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Ciao, io di segnali non sono granché esperto e la maggior parte delle volte raddoppio semplicemente i binari delle tratte e metto dei segnali a senso unico cosi da poter mettere qualunque numero di treno su una linea senza problemi. Ci sono dei tutorial su youtube, e se non ho capito male, occorre mettere dei segnali solo prima di un congiungimento tra binari e non servono invece prima di una separazione .
I think that developers should better explain the 20 minutes rule.
The only thing I can think of in your case is that if you have more than two stops on the line (as I imagine from the screenshot), then the frequency number you get is referred to the total trip (back and forth). However, customers are not forced to use the whole line, but may hop in a stop and hop out the next. In that case, the travel time between two stops (in one direction) can be under 20 minutes and satisfy the 20 minutes rule.
By the way: why in your calculations you get a different waiting time for the different stops ?
1. I think it is only distance (euclidean distance, not actual distance travelled… so it is better to have straight than curvy lines )
2. I think people choose randomly four destination: 1 residential, 1 leisure, 1 work, 1 commercial and travel back and forth between residential and the other… e.g. R–>L–>R–>W–>R–>C–>… I’m not sure if after one cycle all destination LWC destination are redrawn.
3 No idea… can we put cars on trains ??? If you mean waggons, you can put as many as you want, but speed and acceleration decrease because of the added weight. In addition you should not have trains longer than station.
4. Alas you need to destroy the station !!! We asked developers many times to fix this, but they did not.
5. You can upgrade at a certain time with high speed lines, but if the limit depends on curvatures the only way you can upgrade your lines is by rebuilding them.
In that way, I made small profits for the first 30 years or so, then started to make rising profits and was over 20 millions per year in the ending game.
If I have the time to make another run, I would probably start earlier with trains and don’t bother with intercity busses. I may also try a more aggressive expansion and connect more cities: even though more lines could cannibalize revenues and create more possibilites for shorter routes, they should also foster a larger growth which I hope could balance the less efficiency on concurrent lines.
Could anyone else share his strategies ?
I only find it interesting to play on hard difficulty and usually aim for 1 billion before year 2000.To make things not too hard I typically play on somewhat flat maps, and medium because of game performance issues.
The main difficulty is expanding at the beginning: different strategies can be employed and I’m unsure which one is the best. I often start in this way:
1a) connect cities with busses (busses are quicker to set up and get things going and promote city growth than train).
1b) connect a few industries that are well placed. Pay attention that well placed does not mean close (!) but instead the farther they are within the the 20 minutes limit. I always aim first at steel mills because they have two imputs rather than one. Somewhat Surprisingly raw materials seem to be more profitable than finished goods.
2a) when cash is somewhat stable, replace some bus lines with train lines. I typically try to build lines that connect more cities (A-B-C-D-C-B-A) so that my passengers can travel farther (revenues increase with distance) and try to build lines as straight as I can (revenues are calculated by euclidean distance I think, so the most efficient lines are the most efficient). I also build station near the residential area (green). I put 2-3 trains per line to allow a short enough frequency (typically 4-6 minutes) to allow passengers to go farther within the 20 minutes limit.
2b) it is important that you build a good intracity transport system to feed your train lines. I often build two circular lines going through all districts in the two direction and put enough busses or trams to get 1-2 minutes frequency. Straight lines also appear to be working, and maybe even better. In this case I try to build one line going from some district to residential/station to other district and back (e.g. industry –> commercial –> residential/station –> leisure –> residential/station –> commercial –> industry).
With time the costs of the new models is increasing, but so is their capacity, speed and power…
3a) I tend to reduce the number of busses/trams in cities. I also tend to rearrange the stops and make them more distant so as to not slow busses/tram too much. These lines typically lose money but they are compensated by huge profits on train lines.
3b) With faster transport it is important to make your lines longer (but not competing between themselves) to profit from faster transport over longer distances within the 20 minutes. Here it may be useful to find some far away raw material imputs that can be connected to an industry that can be connected to several cities to increase demand and thus allow long and long-distance cargo trains. If they are somewhat straight I may connect iron to coal to steel mill on the same line and put two trains with both types of waggons. Generally with cargo I tend not to put too many trains and instead aim for longer trains.
This strategy generally works, but it is not optimal. Last time I played American DLC and got around 700 millions before year 2000. I think I expanded too slowly in the beginning and did not profit for city growh as I had only separate passenger lines connecting 4-5 cities, but not connecting linges among them.
Thank you for your insight.
In reality I used to use one (or sometimes two) back and forth city bus lines. I recently tried the circular ones, but I’m unsure which one is better.
Back and forth lines have the advantage of requiring less lines (one line cover both directions, circular lines require at least two lines per city, but circular lines may allow for shorter trips between zones as one can always take the direction that optimizes travel time (in your image from station to north part of city one must do all the trip, with circular lines it could go quite directly), but I am not really sure as back and forth lines can run more straight and you can probably have higher frequencies with the same number of busses.
An interesting thing is that when made back&forth lines I made them a little differently than you in that I often started from one district (e.g industry) pass through residential/station and end in another district (e.g. leisure). Since citizens always go back and forth from residential district to the other ones (that’s what the developers told if I understood it correctly, please correct me if it is untrue), in that way trips from residential to other district are shorter.
I also make much less stops than you, especially late in the game. I often have 6-10 stops per line (that makes 12-20 stops per city). I am not sure what is better, but with more stop trips are much longer as busses must continuously stop and restart. This also raises frequency. On the other hand you reduce walking time, so it is hard to find a balance.
I have not really tried to dedicate lines to each district. This could lead to much better coverage (other players claim to easily achiev usage rate of 90% or more, while I usually reach 70-80%) but it also may need more busses and this maintenance costs.
By the way, you should definitively try hard difficulty (if you like the business aspect more than building a nice looking transport network). The other modes simply don’t give any interesting challenges. Even with hard it is not that difficult to make some profit, but you have to manage it with some efficiency.
Are your bus lines profitable even in hard difficulty ?
Is it better a single bidirectional line than two circular lines (one per sense of direction) ?
How many stops do you usually place ?
Which usage rate are you able to achieve ?
Just for comparison, in my last game with double circular routes on hard and USA DLC I manage to service around 75-85% of passengers but after the beginning where I made some little profit with the first horse cars, then I started to make a little loss around 20-40K per line with the newer busses. Are you able to achieve better results with your strategy ?
I also have difficulties in running bus or tram lines at a profit (hard difficulty) and I have not yet understood what is the best layout, so I’m really interested in answers from others.
I nevertheless try to give you two elements to think about:
1) It seems that one bus line mostly goes in the industry district. Passengers always go from home to the three other districts. This line could not attract much people, or if it did, it does not make them travel longer (fares depend on distance). By contrast the tram line also passes through the commercial and leisure districts, which may attract more people. I would advise you (hope I’m not wrong) to better connect the residential area with the other districts: in your city you seem to have left out the green part of the city…
2) It seems that your bus and tram limes somewhat overlap each other. That means that the lines could cannibalize passengers among them, with passengers choosing the fastest line to go to their destination. If your tram line has higher frequency or is faster (it seems to be a more direct line to some spots in the city), passengers could prefer it.
Ich denke ich habe dasselbe Probleme. Versuchen Sie mith hoheren texturen. (sorry for my German… try setting high textures)
I almost always build a double track. In reality I go that because I’m somewhat lazy… Infrastructure building and manintenance costs are small compared to train maintenance costs therefore the more constant flow of the trains should be able to compensate the extra infrastructure costs.
If you are great with signalling and can balance passing loops so that the trains are evenly spaced out and in a constant flow (and this means adapting your passing loops with each train you add and probably works only if you have the same type of trains) you should be able to get slightly better results.
Again I don’t think that the difference would be so huge given the low infrastructure cost, but over 150 years you can probably avoid spending several millions in building infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance.
Thank you very much… this is probably the first time that I might have understood train fever signals (I hope) 🙂
I even saw a few video tutorials on Youtube but they did not explain it …
@isidoro Thank you very much, your explanation makes perfect sense to me. I’m just unsure about not putting the signal on the exiting one directional track: wouldn’t it imply that as long as the train is on that exiting track (until it reaches the station) the crossing would be blocked for the other trains ? Or does the game only consider the common portion of tracks (that is the crossing itself) ?
