- This topic has 2 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 7 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I got Train Fever a little while ago, and struggled on my first few tries to get profitable. It seems to work best if you have relatively short distances between stations, and set up two bus routes to feed each station (and perhaps more as cities grow). Build stations with two platforms – bigger if it will be a nexus. For reasons unknown you cannot upgrade stations, and instead have to demolish the existing one, and the approaching trackwork, and start from scratch.
Go double track as soon as possible, and make flying junctions – having a place where two lines join and you can have trains going either direction on a track is a disaster waiting to happen. At some point you will have trains approach from three direction at once, and no way (that I could find) to resolve it. This meant I had to keep the network simple, so I only transported passengers (I could never get lorry routes to work either).
By about 1875 I had all but one city on a small map connected, and by 1900 the last city, up in the hills as well, and I was making a profit. To make it to 2000, all I had to do was wait.
In fact, only 2 out of seven lines were profitable, and I ended up shutting down most of the lines. By about 1930 I had just three lines, and only six cities had train services.
As decades past, even those lines became less profitable. One reason was that cities became more and more congested with road traffic that my buses (and a tram in one city) were failing to get passengers to the station – most seemed top prefer to walk.
In the second half of the twentieth century disaster struck. I decided to close another loss-making line, and sent a train back to the depot for sale. It turned around and started heading off the wrong way down the line, eventually meeting the other training coming the other way. They ended up buffer to buffer, and I could find nothing that would sort them out. I had trains going the wrong way before, but putting in an extra cross over had sorted them. This time there was no space. These two trains were then costing me a million and a half each year for the rest of the game. Oh for a button to just delete a train…
Nevertheless, I just made in to 2000 still in the black.
And having done so, I find no particular desire to play the game again. It took about a day to get to 2000, but most of that time I was not doing anything. For the entire twentist century I could leave the game running, and come back every 10 minutes or so to see what had happened, make a few adjustments, then leave it again.
Besides passively letting the game run, what I did do was change trains and change track, neither of which was exactly fun. I had about fifteen bus routes, and upgrading perhaps twenty buses was an exercise in tedium. I still had steam powered buses in 1940 just because I could not be bothered to replace them. The automatic replacement feature offers one way to do, but doing that for fifteen routes is just not fun – oh, and the game forgets all the auto replacements when you save/load.
Track building is frequently frustrating, especially building flyovers, as the game says there is a terrain collision for seemingly no reason (but laying double track was surprising slick). An undo feature is desperately needed, or a “pprojected” feature where you can lay several sections of track provisionally to see how it will fit; I had several embankments and cutting where I had laid track that had subsequently not worked, to say nothing of the wasted money.
It is a shame, because I wanted Train Fever to be a good game. It was a challenge to get to 2000, but not one I have any desire to return to. Most of the game time did not involve me at all and much of the rest was too frustrating to be fun.
To solve the deadlock issue: click on the train in question then click on “running” in its window. It will then show “stopped”. When the train is stopped, you can reverse it. Click on “reverse” and then start it again.
F2Andy, Train Fever IS a good game! And it’s very, really very easy to be profitable. In average from 1850 I’m at $150 mil by 1900.
I feel the will to love this game in you, and believe me once you’ll understand the basic rules you’ll be on the 7th sky of happiness of this game.
Skype me on “colink_mike”, I would gladly show you LIVE how to start this game properly.
- The forum ‘General Discussion’ is closed to new topics and replies.