You listen here now @jpinard
It is! Read the tool tip on the lower left of the screen!
:p
Thanks for the heads up on the flash sale :)
I did the tutorial again last night. The 2nd layer of track did form along the first line nicely, so that was good. It still isn’t very user friendly though, it still feels awkward. You still have to manually cross tracks for anything less than the largest station apparently as well.
Thanks for the note. I’m past the refund period, but I don’t regret paying the steam sale price. The game seems pretty fun and now I am torn between Stellaris and building railways.
There are still some quality-of-life issues. Having all the stations have the cross-over track would be a no-brainer. Especially considering that sometimes I can’t place the cross-overs due to slope. It is also annoying that if I make a single track and then try to double-track it, the parallel track is sometimes invalid due to curvature, which is not something that would happen in the real world.It’s like you have to draw the outside section first.
Signalling doesn’t seem bad though. Does anyone know if there is a way to get a slow-moving freight train to get out of the way of a passenger express train coming up behind it? I’m also thinking that warehouses are going to be very handy.
Have them on separate tracks.
I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours with this. It seems quite neat, but I made some early mistakes with not having enough space for the side-tracks. I’ve not gotten to the point of the stock market part of the game yet, but this is looking very good so far. Based on some of the comments I’ve read it seems as if the game has improved a lot post-launch.
Wow, five words leads to a lot of consequences! I’ve picked up quite a bit about rail network design, warehouses, station set-up. The logistics of the trains and the rail net can get quite involved, particularly if you are trying to avoid crossing the freight and passenger tracks.
I really hope they add the ability for trains to take the nearest open connected platform at all stations. Right now you can do it on the largest stations, but they come with built-in switches between all platforms. Those can take quite a bit of space, and I’ve found that when trains break down on these switches it can block the whole station. Even when they are not breaking down, long trains traversing the switches blocks everyone for a long time, removing a lot of the benefit of the automatic platform selection.
I can see why they’ve done this the way they have: the logic isn’t entirely simple with an arbitrary set of tracks around the station. Suppose you have a station with lots of tracks coming in on one side but only one platform having a track leading out of the far side of a station. You don’t want the automatic switching system to assign trains to this platform unless they intend to pass through or there are no other platforms left. Otherwise the next through train may have to wait ages, blocking everything up. And that’s a pretty simple example, it can easily get very complicated.
The best way I can think of to tackle this is to give the player the choice to intervene if they wish, giving them the tools to handle the difficult cases. Specifically, provide the option to prioritise some platforms, leave some as normal priority and disallow others entirely on a per-train basis (rather like the existing prioritisation of goods).
But yeah, anything would be better than the current system of waiting for a platform while an engine takes forever to get serviced on it, all while there are 3 other perfectly good platforms sat there entirely unused.
Yeah I wouldn’t want to make it a requirement, and it wouldn’t have to be perfect. Make the default that it will go to the lowest-numbered platform that is open and accessible. As you say, give the option to prioritise or block. The idea would be to make the default decent in most scenarios and let the player configure for special cases.
I guess I must be missing something. Some people have complained about total lockups in the switching stations so perhaps you are right that there are hidden pitfalls.
Ugh, fixing track connections after I upgrade the size of stations is the type of busywork I can do without. I like the game so far, but I wish the information about goods demand and such was a bit less of a hassle to access as well.
I can think of ways I could deliberately lock up the existing switching system without too much trouble. Still, it’s easy enough to design around when laying tracks, with a bit of care.
I’m also very hopeful for the future. There have been loads of quality of life improvements in just the two months since I started playing. I’m sure new things will keep pouring out.
The game has a bit of a scale problem. The core of the gameplay is solving the small logistical issues: arrangement of tracks, points, switches etc., much as it was for Transport Tycoon. But these are all things that in the real world would be solved within the boundaries of a city. The map scale means these are stretching for 30 miles outside the city, which means a significant lack of room sometimes to build what you want.
Not that that’s a flaw of this game alone by any means. It’s the same problem in Civ VI, say, trying to play a tactical wargame on a strategic size map.
Back to the point, there’s a lot to be said at this scale for having cities be just a hub to connect to, not worrying about the fiddly bits at all. But that’s not what this game is trying to be; it’s not where the gameplay lies at all. For that putative game you’d either have a detailed economic engine or something akin to a board game.
Yeah, that’s a real nuisance. Flow and chokepoints are tricky too. It can be particularly tough to work out whether a shortage of clothing should be fixed by upgrading your clothing industry, your cloth industry, your cotton industry or improving the transport links at some point in the chain.
Yeah I’m finding the process of trying to solve issues and improve connections really engaging. I’ve been surprised how quickly crowding issues can start to occur. Trying to lay things out in a way that gets things done now and also allows for future plans has been pretty fun so far.
I haven’t read anything about what the developers intended, but I’ll take your word for it. I’m not going to fault the game for not being the game I thought it was (or wanted it to be). And now that I am aware of this, the process of planning out my connections earlier will be easier.
From my time with it so far, though, the game does give me the impression of wanting to be more than a small-scale logistical busywork simulator. I think there could be potential in an expansion for a game mode that expands on the business side and has a toggle for “simple city connections” or something like that.
One question for people with more experience at the game: how much faster is the one-way through process at a train station as opposed to going out in the direction you came in? I can see that you save time in that the next train starts heading towards the platform as soon as the previous train has cleared it (without having to traverse possibly lots of switching). Does the process of turning the train around actually save time? Is the extra track on the map actually worth it?
I feel like this is a problem with a lot of the games I play. I find the details interesting at the start. It’s fun to explore the space of solutions of the lower-level game but at some point it becomes a chore to replicate that solution across all the instances where the problem pops up. It’s often a tricky thing to automate as well, since it would be hard to specify how exactly how you want the problem solved. I guess the answer is don’t put fiddly bits that can’t be easily automated in the game, but it feels a bit dissatisfying to me.
So far I still find something appealing about laying down track, even if it’s very similar to what I’ve done before. Maybe something where I could box-select a region of track and hit a key to cross-link them all (or delete everything inside the box) would be handy.
I’m not sure why this game triggers my busywork detector, because it’s not really that bad. I think the only thing I really miss is to be able to select which of the existing tracks connects where when I upgrade a station.
I managed to fail the first chapter. It was more of a test-run anyways, and had fulfilled all the tasks except increasing the population of Cheyenne. The game has its hooks in me, though, so I am looking forward to starting a new game now that I know the ropes.
I’m on the 4th scenario and they do tend to get more complicated than the first one. I mean there are more interesting problems to solve, but I think there is also more busywork as everything scales up. Though if you start with enough money at least it won’t hurt you too much to put in upgraded stations at the start.
It gets way more complicated after that first scenario.
Hopefully I am prepared for it!