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I wouldn’t call TF a “badly planned and alpha game”. It far from perfect and need some polishing, but it still remains a very enjoyable train-builder/management game. I don’t regret any cent I’ve spent to purchase this game, and I’m once again expressing my support to Urban Games for all the efforts and patches to improve TF.
The comparison I’m doing with Cities Skyline is to see how Train Fever could evolve over time, through patches or for the next version, not to do a direct comparison to see which game is better 😉
Two different focuses, yes … but also many similarities in the gameplay/interface.
I have been playing with City Skylines for the past 3 evenings, and there are some very interesting features that I would really like to have while playing Train Fever :
– CS allows you to upgrade/downgrade any road without limitation. If you put a larger road, the surrounding houses are destroyed, but rebuilt automatically
– CS allows you to destroy houses/buildings to lay out new roads/rail with one click. It’s much user-friendlier than in TF.
– CS comes with zero “main connection” restriction. You can even destroy the main highway connecting your city to the outside world. If you don’t rebuild it, your city does not expand properly … but at least you are able to improve the roads or destroy/rebuild everything in an easy way that TF player can only dream of
– Creating new transportation lines is 100x easier in CS than TF (of course, with much less options as the game focus is not on precise transportation plans)
– Generally speaking, the layout of any new road/zone/train/metro/bridge is 10000x easier in CS than in TF. You don’t get blocked every 5 minutes because of terrain elevation, rail/road crossings. You don’t loose millions of cash trying to figure out how to build a goddamn bridge over a small river.
Train Fever is certainly the nicest transport tycoon I’ve every played, and one of the best. I really appreciate the way UG tries to improve the game over time, the free DLC, the modding community …
… but Cities Skylines is by far the best city-builder ever made, with a sense of user friendliness that send TF back 10 years in the past.
I don’t say this to criticize TF or UG. I’ve really enjoyed playing TF, and I will certainly continue to do so in the future (when I’ll switch back to TF after hours on CS 🙂 … but CS is certainly the best example of what kind of improvements should be done to TF or any futur TF2 to raise TF level from “a nice good transport tycoon-type game” to “the best transport-tycoon game ever” 🙂
One major difference that we should not forget about Cities Skylines is that it’s not their first game. The game is coming after Cities in Motion 1 and 2. I haven’t played CiM2 but I used to play to CiM1 and it was crappy as hell.
All we can wish to Urban Game is to have the same kind of approach than Paradox and have TF evolve over time to something as well finished as Cities Skylines, with tons of attention to details and no major bugs registered upon release of the game (something EA should also look at if they want to release another SimCity in the future).
I agree : at least we have to give credit to the devs for listening to customer’s complaints and reacting so quickly. It’s rare enough in the gaming industry.
I had the same issue while trying to play on my laptop. I simply followed the game’s advice and installed the latest driver available for my graphic card. And what a surprise : problem solved 🙂
To be really honest, I’d rather have paid 5-10€ for a complete DLC than getting a free but incomplete DLC. And yes, playing in a US map with US-style landscape and french street/town names somehow ruins the immersion. It’s not a major issue, but it’s something that could have been easily avoided.
Having said this, I still don’t regret having purchased Train Fever, and I’m eagerly waiting for future patches to solve these small issues. This is especially true with Urban Games as I know that they are listening to customer’s complaints and trying to improve things over time.
I tested the DLC for 5 minutes, noticed that all the town/street name were in French, as with the regular maps.
I found some Mods to change the Town names to US, street names to New Zealand (the closest I could find to US street names) … and noticed that all new maps, including European style would now be with US/NZ names !!!!
I don’t understand why it was not possible to assign local names to a DLC. This should not be too hard to program.
Once I noticed this, I stopped playing the DLC. The gameplay is basically the same than on a European maps …
10 days to go until Cities Skyline release date …
I fully agree with you. Even if the autoreplace solution makes the game much easier, I have exactly the same problem when a new vehicule is available (I have 35 bus lines and 20 truck lines).
Another option would be useful : autoreplace to the new type immediately after changing the vehicle type.
At the moment, I change the vehicle type in the menu, then if I want to switch immediately to the new type, I have to select the interval to 25%, wait for all vehicles of the line to be changed, put the interval back to 100%.
Once this is done, you still have to check that the number of vehicles is still in line with requirements. This is especially true for truck lines where you need less and less trucks with each generation of vehicle to get the same service.
I’ve just read the the text attached to today’s build. Who said that the developpers were not listening to user’s complaints ?
Two suggestions about load/save screens :
– When selecting which file should be loaded, would it be possible to have a quick description of the content of the savegmae ? Things like current game year, money, map size and type
Idealy, if we could also give a name to each map …
– When saving the games, it would be nice to see all the previously saved games, to replace an existing save or to have a personnal way of sorting the savegames.
Personnally, the only crash I experienced with TF was right after installing a graphic mod. I removed this specific mod immediately and never had any additionnal crash since.
Otherwise, the game is running smoothly on my computer, without noticable lag, except very late in the game when I have many train/bus/truck lines. This has been considerably reduced with the last patch.
I stopped playing the game after the Xmas patch (the one that introduced the Main connection feature). I have started again this week-end to test the last patch and the game looks playable again to me. I have played several hours on a new map without being blocked by the Main Connection issue.
There are still many things that can be improved in the game, but it’s not as bad or unplayable as written in some posts above. Looking at the continuous rate of patches, I’m confident that the game will continue to improve.
Another simple solution : let the users destroy/rebuild the main connections while the game is Paused, and let the game resume only after all main connections are restored.
This would enable the players to update roads or lay track over existing and/or updated roads, without letting the cheat of cutting the main connections persist.
