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I’m all for them addressing some of the larger shortfalls of Train Fever by aiming towards a sequel rather than attempting to patch it into the existing game. Train Fever is fantastic as it is, but it could very obviously benefit from some deep core changes in the game design, and that’s not really possible on an existing game. Working on a sequel that takes the original game as a base to build upon would mean they could potentially make far more headroom quicker than if they try to tweak the existing code.
What would really make this a great direction to take would be if they offered that sequel to those who bought the original game at a reduced price – expansion-pack prices – around the €12-15 mark. That would reward fans for buying into their earlier, less polished work, while still freeing them up to make the more sweeping changes it sounds like they’d like to make.
Well, it would be more if every highstreet shop you visited required you to sign up for an authentication card, and required that you use that card every time you wanted to enter the shop, and every shop uses a different card… and they all got burgled all the time anyway, so the only people it was inconveniencing are paying customers.
The key thing I find with Steam is that it absolutely minimized inconvenience, makes patching and updating completely transparent, offers a bunch of other useful features, and actually functions as a reasonably effective copy protection system. Plus it’s a single solution accessible to all developers, that almost all games can be accessed through.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most.
Glad I could help! There’s no demo to try out at the moment unfortunately. There very well could be in time, but for now it would be a dead end asking about it, as I’m sure they’d announce it through official channels the moment there was news.
If you want a comprehensive run-down of all nVidia and AMD graphics cards, check out the lists on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
– That pretty much lists hard-numbers without any sales rubbish and confusion. Probably the most straightforward way to compare relative performance is the “Processing Power GFLOPS – Single Precision” column.
I’m not too clued up on AMD cards these days, but typically for nVidia, the #50 GTX and #60 GTX cards tend to be the sweetspot for price/performance/power-consumption. Anything #40 and less will usually be underpowered for most games, and anything #70 and above will be a huge power-hungry expensive beast 🙂
The 750 and 750Ti are the current sweet-spot of choice… very efficient, reasonably cheap, and will run most games well.
There’s no point saying how much weight a train can pull, because it can pull many different weights at different max speeds, accelerations, etc…
What would be useful is if, as you added wagons to an engine, it would give you feedback on what the current maximum speed and acceleration will be, on flat, moderate, and heavy uphill inclines. Even that I’m sure would need to be an approximation, but it would be good to get a general idea of how a train will perform at a glance.
It’s possible you might be able to get it to run, but far from guaranteed, as Intel’s OpenGL support is apparently fairly flakey.
If you *did* manage to get it running… the best I’ve heard about the experience is “playable”… and I get the feeling that’s at the “barely” end of the spectrum.
Basically, you need a GeForce or a Radeon for any reasonable gaming.
That 350w power supply might be a problem, depending on what brand it is. If it’s a reasonable named brand, then maybe try picking up one of the new nVidia Maxwell-based cards – GeForce GTX 750 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti – which have power requirements of 55 and 60W respectively, and so won’t even require additional power connectors. They’ll also be fairly cheap, and will run most games at decent settings.
My passenger train services ended up being profitable almost straight away, once I built them. Admittedly, until I got the first decent trams on the scene, the local bus services were barely breaking even, but I took that as a reasonable loss-leader for being feeder networks for the intercity train service.
True, a couple of cargo routes does grease the wheels, and you probably won’t earn enough from local bus services alone to afford your first train service, or even to replace the buses when they become obsolete, but if you plan them well, even the first train services can be a big earner. You do have to be meticulously careful about ever sending the trains into the depot though, as having them out of action for even a few months can cause a financial setback that can take a couple of years to recover from.
I actually found going for the Penny Pincher achievement helped me immensely. You just aren’t in a position to weather much loan-interest early on… even the initial 30k per year stings… taking on any more debt can seal your fate from day one. Waiting until you build up the funds for an expansion is almost always better than being impatient and taking out more loan.
Have you let the new train line run for a good 4-5 years before comparing numbers? Train lines take a long time to fill out, as the population needs to adapt to the new transport options, and it will take a while for the numbers to build up. You can never compare directly soon after you build a new link… the simulation needs time to settle in to a new pattern.
Well, I can report that Hard mode is entirely possible to succeed with.
After a couple of test games to get my bearings, I started my first full-playthrough game, set to Large, Hilly, Hard difficulty, starting from 1850, and going for the “Penny Pincher (hard)” achievement, so limiting myself to the initial 1.2M loan.
I’m now at 1935, and bringing in a health 3-4 million per year. The first 30-40 years were far and away the hardest – I had to plan absolutely meticulously, didn’t introduce a single train until about 15 years in, and even then, had to be extremely careful laying track with minimal landscaping, and be very careful about setting trains running on the line with a reasonable number of cars.
One thing that can *really* turn the tide, is finding a cargo route where you can make use of both directions of travel. One of the most useful lines in my game was a truck route that took wood from a forest right next to one of my towns, out to sawmill a little further out, and then brought the good back to town using the same truck fleet, without significantly expanding the length of the route… that really brought in some big monies 🙂
Bear in mind that any time you set up a new passenger train service in Hard mode, it’s going to run at a massive loss for at least the first two years, because it will take a while for people to start using the line in large enough numbers… so you have to factor in weathering that loss.
Actually, thinking about it, while the economy should be balanced in such a case, there would be one outstanding benefit of adjusting the passage of time. If you slowed the pace by 4, then sending trains/vehicles to the depot for replacement/servicing would have a quarter the impact on your network… which would be a great improvement. Currently in a Hard difficulty game, sending a single train to the depot at the wrong time early in the game can very easily bankrupt you, and even if you get the timing *just* right, it can take a year or two to recover financially from the disruption! 🙂
It’s a tough trade-off overall… I do agree that time passes too quickly, and that the flow of the game would benefit greatly from vehicles being able to make a more significant number of round-trips inside each year.
The problem is, I’ve already sunk 50 hours into this game, and I’m only half-way through my first full play, having sunk maybe 30 hours into this map alone!
For that reason, I think slowing the passage of time, and accordingly adjusting income levels and such to maintain the ecomonic balance, can only really be feasible if it’s possible to add faster time-multipliers to the game speed. If the game was slowed down by a factor of 4, we’d really need a 16x speedup button.
Otherwise, with a factor of 4 slowdown, it would take 60 hours minimum to get through 200 years, even if you ran the entire game at 4x speedup!
It’s only fast if you feel like you’re expected to replace all your trains with the latest model the moment it becomes available. They still have 30-40 year lifespans, and in economic terms, you would probably be better off getting maximum use out of them to offset the cost of the initial investment.
If you play on Hard difficulty, it becomes rather more important to consider whether it’s actually worth upgrading a vehicle ahead of it’s sell-by-date, as you’ll tend to bankrupt yourself unless you’re constantly working out how to get the most value out of everything you buy.
Mansen – I’ve checked this, and the oldest wagon does not appear to set the age of the entire train for the purposes of maintenance cost… it will correctly total up the individual costs of each train and wagon, and add them together in the vehicle summary. There’s just no way of *seeing* the individual ages/costs.
What it will do is “report” the age of a train as equal to the oldest wagon or engine, which is also tad unhelpful, as you can mistakenly end up replacing an entire train, when there’s only one offending wagon causing it to report that age, and the actual aggregate maintenance cost of the train is actually quite low.
I don’t know if there would be so much to gain from SLI… the game can run pretty well on a moderate GPU, except for the resource loading slowdowns. If you got SLI running, you’d just have an even smoother framerate in the periods between the slowdowns.
I really think the game just needs a bit of tuning. A lot of people are crying foul about the developers’ coding, but honestly, the game engine is pretty damned amazing, and I’m staggered how well it runs already considering the scope of what it’s attempting to do… being able to zoom out to see several kilometers of terrain, and instantly zoom right back in to a different town and see the people and garden fences takes some seriously clever coding. Getting it to do that fairly smoothly even on my laptop blows my mind!
They’re almost there… the performance has already increased hugely since some of the beta lets-play vids from a couple of weeks ago. A few more tweaks and I reckon it’ll run pretty well across the board.
As an interrim solution, and just because I find it more straightforward anyway, I find I tend to wait until I build up the funds to fully purchase/replace a line’s fleet in one go, rather than adding extra vehicles over time. Makes life a hell of a lot easier. Pause, click the send-back-and-sell button, buy a fleet of replacements, assign to line, unpause. Job done.
It’s not an absolute that you have to replace a vehicle the moment its official lifetime is up. I’ve noticed the official lifetime is only really a recommendation… all vehicles will increase their running costs steadily over time, and will continue to after their official sell-by-date. A few years one way or the other isn’t that big a deal. In fact I’ve had horse-carts hang around for over 40 years on occasion, and still remain just about profitable even with +125% running costs 😛
Admittedly, I haven’t actually gotten that far through the game yet, and I’m playing on Hard, so I only have a couple of towns with tram and truck services, and a single train line running between three towns… ~30 trams, ~50 trucks, and 4 trains. I can imagine even with the convenience of quick mass-replacing, it could get unmanagable later in the game when you get up into the multiple-hundreds!
It is a little bit of a conflict of realism vs. abstraction. The assumption is that a train making 3-4 journeys in a year is effectively representative of a real world train making several journeys each day… but then when you have to send the vehicle to a depot, the game treats it completely literally, which manifests in it taking anything up to a year to “service” a single train… when in reality it might only take a couple of days.
On that “representative” timescale, servicing or replacing a train should be something that can happen almost instantaneously, so yeah, while it might make it *appear* a little less realistic, it would ultimately model reality closer to allow you to delete and place trains wherever you want them, as Locomotion did it.
It’s a shame there isn’t a better way to balance the two aspects though, as I rather like the idea of having to send vehicles to depots.
