Hi all!

Some ideas have come to my mind when playing Train Fever and making content for the very title.

1. Double passenger and goods capacity on all vehicles, while also doubling the maintenance cost and buy prices. At the same time, double the accepted travel time for passengers and cargo. Why do this? Firstly, it will give less vehicles to simulate and render. In my opinion, it will also make the cities look prettier with less vehicles, as it would look more realistic and less busy compared to an over crowded transport machinery, where trains are waiting in line to enter the station.

2. Combined stations. This idea emerged while working on the Scandinavian DLC project on Train-Fever.net. The idea is that goods- and passenger stations are combined, as they have often been in Scandinavia, especially in Norway. Norwegian trains – even express trains – used to have end coaches with a luggage and express goods section. This was really useful for transporting goods back and forth to smaller towns, without having to send an expensive, dedicated goods train. It would also lessen the need for more space taking cargo hubs without having the need for a large cargo capacity.

2.1 Combining passenger stations with tram and bus stations would also make public transport more effective. A problem I’ve encountered is that should be considered is also that a huge amount of traffic can clog up road intersections. This happens more often with longer vehicles, such as the Cobra. This also leads back to idea 1. Another way of solving this is having several entrances and exits from bus/ tram stations.

3. Less cities, more towns and rural places. By this I mean that I would like a focus on the rural places, and what is a better example than Switzerland itself on this? Smaller stations meant for short trains, such as railbuses would give the player a good reason to buy railbuses. They’re fast, but as Train Fever is right now, buses and trams are much more effective. The reasons are probably that it’s hard to build effective stations for this purpose. The smallest stations are 160m long, and can only be accessed from one side, meaning that one station could quickly take as much space as there would be between two tram/ bus stops, while also taking space away from other buildings.

3.1 Having an effective use of small passenger stations would potentially eliminate the use of a subway system, which some players request.

3.2 Farms. How I would implement this is just as much of a visual thing as a gameplay thing: Farms grow with borders snapping to roads and railroad tracks, giving a realistic- and more organic look, as well as more to look at in the environment. It would therefore not looking like a squared, boring farm that was placed at a random location. It also helps on the appearance problem that occurs when the player destroys trees and the farmland decals: Nothing natural replaces it. In the end, the environment can look a bit naked.

3.3 Giving rural areas farms would give the rural areas something to live on. Smaller cargo stations could transport goods to the bigger cargo stations, where the cargo is then transported from city to city. The same would happen with passenger, travelling from a small rural station to a bigger city station, from where they would then take a train to another city.

4. Some factories plop up like regular buildings – when there’s a good access to some resource, a factory will plop up nearby, pasteurizing milk, making cheese, bread, steel rods, cars, locomotives, etc. This would be useful in rural areas, as well as allowing some cities to specialize more than others. It could possibly give the player another little puzzle on the cargo side to solve. Making cities demand several different goods would maintain the goods need in several cities, in case any of my ideas made cities flood with goods.

Conclusion: The player needs more options on how to solve challenges. Right now, the game does it well, but it can be done better. Cities need to be more spread with smaller towns in between, where railbuses and very short trains would be more effective than regular trains, or even bus/ tram routes with very frequent departures. The player also needs mechanics that makes theses smaller places very useful. Could a system for more varied good demand be useful?

I hope this will inspire Urban Games, give the player more options and more often have a good reason to buy what he/ she doesn’t buy that often today.