continued…
Transporting cargo is way too much pain, particularly when using road vehicles.
Suggestion: Make it much clearer what a vehicle can transport. Some of the rail wagons for example, I had no real clue what sort of resource they could transport – it might say it on screen somewhere, or in some guide, but I didn’t spot it. Show icons for what the vehicle will transport.
Suggestion: When upgrading vehicles, have them default to resource the line is currently carrying, if possible.
Suggestion: If vehicle can carry multiple resources, just show the resource icons as buttons = more obvious that I need to make the choice, easier to make the choice (no need for pop-up resource menu), and clearer which choice is currently active (assuming a background colour added to selected resource).
Suggestion: Even if vehicle can only carry one resource, show it’s icon = make it super obvious that a vehicle can only carry that type of resource.
By this stage in my game, I was also getting fatigue from the billions of dialog windows cluttering the screen every time I tried to do something. I realise you can press Del key to get rid of them all, but I’m on a Mac and there is no Del key!
Suggestion: Allow Backspace key as alternate to Del key
Suggestion: Find ways to avoid having so many damn pop-up windows all the time. (Compare TrainFever to Cities:Skylines – there are often alternate ways to approach UI!).
So, back to cargo. Meh. It feels messed up, I’m not sure there’s much you can do about it without breaking backwards compatibility. Here’s some ideas of what could be in TrainFever 2…
- Get rid of road cargo depots (or whatever they’re called – the round things with 2 or 4 cargo bays). They’re kludgy and ineffective IMHO.
- Factories should act like ‘road cargo stations’ – I should be able to add them to lines and have my trucks go to them direct to collect/deliver stuff.
- Add a placeable warehouse building (maybe small, medium, large options for capacity)
- Trucks can take stuff from and to warehouses; they drive in to warehouse to reduce amount of animation used (that whole thing with resources moving around a train station is just crufty and slow)
- I can create chains of warehouses, eg. a bunch of trucks shuttling things between warehouses
- I can assign a fleet of trucks to a warehouse to automatically distribute goods to surrounding area (eg. place warehouse in city and the truck will go about making deliveries) – this would also remove the need for lots of single resource icons moving around screen (and associated pathfinding)
- Allow adding stations to a road line, so trucks can deliver direct to station (maybe this is already possible, I’ve not tried) – note: I’m aware of grouping, but this isn’t what I mean; trucks should drive in to train station to deliver goods (and without the crufty animations of resources moving on to platforms)
That’s all for now 🙂