Transport Fever officially announced!

[MagSun]

Sorry for digging this discussion up out of its slumber. This is about my story with cargo transport:

I’ve started a hard game a few days ago to earn the achievements, first of all “Truck Fever”. I made good money and was loan-free after ~3 years and had ~10mil after the first 15 years, using only 3 profitable cargo truck lines (1 supplier, 1 factory, 2-3 cities). So in that time, I could scale the transportation effort with single vehicles to perfectly match the needs.

At the high of 50 mil (achievement earned), I decided to switch to cargo train lines. So I built the first line (Supplier A, Factory B, City C). To push the production I added 2 more lines with 2 buying cities each (Factory -> City A -> City B), raising production need to ~250 (nice!). But no train line made any money. After switching to Supplier A -> Factory B in the supplying line, that made a plus ~ 100k a year, while the other “selling” lines made a minus of 500 to 1 mil a year.

“If hard is too hard, don’t play hard”!?

Yes and no. If the goal of “Train Fever” is to play only with trucks, the game failed somehow (I love the lines I had on easy, though).

With trucks I can fine adjust the transportation effort, having

1. no wait times on “load full” (which then regulates everything nicely)
2. no jams (a jam is an indicator, you have that too many trucks on the road for that line)
3. no overloaded (and thereby lost) cargo (overloaded cargo means too few vehicles on that line)

With trains, you have to plan in advance and have to be so careful, how many wagons you put on how many individual trains. You make losses in the first few years, that’s right. But the adjustment is so poor and I could never break even.

With too little cargo on a station I could

1. Run empty but more often (increasing the running cost, as moving trains cost more than trains in depots and stations)
2. Wait until fully loaded (reducing the possible transportation effort calculation, making the line less attractive in the future [cargo volume * frequency with wait => frequency+?])

So both ways are not optimal, but production now raises, so my single train (line) needs improvement in the cargo volume (while loosing ~500k per year, as one way is almost empty). I could

1. Buy an additional train (doubling the running cost to match that small +% more cargo to move at this moment)
2. Send the train to the depot, add 1-2 wagons, send it back on the track (reducing the transportation effort calculation on that track for missing a) supplies and/or b) consumers, reducing the production on all involved industries by quite a lot. At least, if you hit the re-calculation between month, which is very likely, as you cannot control when your train hits the depot).

TL;DR

In my experience, you cannot earn money from cargo train lines in hard difficulty, supplying more than 1 city as

1. the running costs will always eat up the income
2. you will never be able to fine tune the transport volume by adding or removing single wagons

Even with pushing the production over 200, the supplying line did not make a great amount of money, financing the selling lines.

Trucks however make money, even one way empty, than their running cost. Even “distribution lines” from your supplier (i.e. oil rigs) to nearby cities pay off, while for trains….they don’t.

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