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To keep it short I agree with you …. and here is why ….
Yes you don’t need a planning tool. What you need is simple, just like in the game Banished that was released rather recently.
In that game you can build without actually building. You just plop down whatever you want to build and put it on pause. In Banished they actually build stuff so “pausing” works. In this game it is built instantly and money taken from you instantly. So you just need a mode where you can build and build and test and tear down and rebuild without loosing any money.
You should even be able to create lines on this future tracks.
And when you are ready one should be able in the line tool window to be able to say “build/realize” what is necessary for the line to function. And then the game builds the track you have planned but only that.
If the game implemented that then there is no need to sit and await you have the money necessary for your next project. Now I have to sit and make plans on paper because planning is very important in this game where you spend hours constructing just to realize “dang!” I forgot about that iron ore mine, now it is on the wrong side of the tracks.
I agree with you we should be able to build without paying money just to see if it will work.
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About me planing. A paper, put down back blobs where the cities are. and draw the rivers roughly dont have to be exact.
Write down where all resources and factories are on the map.
Then draw line between Iron Ore —- Coal mine —- steel mill
and Forest —- saw mill
and Oil —- refinery
And then you take a good look at this and start drawing the lines and try navigate this maze of transport needs, passengers and a mix of goods so that you get each thing on the right side of the track. This result in no optimum straight lines but a railroad that snakes around all these obstacles trying to cut a path on the right side of each and giving space for switching trains so they can change track as necessary.
It looks rather nice compared to the absolute optimal route. If you keep doing that you probably will have to start and build a lot of railroad tunnels or bridges and you get a spaghetti web instead of a railroad system that looks like the blood veins in a body.
I think the road bridges over rail are not very nice looking so I now exclusively dig a tunnel under the rail everytime everywhere. Use the m/n keys.
they did too little research into games already made, and the project leader is not smart he let the NEW product train fewer become inferior to older titles.
yes , the terrain tools have raise lower or flat terrain but they work so slowly it takes a couple of minutes to alter the terrain.
Your suggestion is good. A more agressive system that instantly just flaten the area you point at to the level the area had when you first pressed the LMB and then you just move the mouse around and everything instantly get the same heigh.
I do not know , how many people are working on this project but I think they are not very bright.
first turn on the display of cargo ob the map so you know the site is producing any cargo at all.
Second, you must make it preferable to use your services by collecting goods often enough and transport them faster to the destination then it is by walking.
The game system is bad. No cargo in the world walks by iteself. And the site producing the goods have only that many workers. So it seems the industries are asking unemployed vagabonds to do the carrying and there seems to be an endless supply of them.
That is why I proposed an automatic system setting the frequency value to one that will fullfill the needs of the producers of goods on that line according to how much goods is produced.
An automatic system that purchases vehicles would then have to look at the capacity of the vehicles to figure out how many to buy.
Making an automatic vihicle buy system is not rocket science. Modifying the GUI and painting all new buttons may take a whole day. Writing new automatic purchase system probably only take 2 hours.
Yes I am 50 years old and a systems programmer system admin and network admin , I can see how few lines of code is required.
GUI programming and painting and stuff will take more time then just adding the logic to the game.
Try placing the stationn further from the “old” town. Then build a grid of biggest roads with empty blocks, the game will populating these emty blocks anyway as the town grows. So you get a grid of roads that look like New York instead of some small english village. By placing roads yourself you are sculpting the future look of the city.
The game is so proud that it can have curved roads the automaktic system makes a lot of them and dont seem to build big avenues.
So do it yourself.
And you need to prepare the are with the terrain modeling tools and create flat area. IRL station seldome have any incline it is usually 0%.
Also when you drag lines you see the game carving into the terrain or putting a lot of sand under the tracks and that is because IRL 3% incline is considered steep. Any steeper then that you usually use helper locomotives that need to be attached before the climb if the climmb is steeper then 3%.
yes that is my strateggy now also, no need to wait for the recalled vehicles to arrive all just recall and spawn just as many you recalled. They come out in a bunch packed together and will take them some time to spread out.
And automatic system that has a primary variable called frequency would buy them one at the time to create perfect spacing on the line.
A frquency / time table system would also not let passenger vehicles leave a stop until it is time and would try avoid having them bunch up.
as I said the game should replace old vehicles automatically when that line has surplus money.
There should also be a way to send money from the central budget and boost the lines own budget.
I don’t feel smart when I repetitively sit and click on each vehicle. Things that the game should do automatically.
If I am the CEO or chief engineer / designer I do not take my car and drive down and point at the trains the service people should upgrade. If so I would never have time to do the strategic stuff of planing where the next lines should go or if I am going to shut a line down.
To cope with a bunch of vehicles coming in we would like to be able to build big train scheds with like 8 … 12 … stalls.
This all is very badly implemented. As you say too many clicks.
It should work like this that you
1) specify the frequency on the line. Or set the frequency to automatic. Setting it to automatic the game will then use whatever frequency value is necessary to serve all “users” of that line and how much cargo they produce at the moment.
2) the game will buy as many vehicles as needed to reach the 1) frequency set.
3) the desired configuration of vehicles. The vehicles can be trains so you specify the locomotive and the train cars. If you change the specification the game will bring all vehicles into depot sell buy reconfigure as necessary.
4) the game already at least show a separate budget for each line. Now the game could actually have a separate budget for each line. And buy and replace vehicles when the line has some surplus money. This is so the automatic update of vehicles do not zap all the money you have. Which might stop your work building new lines elsewhere.
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As you say there is too much mouse clicking. And this does not scale. As you expand sooner or later the player will feel he can not keep up and that he is doing work he shouldn’t need to do.
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Next question is …. do the developers play their own games?
Why do they not discover that their design is bad?
I agree waypoints. not only that, add everything that is missing so we can build normal looking railroads that can handle the traffic.
I am just experimenting now on easy mode to try figure out everything this game can NOT do , and figure out the little it CAN do. Before I try build my empire on a large map. But I uspect I need 64GB main memory and 1TB swap to complete a large map.
Either this game have a memory leak or an enormous apetite for memory. When I quit TF after a few hours play it takes 1 minute for my gaming rig to recover the swap space used and drag all other desktop programs in again. Jeezuz.
I need this functionality badly too.
how I pace stations: I build large 5 track stations immediately. I place both the large passenger AND cargo station side by side tight together and rotate them using N and M keys. This is because they snap to certain degrees on the compas, and so both passenger and cargo station snap to the exact same degree.
If build the roads first and have the two stations snap to them I could never get the exact same direction for bith stations. This is just to make it looking pretty and tidy.
Terrain around cities: For example when you build a line from city to city, sometimes there is more cargo produced on the right side of the city and when you come to next city there is more cargo on the left. So you want the cargo station towards where the goods are.
And I want both the cargo and passenger station to use the one double track I have put down.
The main line is going from passenger station to passenger station. But since the cargo station is sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right , and even if you use a third rail or not for cargo traffic, you still have to cross over the tracks, and this creates a lot of switches.
More complex layouts. You usually have your main line. And always on that mainline you end up with having to split it in a Y. City A needs to go to city B and C. And sometimes you make a Y-split in all these three cities …. A -> BC . B->CA, C->BA. I found that there usually becomes too many switches if all 10 tracks ( passenger + cargo ) in each city get a path to each 10 tracks in the other cities using only a double track between cities.
So I decided to only put down enough switches to, from one city to another, reach 60% of the passenger or cargo tracks in the destination city. Ok fine fine fine, now I have the tracksystem built that can handle anything.
But what happens, the game selects the shortest path. Also the paths seem to be fixed. It will use that path and only that path. There is no load balancing of traffic. I never seen the trains understand there are multiple paths to a destination and then let one train take one track and the other train take the other track.
So it picks shortest path and that means both passenger and cargo trains paths gravitate to switch to shortest path as soon as they can and so u get passenger and cargo train trampling on eachother. What would be smarter would be if the game checks if another line already uses that track. And then try to stay out of the way of that line for as long as possible instead of switching into other traffic as soon as it can not using the spare tracks that have been built when you have 3 track or 4 track or more.
In Sid Miers Railroads the trains selected the track to used based on what the signals told the AI.
OK ok ok ….. so that is the situation, the game isn’t very smart.
Solution: Let me specify what station track or tracks the train should stop at, let me tell the game what my intensions were with the track layout.
More solutions: Since the path is fixed and does not react to any traffic or congestion then you can just as well let me specify waypoints in the lines list of stops, only it is just a waypoint to drive through. A thing like that would also help to force the train to end up at the right station track.
Honestly I have not checked this … I start the game again and see if it reacts …. if you can set waypoints ….. no seems you can only add stations …. no.
I hope they give the trains more brains and use players more control with signals.
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This game is both worse and better then Railroads. At release a station had max 3 tracks and later 4 tracks. So the station was the bottleneck. To squeeze more traffic through you had a mainline with up to 12 tracks max with trains waiting for their turn to get into the station. I discovered the signalling system could handle 2 track splits without causing a jam. so 3 tracks in station and then you count “one split” 3 x 2 = 6 “second split” 6 x 2 = 12.
But this means the trains coming into station on a track must always use the same track in station. If you want to give them the chance to choose from at least 2 tracks in station you have to put down some switches so the train can cross over to another track. Giving the trains freedome to choose reduce incoming tracks to 5 I think it was.
Anyways in Train fewer we have 5 tracks so instead of many tracks to a few, you can build more realistic a few tracks spread out to many in station. So train fewer with Sid Miers Railroads signaling system be good. The incoming trains would then choose among the empty tracks in station that they can reach from their current track.
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But a time table system would be cool. A dispacher system. Like in real life. Some signals are automatic and just separate trains out on the line. Some are manual. Some are both. Most of the times the switches are set in a certain way, and never touched, to create a line. And only a few switches they need to flip back and forth when a line splits from or merge with another. IRL you don’t send trains out on the line and try their luck with the signals and other traffic. It is operated like a swiss watch. Would be fun to try that degree of control.
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I think most players will run into these problems unless they stopped playing already………
I think we need:
specify which track in station to stop at.
Waypoints.
A much more clever signalling system that can make a train use reseve tracks if the normal one is blocked.
I use the “wait for full load” option at first stop when I begin running a line. You can then buy many vehicles and leave them to it while you do other things. When they are spread out I turn that off and let them run as fasst as they can cause I discovered that often the site that turns raw material into goods somehow start to produce more goods then incoming raw material. You discover that when those packets start walking themselves along the road from that site. Then you have to pull out all stops and buy more vehicles to catch up.
So we have
1) stop check for cargo but drive immediately
2) wait for full load
why don’t we have
3) half full
4) 75% full
5) or just be able to set the percentage yourself
or
6) decide what cargo you want to carry like 50% raw materials and 50% refined goods.
They need to add a special bridge building mode.
You drag out a road. You lift then entire thing up in the air till the game says OK it is high enough for a bridge and then you click ok.
Next step is the ramps , click on end of bridge , drag out and place on ground , you keep draging out that ramp till the game says I can make a ramp now, then you click ok. The ramp should not necessarily have to be straight the game should be able to do currves too.
A the moment I am sculpting the terrain for some bridges. The problem is if I make a mistake and make a wooden bridge and delete it to make a steel bridge instead the changes the game did to the terrain make the new bridge impossible to place. And it is therefore we need a special bridge building mode that brute force change the terrain and isn’t so careful and scared and nervous.
The game is so “nervous” when you place things that you don’t trust it be able to do upgrades. Instead you build the 5 track 400 500 meter stations immediately and when you make bridges you use the biggest road cause you believe the game will fail when you come back later and try an upgrade.
Same with bridges over water you try again and again till you have a 4 track brige. So you look at the map, make plans, and then you fill it with 4 track train bridges over water, and all the road bridges, and then you start connecting the stations and all these stracks under bridges you made. Cause goging back and upgrade you get error error error error.
This game is just as bad as all other games that have come before it where you can change the terrain. If you delete any tunnel or bridge u made you can not make the same tunnel or bridge in the same spot again. They all complain about the terrain being wrong. And they behave indentical all these games one wonder if they us the same algorithm.
No there should be a special tunnel bridge mode where the game just brute force change the terrain until it is happy with the terrain and not look at the terrain and then decide I can not do this ……. when the game ofcourse could do it.
These bridges are very important so you can haul gods over the tracks to where the train station for goods are.
Also I noted when placing a train station for goods next to one for passengers that either you freely place the station and rotate it as u like , or you make a road first and the station align itself with the road. But these stations don’t seem to react to any piece of tracks. you know, automatically connect iself to the end of an existing track.
If it did it would be easy to perfectly align the passenger station with the one for goods. You just lay a lot of parallel tracks till you get the right side offset. Then you delete the tracks inbetween and connect the goods station to that track stump.
Bridge / tunnel tool, and that stations have a magnet the glu them to existing track.
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Except for this I want in an advanced mode be able to write time tables. To really try squeeze a lot of traffic through bottlenecks.
And I want block signals. So the train drivers can “proceed with caution / reduced speed”. Just so you can squeeze even more traffic in.
The game have potential. And I am actually amazed it haven’t crashed yet. I am just stting there smiling and wondering while I do all I do , cut of tracks, rebuilding, while the game is runing at slow speed not paused.
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It is good that it is always day while you build. But watching a train station with 12 tracks and signals at night would be cool.
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right now they probably only work with stability patching but the game is not finnished. And it needs intelligent and understanding players. Cause it takes a long time to build these rail networks …. error error error error collition, terrain is wrong , no can not do that. etc etc.
you have to keep working on this title.’
