My Thoughts so far

[lightrail]

I’m enjoying the game and love the graphics. I really like the realism with track placement, limits on curves and grade. I never did like the way in RRT3 that trains could climb 20% grades.  So this is much better and makes engineering through mountains a challenge (and in some cases makes road transport a better choice).

Trains – can be hard to make money and I find starting off small is best and being careful about expansion. I’ve gone bankrupt building what I thought would be a profitable line, only to find that it was not used very well.  I find it best to build cargo road lines first to get money flowing in, then look for good connections for a train line. Something that will let me run freight and passenger trains, with freight hauling raw materials to the facotry and cargo to the cities so the trains are not running empty back to the mine or lumber yard.

I would really like to see a way to replace vehicles automatically or in a single press method. I currently pause the game and send all vehicles to the depot and buy new, but it is still tedious.  It’s the part of the game I like the least and dread it. It is not fun. Locomotion had the same problem and a “no breakdown” mod was the solution.

The popups of road vehicle windows when buying is useless and just sucks the framerates – please get rid of this hold-over from TTD – in that game you had to assign each vehicle; in Train Fever, with routes, you don’t need to do this. So the window is redundant.

Same for vehicle renewal – I hate getting spammed with all those windows. Maybe just a text message or something would be better.

I’d like an alert when a train has been held a signal for a long time. Right now I only notice something is wrong when my line starts losing money, then I have to search the route to find the problem. A badly placed signal on an upgraded line led to train-jam with nothing moving.  And for this reason, a way to remove a train to free up the jam – right now I have use the “stop” and “reverse” function and can be frustrating to sort out.

Sending road vehicles to the depot is easy. Trains, however, only look forward so if the depot is behind, we get an error message. Could this be changed so that when you hit send to depot, the train will look in both directions for a connected depot and then go there (reversing at the next station if needed).

For building tracks – would love to have cross-overs so we can build more realistic junction other than ladder junctions. Also like to build diamond cross-overs etc.  Bridge pillars are too close together so hard to build road under existing bridge without demolishing bridge first. Should be able to build a road crossing the railway.  Bridge construction works well if you lay the road over the track then use “n” or “m” to lower or raise the road until a bridge or tunnel appears.  Would be great to have an option to build multiple tracks a once. Sometimes impossible to build a second track along a bridge that is not at right angles to the road or river or track it is crossing without getting terrain collision.

I would like to be able to add platforms to stations but I can live with not doing that. I’d like to see terminus station with the road and building at the head of the tracks, or some terminus and some through platforms, but maybe that will come with mods in time.

More ground textures. I’d like the cuttings and embankments to be darker so they are more obvious and easier to see.  More realistic too.

Water transport – ships or passenger boats for the rivers and lakes would add another dimension

Finally, sandbox mode so I can build a railway and not worry about cost of running it (let the taxpayers subsidize it for the public good).  The $10 million cap on borrowing has meant I have had to end a game and start again because I’m stuck in a downward spiral and can’t even infrastructure because it costs money to do that.

 

[lightrail]

Oh and we need way points so we can direct fast trains onto the fast track and slow trains onto slower tracks.  A priority system would be good too. Let the user set the priority of the train so an Express will get the path assigned ahead of the freight or local service.

And it would be nice to know the value of the cargo in the train (similar to the way RRT shows the value and how it diminishes the longer the train takes).  Different cargoes should have different time sensitivities. For example passenger are very time sensitive, but a coal shipment shouldn’t matter as much.

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