Mini Metro alpha

I definitely think luck is a.major factor in this game. You can perform the same strategy on the same map, but a bad string of upgrade choice or a bad set of symbols and there’s not much you can do to avoid it .

After not playing for a while I played the daily challenge today, so if you want a score to shoot for - there it is! I think it resets in like 5 hours, so not a lot of time I guess.

I’ve never before seen a train game that treats the railroads totally transient. Usually these games are about planning a rail network that’s best suited to the distribution of stuff on the map, and then committing to that network for the long term. And then you either can’t change the track, or replacing it will at least come at such a heavy cost that you’ll have to make some compromises. In Mini Metro you can’t plan at all due to the all the randomness in station placement (not sure that the randomness of passengers is a big deal). So instead every new station (and every end of the week bonus) should be considered a call to rejig the whole network. It’s all tactics, no strategy or sense of commitment.

It’s an odd design, which I really should not like given how consistently it does the opposite of what I usually want in railroad games. But it just works super well, and is such an unique approach that it’s impossible not to appreciate.

However…

I really, really hate the ability just teleport trains around at will. It gives a huge benefit, and seems to be only restricted by the player’s tolerance for tedious micro-management. And since this is at heart a score-chase game, it seems like you’d have to do this to be competitive on the leaderboards. An absolutely insane decision.

There’s a similar problem with building track that is basically used to run one train once, and then deleted and rebuilt elsewhere. But I’m less bothered by that. First, the design intrinsically depends on the railroads being totally malleable; it’s not clear how you’d prevent this. That’s not the case for teleporting trains. Second, these kind of track-removal shenanigans come at a heavy cost since it means you’re playing with one fewer “permanent” lines. And third, it’s not nearly as micro-heavy as optimal reshuffling of trains would be.

I think Square Times is impossible. I’ve been trying to get that achievement for over 50 hours now and it’s driving me crazy. I just don’t think it can be done anymore, so I’m going to move on to trying to get some others instead.

I just tried Square Times for the first time, and got it. Could be that I was very lucky, or that you’re missing some mechanic or trick.

Track looked like this at the moment of getting the achievement:

That was with two interchanges. Not sure if that’s normal on the NYC map, but at least one seems absolutely critical (the second one probably didn’t do much). The main funny business I did was teleport the green double carriage train from the square all the way to the eastern interchange if too much junk started piling up. (It was pretty much where half the map’s production had to go through). Probably had to do that around 10 times.

And obviously all those unconnected stations were occasionally part of the network. But the purple line was so obscenely long already that I alternated between two configurations for the eastern half of it rather than try to keep all the stations on the line all the time.

I pretty much agree with everything you said @jsnell about changing tracks and trains at will. At first it bothered me, but I just decided to play it for what it is and it works. I think hard mode doesn’t let you remove any stops, and may not let you move trains around, I can’t remember.

It’s tough to describe what goes wrong because each time it’s something different.

This latest game that just ended got me no extra bridges, and no interchanges, so I had do try to juggle everything with the three bridges I had, and no interchanges.

Originally I had the right side island divided up between green and blue tracks, and everything was going great. And then the stations in the north showed up, and I had to use a bridge to get to the north, so I had take the green track to the north and the blue had to take all of the mess that’s the east side. And then another week passed as I was trying to juggle tracks, and once again my only choices were a new line, which doesn’t help with bridges, or a carriage. I took the carriage, which helped me survive an extra few days on the West side, since I originally had pink go to the west side but couldn’t afford to take a bridge to the left anymore because of lack of bridges.

Anyway, so yeah, that was this time, but each time it’s something different.

It’s been awhile since I played, but my first thought is you should probably be completing the circuits. That blue line just seems too long to me without being connected to itself. I believe my goal was to have one linear line going across the map connecting each of the 3 sections. Then each section had its own circuit, with the middle section having the most lines.

There certainly is some luck involved though. Two bridges doesn’t seem enough, but I guess jsnell made it work.

Well, interchanges become more important when you chose not to go for more lines or more bridges. If you want carriages, you’re forgoing lines, but then you really need the interchanges.

In this latest one I went for carriages a couple of times, but never got the option for interchanges, so things quickly got out of control. It would have been fine if the people I had piling up at the main triangle is squares, but sooo many people wanted to go to the Cross. So the Cross congestion is what killed me this time.

See, I think your green line is too long there. I would have made it a circuit then had the short red line connect it to the mainland. Since the red is so short it could have kept up with whatever the green dropped off at the connection.

Do you never do circuits?

Yes on other maps, I do lots of circuits. Circuits never seemed to work out for me on the New York map. Not without Interchanges anyway, and interchanges are very rare on this map. I know it’s supposed to be random, but I almost never get them on this map.

It also helps a lot if the stations on the left and right of manhattan can be a mixture of circles and triangles, instead of mostly all circles. That helps extend the game a lot.

Edit: For example, in one of my other games:

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In retrospect, on that last one, the orange line should have connected the East to Manhattan to the Triangle on the red line, not the circle. Or if I could have had another train on the red line, that would have helped too.

Ok, sounds I got incredibly lucky with two interchanges then :-/ I’d actually bet it’s not fully random either, but depends on both the map and the length of the game.

On that last screenshot the orange line isn’t really carrying its weight; it’s never delivering anything, just building up a backlog. I would probably rather have extended the red line east instead,. Or at least connected the orange between a circle and a triangle, not two circles.

But even in this situation, it seems like once things started piling up on that station, you could just have moved another train to the red like temporarily. Feels like either orange or the single carriage purple could have gone away for a few trips without causing a disaster. Or even 5 seconds before the end, the blue double carriage could have gotten that city under the limit with a single load. Unlike the other screenshots, there really was just a single crisis spot.

I got further than I’ve gotten in a while.

Unfortunately when the specialized stations showed up a minute or two before this failure, like the Cross at the top, and the station that turned into a tear drop, and the station that showed up as a football shape, those caused some weird complications and congestions that weren’t there before, and I wasn’t able to make enough changes in time. Plus the weirdness on the left side with the green line, I spent too much time trying to untangle that, and it just wouldn’t take the track down without criss-crossing with itself, and that wasted too much time.

Damn it. I was doing really well this time. I just needed to switch down to the slower speed, which I forgot to do. If I had I have had time to move trains from one track to the other as needed.

Picked this up. Super cool! Until I want to delete a connection and spend a minute cursing at the UI before killing the app (mobile).

Am I just failing at understanding some UI paradigm? I always end up moving a line to some other station or doing some other goddamned thing instead of cutting a station out like I’m trying to do.

I didn’t have trouble. You just hold your thumb over the station, until it removes the connection. And it’s the same on the PC with the mouse.

Hmm, OK. I was trying to drag the connection off to break it. It made sense in my head!

You can drag it off too. Pick up the track somewhere near the station, drag it through the station, and it’ll get detached.

If anyone wants some hot leaderboard competition, I’m planning on playing the Daily Challenge every morning this week. Got position 44 (top 5%) yesterday; today is obviously not over but I’m guessing the preliminary top 10% rating will stay pretty stable throughout the day.

Today’s challenge is Paris on Extreme mode. I hadn’t played on Extreme before; it’s the one where you can’t move trains, rebuild track, and the overcrowding limit for stations also appears to be smaller. I didn’t think Extreme would work at all before playing; seems like you’d be totally at the mercy of the RNG. But it was surprisingly good, actually. It really forced you into a different mode of thinking, it was all about the big picture decisions, not about the disaster recovery options. “I need to connect this new station to one of these two lines. Both options suck. Which one sucks less?”

Obviously sometimes you’ll make a choice with the very limited amount of information available, and the RNG fucks you over with the very next station. But I’m assuming that in the Daily Challenge that RNG is at least the same for everyone. Would be great to have a slightly larger window into the future. For example seeing where the next two stations are going to pop, even if not what type they’ll be. That kind of mode with more information and more permanence would probably be my personal sweet spot for this game.

I gave it a shot and just barely beat Rock8man but was well behind @jsnell. I needed a bridge to come up to get to a stranded location. It’s funny how chaotic a line can end up when you can’t adjust it on the fly.

You can look up what people got on your friend’s list? They sure don’t make that easy to see.

How do you do it?