kamnet

> 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.

If you play with the JGR Patch Pack, there is a patch for drive-thru depots, which lets you place depots back-to-back, with each end open, and a train will drive in one side, service, and then drive out the other. It looks a little janky with the default depot graphics, but if you use a track set with full-tile depots, it looks wonderfully accurate, and you can make them as many tiles long as you need.

OpenTTD was well known and popular for it's genre. Placing it on Steam, GoG and Microsoft Store was more about just making it more accessible and convenient for players to download and update, as users were already providing simple installs for the various Linux distributions, Docker, Flatpack etc.