companies run trains on your tracks etc? Does OpenTTD presently offer similar challenges?
That was the case in the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe, if memory serves right. Getting cash positive isn't the real challenge, the challenge is growing faster than the competition. Which is a lot more fun if you can play against humans rather than AI. Playing without rival companies is more of a sandbox than anything, where you have to make your own challenges and goals. Can you survive with only buses? Only boats? Make the most optimal rail network? etc. Once you have a grasp of how income is calculated, there are lots of exploits you can do as well to make money practically infinite.
This was also the case for Chris Sawyer's later games too - Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 challenged you not just with having a cash positive park, but with meeting goals under a time limit or with other restrictions. It is something of a cursed problem in game design for sure - if you make the basic act of surviving too hard, you limit player expression and fun; if you make it too easy, you can just as well remove the money system entirely. I would say the proper balance is one where you can run out of cash, but aren't likely to if you just apply a modicum of business sense. Which is how both TTD and RCT play. SimCity is another example of that. The games are most fun when your own creative ideas have enough breathing room to grow.
Railroad Tycoon 3 ( and 2) achieved a sort of good level of challenge I think. It also seperated personal funds from company funds and had challenges like growing one's personal networth to a certain figure, which involved playing the market. Its business simulation aspects seems well fleshed out.
I used to try to run my company to the ground, buy all the shares for dirt cheap and make it profitable again to become filthy rich. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it backfired really bad, but a lot of fun was had.
Set scarce resources, high taxes, multiple competitors, realistic breakdowns... Yes, you still can make tons of money just running a coal train for 200-500 squares, but it would take you a long time to afford this.
Also, TT, in all it's incarnations, is more a sandbox type game than a challenge one.
You set the rules, you play by those rules.
Or break them fo giggles and profit.
Or make bus only empire.
Or terraform everything to NeoMegaVenice and run only ships.
Or..
> Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?
Yes, it's reasonably easy to generate huge ammounts of positive cashflow, but if you find that bad, you can just give your money to other players in multiplayer, raise and lower sea, or bribe a random town authority until enough money vanishes.
> the historical drop in rail passenger traffic in 20th century
This happens in the OpenTTD too if you start offering non-rail passenger transit.
> important choice of diesel vs electric
You can enable this in OpenTTD options, but it's mostly a very easy drag-select to simply update your entire rail grid to catenary powered ones.
The most important rail infrastructure decisions are between conventional/electrified rails, monorail and maglev, that requires actually replacing all your rails/stations/depots/trains infrastructure in one go.
> and of letting other companies run trains on your tracks etc?
Under normal settings, tracks are unfortunately too cheap to lay, you can just lay your own parallel set of competing tracks while leveling half of the land in the process.
Another possibility is multiplayer, with several players on the same game company.
> Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?
Making cash was never the goal, it was a means to the end. The original goal is to score more points than the other players and make it to the top of the leaderboard in the year 2050. But there's so many add-ons anymore than almost nobody plays that way. It's either sandbox, build pretty looking virtual model railroads, or just make up your own rules. Many players now use multiplayer to either build massive and efficient networks (co-op style), or to build fantastic model worlds (cooperative play). The latter is often achieved using the JGR Patch Pack with the Infrastructure Sharing patch activated. You also have communities such as n-ice and CityMania where the community has a collective online scoreboard and run customized contests using game scripts and AIs.
It's still the same, I enjoy the system building more than anything. I did see a stream that inspired me. DDRJake did one where he started out with a small number of cities in a very large map, so that to expand he had to build the cities as well. He had a couple of sub-conditions:
1. all cities need to be connected to each others (for this to be interesting you also need to turn on that passengers can have destinations farther away than just next town), and
2. industries that spawn too far away from a town must be destroyed (because industry spawns randomly across the map and then is coupled to a town)
I don't know if that would be enough for you, but definitely puts an extra strain on the economy, but in the end, I mostly enjoy trying to handle the pax stuff.
The original AI for OpenTTD is mediocre. There are many options for alternative Computer player AI that are quite a bit more intelligent, efficient, and cut-throat. Try downloading one of their NewGRFs and trying them out
In addition to the other suggestions, OpenTTD has optional inflation that you can turn on to help rebalance the economics. It ramps up the cost of everything as your world ages.
Railroad tycoon 3 for example had sort of dynamic elements that influence gameplay like the historical drop in rail passenger traffic in 20th century, and important choice of diesel vs electric, and of letting other companies run trains on your tracks etc? Does OpenTTD presently offer similar challenges?