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A sketching/planning tool would be hugely useful. I’ve already taken to taking a zoomed out, overhead screengrab with contours turned on, bringing it into Paint, and drawing lines all over it to plan out my hillclimb routes.
Also, I would really like to be able to draw out multi-node sections of track, and drag each node around before committing to building the entire piece.
I would guess at them being passengers that have gone beyond the 20-minute tolerance level, and decided to give up their journey (and presumably jump out the window of a moving train, and trek home through the wilderness). Still, if it is down to that, it shouldn’t really be happening. It should be a guideline, and once a passenger sets off on a journey, they see it through even if it takes a little longer.
Hmm, that was going to be my next question. I would have thought that map generation scripts would have been one of the most obvious things to open up to modding. At the very least in a limited sense – like changing number ranges around… even if they didn’t let you get at the actual height-field data and such directly.
Hopefully they’ll open it up more soon, either to modders, or by giving us some of these options directly in the new-game menu.
Haven’t really had a chance to play yet, as I’m stuck at work, but had a quick look at the map generation.
There appears to be a significant difference in town density depending on map size.
Small (4x4km) typically seems to generate around 5 towns, giving ~3.2 square km per town. (square root gives roughly ~1.8km distance between each town)
Medium (8x8km) generates around 14 towns, giving ~4.5 sq km/town. (~2.1km between towns)
Large (16x16km) generates around 25 towns, giving a plentiful ~10.2 sq km/town. (~3.2km between towns)
…so it seems if you want your towns to have breathing room for some nice long distance routes between them, go for the large maps.
Even on large and hilly, it feels like there’s a few too many towns conveniently located along wide swathes of flatland alongside too many rivers, for my personal tastes. So I’d still love to have the option to specify these things in the map generation.
For now though, I think I’ll be playing on Large 🙂
Have to see how the game handles it, but I’ve heard the same as others have mentioned – freight and passengers will plan their own routes, and if the quickest route to a destination involves taking two different trains, they will.
If it genuinely works that way, it should be a rather elegant system. If your two-stage route isn’t being utilized, it’ll be down to not having planned it efficiently enough, or not having realised that a better alternative exists, rather than from not having configured it correctly.
About the only idea I’d like to see is something like an engineering mode, where you can plan out and tweak an entire route before committing to build the project, and maybe then a system whereby the route takes time and resources to actually build.
I don’t bother suggesting it though, as I’m fairly sure not many people are going to care much for the idea, and I don’t think it’s likely the developers will ever go down that route.
Outside of that, I’m not particularly interested in additional vehicles or such. I would sooner they carried on fleshing out the existing game systems, filled out the map generation with more interesting features, and maybe worked in some new terrain types.
I’m not really concerned what they add, provided it enhances the game, so I like to talk over what I think will and won’t do that.
I’m interested in this particular topic as I actually think the idea of having international airports and shipping ports would be a great addition to the game, and I’d like to see a discussion develop over how best that might work (as implemented badly, it could be pretty boring and throwaway, while I feel it has the potential to be a really engaging and unique feature if it was handled well).
I’m not posting “Don’t implement it”… I’m posting “I don’t think it would work very well if it were implemented in a particular way, and could use some serious consideration as to how best to fit it into the theme and feel of the game”
Given that the developers’ time is presumably limited, and that features such as these would require significant development, then if they chose to implement this they would be doing so to the exclusion of something else, something that might serve to expand the game in a better way.
Either way, seeing as both possibilities are entirely academic at this point, as they haven’t actually asked anybody for their input on what they should focus future development on, then we all stand to gain or lose just about nothing as of this moment. I’m not denying you your beloved planes and ships just by engaging in a discussion about them.
Again with “Please stop talking”. Why? In what way does it harm you any more to read a constructive discussion on the matter than it harms me if they implement planes and ships?
Just because you don’t agree with one side of what’s being discussed, doesn’t mean you have any right to silence a discussion. Try being open-minded rather than just shutting out anything that doesn’t reiterate what you’ve already decided you want.
I know full well that the game isn’t a slavishly accurate model of reality, and I’m not suggesting that any addition to it needs to be. All I’m suggesting is that going by my own personal taste, I don’t feel that planes and cargo ships fit the feel of the game as it is currently. My personal feeling was always that planes didn’t fit terribly well even in Transport Tycoon, as they just ended up feeling like a rather one-dimensional game element next to train and road travel, and looked rather preposterous once you got a fleet of concorde buzzing around like a swarm of jittery bees. It felt a little out of place to me in a game that largely threw away the slightest notion of physical accuracy, and was pretty majorly abstract for the sake of gameplay. If it didn’t feel particularly well there, I can only imagine it would feel even more out of place in Train Fever, which for all that it isn’t a perfectly realistic simulation, is undeniably a lot closer to reality than Transport Tycoon ever attempted to be.
That’s my feeling on the matter. I don’t ask you to stop baseless discussion of a feature that I personally feel wouldn’t be a constructive use of the developers’ time, because I entirely respect your right to engage in this discussion. Feel free to carry on. (But perhaps try to shift your discussion over to debating how such a feature might be best implemented, rather than focusing on shutting up anyone else who attempts to do so)
What’s the deal with “Households, needs planks, steel and plastic to produce goods”? Sounds like something factories would do… I presume “Households” is a bit of a mis-translation?
Lovely to see such a healthy mod community is already forming. It seems you can always depend on train-enthusiasts to step up when it comes to game modding. I guess they are the original-and-best kind of geek 🙂
I agree with your suggestions theuros… I suggested much the same. I think having airports and shipping ports treated as industries/destinations, rather than as “stations” for your own planes and ships, would make a lot of sense within the scope of Train Fever. I’m all for that as a future development.
From a pure flavour point of view, it would be really nice to have small propeller aircraft, helicopters, tourist boats/sailing boats, etc, etc… but I fear that most of those things would only really make sense as flavour elements – they wouldn’t meaningfully contribute to a mass-transit or cargo transport network. Commuter boats and canal barges could have some meaningful utility, but even then I think it would be fairly niche, and so it would be understandable if it wasn’t an important focus for the developers.
That comes back to the major difference between Train Fever and Transport Tycoon.
Transport Tycoon could have planes and ships, specifically because it had a completely nonsensical and arbitrary definition of scale. The distance from one side of the map to the other can vary from a few kilometers to a few hundred kilometers, depending on what you used as a reference.
While Transport Tycoon is obviously a huge inspiration, one of the main ways that Train Fever departs from it is by having a consistent and reasonably realistic definition of scale. That pretty much precludes meaningful air and sea transport, even if you somehow managed to increase the map size up to 64km. Neither make much sense until you hit >500km or more.
Also, stop throwing around the “hate” word. Nobody is spreading hate. The first thing I stated was that I’m not against them being implemented. I’m just engaging in a meaningful discussion about the merits and drawbacks to it, and suggesting some cases where I personally feel it *would* make sense and fit within the scope of the game. If you want planes and ships added into the game with no consideration for context, game balance or scope, then that’s where modders will surely cater to your wishes sooner or later.
If you want the developers to add these things, it makes a lot more sense to actually give it some sensible consideration and tailor your suggestions to fit into the scope and style of the game, rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and trying to silence anyone that challenges your suggestions by telling everyone they’re spreading hate.
I’m all for them adding in more points of interest between towns. I think the farmland could use some major work, so that it integrates better with the terrain, has roads, paths, streams and hedges bordering the fields, along with occasional farm-buildings and maybe the odd rural village.
That’s sort of a different matter though… I think in gameplay terms, it could provide a really satisfying challenge to have greater distances between towns/cities, and it shouldn’t require any significant redesign of the game or even any significant alteration of the map generation script to achieve. I presume there’s an internal variable to set or limit the number of randomly generated towns already… I just propose that they let us set it ourselves 🙂
I’m not against planes, I just don’t see the point of bothering to implement them. If they were implemented correctly, they’d be a perpetual loss-maker, as they only make the remotest sense transporting over international/intercontinental distances. Domestic flights between neighbouring towns never exactly turned into any kind of industry in the real world.
Ships/boats are a mixed bag. Earlier in the game, canals and cargo barges would actually make some sense, as that has some precident in reality… but also in reality, the collapse of that particular industry was caused by the rise of trains and motor-vehicles, so it would at best add some early flavour to the game in a similar way that the horse-and-cart does currently.
Modern-day commuter-boats like the Thames Clipper make decent sense for Train Fever. They’re still dwarfed by train and car travel, but at least it would be relevant on the scale the game deals with. I’d gladly see those added, as I think it would add some nice extra character to the game.
Large scale container shipping suffers the same issues as air travel… it only really makes sense on an international/intercontinental scale, where the relatively low speed is offset by the sheer vastness of the capacity. It’s a scale of economy that wouldn’t make any sense inside the scope of a Train Fever map.
The idea of having airports and shipping ports as game-generated industries seems a much better idea to me. In the early 1900’s, you could start out with a bunch of scattered small airfields, and the ones you feed with services could gradually expand in a similar way to towns, until they turn into major international hubs. In modern times, one or two major ports would require massive capacity passenger and cargo services to connect them to up to cities, and could be considered vital growth motivators. The late game could end up with a significant focus on providing efficient international links. It would also be rather neat to have maps with a section of coastline, along with some river estuaries/natural harbours/cliffs, etc. Weaving train lines around the coast of a hilly map like Brunel did in South West England could be rather satisfying 🙂
