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They need to make serious changes soon or it is going to fade away.
There are too many outstanding serious frustrations to really keep a large player base engaged. That’s entirely their problem. If they could address some of the major game issues like:- Collisions with track/roads
- roads over rails (and their upgrades)
- industry diversification (let cities take other items)
- station upgrades
- dynamic track choice
- vehicle replacement management
They could turn this into a pretty significant long running game and series. There are a few more things beyond this, but I think if these things were fixed it would remove the majority of issues most people have with the game and it would be easier to recommend it, promote it, and get into it.
Personally I considered doing some modifications related to Korea, since I’m living here, but I can’t justify the investment with the current state of the game.
There are several download links in this thread, but none of them look like the final one. Where is that?
Wait, what? So your complaint isn’t actually about a game mechanic, it’s just about the fact that you are unable to make money? Try turning the game difficulty down then. If you can’t make money on trains on easy then I can assure you that is your problem, not the game’s.
I’ve got complaints a mile long about game mechanics, bugs, and a generally poorly developed product. Balance is only one of them.
Bingo. They programmed the maintenance of trains, without considering what would happen if someone went against the intended design of the game and used a train of buses across the map. But trains are not so expensive that it is hard to use them. In my games they are usually the primary money earners, because I use them and don’t exploit an unintended consequence of the game’s design.
No, they didn’t. I don’t use a “train of buses” (whatever that means) and trains full of people and goods constantly lose money. I have no intercity buses at all. Those two scenarios aren’t remotely related.
Regardless of whether it’s possible, the game clearly wasn’t INTENDED to be played without trains and it requires you to go out of your way to not use them. And I think people who complain that trains aren’t profitable at all should either turn their difficulty setting down or learn to play properly. That would be an actual issue if it existed, but it doesn’t. Most of the best games that I, and other people, love are not entirely 100% balanced, they have exploitable game mechanics in them and if you’re an idiot who wants to “win” an open ended game then sure you can go ahead and do stuff that is counter to logic and counter to the game design. But they’re issues that one never has to encounter at all unless one actually tries and I’m only against fixing them because it’s been my experience that companies tend to lose sight of what is actually fun about the game in doing so. If they can fix it in such a way that it doesn’t negatively affect those who aren’t deliberately exploiting the game mechanics then have at it, go ahead and fix it. Otherwise, learn some self control.
And yes, exploiting included game mechanics, what the hell else would you exploit.
It doesn’t “go out of your way” to not use them at all. You start with a blank slate. You can certainly only use trams and trucks for almost the entire length of the game. Its not like you have to go in delete a bunch of existing trains or disable them in order to not use them.
Trains aren’t balanced, full stop. Maintenance costs aren’t on par with the full cost of buying a new train. It doesn’t even make sense.
As far as exploits go, exploits in games refer to bugs or the results of unintended designs. Vehicles aren’t a bug (other than all the bugs related to vehicles like how they teleport around when you upgrade a road or lay a road or put down a stop, etc) nor does it seem the mechanics of vehicles includes anything unintended.
An unintended design would be for example the designers making a merchant sell product A in at a price of 2 with unlimited quantity and forgetting they had a merchant somewhere who would buy the same product at price of 3, which would allow the player to generate unlimited income through trading. That would be an exploit that wasn’t bug related.
as far as 100% balance goes, I’d settle for something about 0% which is what they have now.
It has mod support
But in all seriousness, crossmr is not wrong… but for some reason, I still enjoy playing it, even with the current issues.
How long that lasts remains to be seen though.I agree with most things in the 1-8 list, but perhaps tolerate it a little more, no disrespect intended there.
Some of the issues would be a lot less frustrating if an undo button or the ability to plot multiple sections of track at once before committing to the build was implemented, but some can’t be fixed like this.. such as bulldozing a station in order to replace it, only to find a ‘collision’ now exists and you have to bulldoze 10m worth of buildings around it.. even for the same size station.
At the end of the day though, I would love to see this game become a success.
Even mod support is flawed. A great industry system could be made, if it wasn’t hard coded that the cities only took “goods”. The game has potential, but the devs really need to step it up immediately or its going to fade into obscurity. It doesn’t have much time left before the new car smell wears off and people really start forgetting about this game any future patches barely get seen.
Obviously the core gameplay works, that is laying tracks and roads, running trains/road vehicles, growing cities etc. We can discuss details such as the choice and number of transportable goods and ease of track laying. Honestly I don’t think we can find much common ground if you don’t agree with this.
How could I agree with it? All of those things are failures. Laying track is a pain in the neck. The collisions, bridge issues, etc are ridiculous. It’s so bad you can delete a tiny section of track and be unable to replace it because of “collisions” even if you put it in the exact same spot.
Roads – you can’t lay them over track. Upgrades pointless don’t work half the time. Sometimes you can’t use the upgrade tool to lay tram track on a road (while using the same size road) but if you hit the tram tool it will place it. Failure.
Running trains/vehicles – failure. No spacing controls means micromanaging the system in order to get things spaced out properly, running them includes replacing them and paying for them. Running costs and the terrible replacement system are ridiculous. Growing cities, another failure. They spawn randomly with little sense or thought. Cities end up a mess.
etc.
So again., what does the game get right?
I’m not saying that the game is perfect or that it’s not missing anything important (such as automatic replacement). I’m merely objecting to your choice of words. Unpolished, or even unfinished? Yes. A failure at all levels? No.
Then I’ll repeat the question:
What does the game get right? If you can’t list anything that it got right then it is a failure at every level. It fails at trains, vehicles, city, economics, track laying and design, everything. At release this game even failed at performance and basic file management.
Unpolished and unfinished? These are words used to try and soften what a failure this is. They are gross understatements.
Can’t agree with this. The trains vs. road traffic balance is not very good at the moment, especially in the cargo business. These balance issues are something that can only be fixed via through testing by a large amount of players. Almost every game suffers from the same issues, just look at any major release during the last years. For example Civ 5 was horribly unbalanced at release and still I’d hardly call it a failure at every level.
Well then let’s list the things it’s good at:
1. replacing vehicles? no
2. Laying track? Collisions! or drawing the track from A to B Fails (2 ends of lines) but B to A suddenly works? or Bridge pillars
3. city growth? Random doesn’t work for everything cities become a mess
4. Upgrading roads? Not even close. More collisions!
5. laying road? can we say rail crossing?
6. Scheduling? Can we say tedious micromanaged spacing?
7. maps? what little randomness there is is in fact extremely little.
8. industry? One final good for all industries? Awesome!Please tell us even one thing this game does well. Balance is only the tip of the iceberg and trying to handwave this with “every major release” no.. that’s apologist speak. Every major release is not in the state that this is. While most major releases have bugs of varying degrees, they usually still do some things right and well. This does nothing right at any point.
There is no major problem here. It’s your decision whether you use trains or you exploit the game and use just trams and buses. If you want to use trains because you like trains, then use trains. I always use trains.
Exploit the game by using an included feature? That doesn’t even make sense. The game was simply not well thought out at all. It just about fails from one end to the other at every level.
#trainfeverfanboylogic
Different signals do different thing. One kind of signal was supposed to only block the segment in front. The other kind was meant to block all the track in front of the signalled area. One would allow a dynamic bypass, the other would cause the train to wait or seek a totally different track.
I just keep in mind that local city traffic means nothing.
City-to-City trafic is a key to get money. So i use local lines as a feeder to the long lines only. My local lines end on the long range station. Therfore I make local line as forth and back, never circular. I need to transfer people from their location to the long travel port. If they need to go buy a bread to their local shop, I dont care. If they need to buy a bread in the shop on the other side of map, well, thats interesting
Local city traffic means a lot. It’s income, you can get some decently profitable lines in city if done well, and they feed city to city traffic and deliver it as well. With the 20 minute rule you don’t only need to get the person on the train, but they need to get to their destination. Good local traffic means more change for them to hit their destination and take the route again, which means greater city to city traffic.
The problem is the running cost. The running cost isn’t realistic in this game. There was a thread here about modifying it, and I modified it so that lines cost more to build but cheaper to run. It needs to be tweaked, but it certainly makes the game much more realistic and fun.
Trains don’t cost as much to run in a year as they do to buy a new train. That’s ludicrous.
