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I just bought Train Fever during the steam holiday sale and started it for the first time. I’d like to ask a question and I hope I didn’t overlook an obviously FAQ that would have answered it:
I started a game and picked the largest map. But I got only a tiny piece of land. The city list shows 27 cities. So, lets assume they are placed somewhat like in a 5×5 grid. That means if I start from the center and I connect the closest two cities in any direction I will reach the edge of the map. This can’t be true. Did I make some sort of mistake? Or is this seriously the biggest map this game offers? And if that’s the case, did anyone mod it to have like ten times the size? Because everything below that seems like a cruel tease, like a free trial version or something.
This game seems really interesting, please tell me they didn’t ruin it with that laughable map size!
You would need a really beefy machine to saturate big map. People with top shelf machines run into performance wall on big maps. To comfortably run an even bigger map you’d need something close to 30-40 ghz single core machine and I guesstimate about 100 gigs of memory.
Sooo – no. Nobody modded the game to handle “bigger” maps.
What he said. Play it for a bit and get busy, then watch as your PC grinds to a halt on your so called ‘small map’. Personally, I think the sizes are great, you need to manage a lot of different things and much bigger would make it more of a chore. However, I lplay on small maps (5-7 towns) as anything larger cant be run after 40 years or so.
Even a small map can get a reasonable network running, this is hardly SimCity!
What he said 🙂
To make his point hit home.
My current game on small map has 60 trains, about 300 trucks and buses and over 6000 simulated people. My 4ghz Xeon has some struggle handling that.
Well, thank you for the quick answer Uzurpator. Now, I am very disappointed by this and would like to give my feedback in a calm and reasonable way, hoping that someone will use it to do something good at some time in the future.
First of I don’t accept the performance argument. I don’t believe for a second that the developers were unable to foresee the hardware requirements early during development. At that point they decided to sacrifice map size in favor of other demanding things. I think they made the wrong decision. And here’s why:
There are several types of trains in the real world. Local connections within the same, large city or between smaller towns, regional connections that link the surrounding towns to the largest city in the region, national connections that connect the largest cities of a country and international ones that link metropolitan regions to each other. A TGV or ICE wont stop in Smallville to pick up a handful of people that want to travel 5km to Tinytown. And the local train between Smallville and Tinytown will always stop and wait to allow the TGV between Paris and Orleans to travel at full speed if the decision has to be made. All these things don’t exist if you have only a small region to work with. If the city grid is only 5×5 it doesn’t make any sense to pass by small towns and connect large population centers or something like that. This takes away a huge part of the possible variety of tracks, trains and tasks.
I would like to have different terrain to work with. And I want each terrain to have some space on the map. Imagine having two parts of your company separated by a mountain range (Appalachians, Rockys, Alps) and just later reaching the technological ability to connect them directly. This won’t work on such a small map. You need hundreds or maybe even thousands of kilometers to portrait such a landscape. Undertakings like these have made some of the most interesting stories in railroad history. But it seems this game doesn’t care at all.
The big nothing. Emptiness. Each part of the world has stretches of land that are way less populated than the surrounding area. Or maybe there’s just a huge body or water or a mountain or a desert or a jungle. Maps this small won’t allow for contrasts like that, or there’s no land left to build on.
OK, that’s it. Call it a rant if you want, but it’s really just my attempt to explain why I am disappointed. I payed 14€ for the game and while I am no rich person I can live with the loss, that’s no problem. I learned that this was a crowd funded thing, so I am still happy I supported it, even if I don’t like it. But I was hoping to find a good railroad manager game for once and I was let down again. Again visuals and extravagant features were given priority above the basics of the genre. I am waiting for quite some time already.
Pollux i’m so with you on this one. What i would give to get a full map of the UK for example in right scale so i could run my commuter services in and out from London whilst having Pendolinos reaching out to Manchester! Now there is trains in this game for both, but no real possibility to use them.
I totally agree with Pollux. The largest map only covers the area of a small metropolis which is what the small size should be. Large should have four or more “urban centres” that can be connected by regional trains while the “towns” (suburbs) within the centres themselves should be connected with commuter trains. There should also be one or more city centres which could be considered as the central business district of the Urban centre. There should be more of an emphasis between towns and suburbs, where suburbs will grow faster than towns, or towns that are close to the urban centre will eventually convert to suburbs and become part of the greater metropolitan area of that centre. Maybe have a maximum distance from urban centre where any town outside of that range will always be just a town and never convert to a suburb. Also, high rise buildings begin in the centre and slowly spread outwards, maybe never reaching the outer suburbs. You know, like actual cities.
They really need to optimise the game before this can happen. The current large map needs to be able to perform with thousands of vehicles like the the current smallest map does with few vehicles. Most people here have more than one CPU core, let’s use as many cores as possible, that would be a good starting point.
If you zoom in, and set the gamespeed on normal, The trains do need 5-10 min irl to drive between stations. I haven’t tested to do big long routes across map yet, but I would imagine it must be almost a decade in-game time to travel across the map..
Maybe the scale of the models of trains and tracks should just be smaller, if everything on the map was half the size the map would look bigger, and trains would not seem to be driving in walking pace when it says its going in 100km/h 😀
Come on guys, it will be impossible to simulate on a scale 1:1, especially for transport simulation. Because in this case the speed of time will have to be linked to the speed of trains, and man, you’ll have to wait 1 hour and 25 minutes to bring the train from Brussels to Paris. You’ll be bored within minutes, starting to accelerate time, and believe me, you’ll consider current speed and scale quite efficient.
However the current flow of time could be slowed down 5-10 times, it’s really too fast indeed.I agree with the OP about the fact that the performance is ridiculous. THE BIGGEST FLAW in this game is the fact it does not make use of hyperthreading, therefore, ALL multicore CPUs will have trouble handling it once you get anywhere near busy. Most of us cannot even dream of using the games ‘large’ map, never mind anything bigger!
However, this is also NOT Train Simulator and to expect realistic layouts is mad. Even on the largest map size, the real world would have one, maybe two branch or commuter lines, that’s it. We all stuff in several including multimillion dollar HST networks and it all works and makes a profit!
I did make a reasonable line on a medium map the other day, had 7 towns with only three of them being served by a HST line and the rest by a commuter line. Looked and worked great ……….. until the lag and drop in frames made it unusable.
come on guys, i can barely make it 100 years of playing on a medium size map, having huge lags. And I have a recommended system requirements
The game would need to be rewritten up to bottom to support multi-core. And even if this happens, i doubt we’ll ever be able to play on anything more than a large map.
Stop having unrealistic dreams people.
I didn’t think this game could be saved. It seems obvious that the project was doomed during the design phase. See my post, I said it there. I wanted to tell you why I think the game is ruined. This wont be the last game of this type and hopefully not the last project the creators work on. So feedback about this game could help to make the enxt game better. I wasn’t calling for a fix.
I agree, I’ve always said that ‘Train Fever 2’ will be something to look forward to. This games major flaw is the core and that means a whole new game, shame because its great fun until it grinds to a halt.
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