Observations and Ideas for Improvements

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  • Firstly I apologise to the German majority on the forums but my German is not good enough to do a multi-language thread. In my experience you all speak such good English that it probably won't slow you down too much anyway :)


    So I thought I'd share some observations and ideas for improvements after my first several play throughs of the game. I've mostly been playing on the medium difficulty with the medium terrain, usually 1:3 ratio. The first several times I predictably went bankrupt early in the game, although in my most recent playthrough I made it through to approximately 1970.


    So my ideas are as follows:

    • It is very hard to make a handsome passing loop. The minimum curvature requirements mean that you have to swing very far out and then come back in to have your second line. There should be an option for a (possibly low speed) switch that allows you to go below the minimum curvature requirements.
    • The construction costs seem way out of line with the vehicle purchase costs - it usually costs me under 1,000,000 to construct a new high-speed line with a station and a depot (if I pick good routes and follow the terrain). Contrastingly, purchasing even a single train with its carriages from around 1900 onwards seems to cost easily 10 times this much! I have never been able to earn enough money in the game to keep up with the vehicle costs, an in fact because construction and property maintenance costs are so low I would say I have >10 lines fully built but sitting empty because I cannot afford to put even a modest train on the line. I think vehicle costs need a serious revision.
    • I think the years roll by a little too quickly. I know you can get mods to slow it down but this also slows down revenue and costs, effectively just making the same game take longer. I think that these thing should be able to be altered independently - I would like a lot more time to explore the early game with more lines and vehicles, without advancing into later eras but also with the money to build and expand.
    • It is precariously easy to bankrupt yourself with a single wrong move! I had a freight network with around 15 branches, and passenger services between perhaps 10-12 cities at one point and a slight mistake in building the station access while I was busy watching trains on another part of the network saw several engines irreversibly block each other into and out of the station, while blocking the main line. This led to dozens of other trains backing up behind them, and the collapse in revenue meant I could not even take a loan out and build my way out of it, and very quickly lost the game. All because there were 3 lines wanting to use a 2 platform station.
    • Expanding on the former point, I wish the lines could be set to use multiple platforms (perhaps optionally, for those who don't want them to do this). I find this especially frustrating at steel stations because they have trains sitting there taking steel and other ones coming in and delivering commodities. I would not have lost my last game if the iron ore train would just have picked a different platform when the one he wanted was full.
    • I think cargo routes are not as profitable as they should be. It seems that my cargo roots usually make very little money or perhaps lose money, but usually seem to exist to fuel growth to grow the insanely profitable passenger lines. I don't think this reflects the real world very much where passenger services often have to be subsidised to be viable whereas heavy haul cargo is like printing your own money.
    • I wish there was a way to "Copy" a train without having to send it to the depot. Sometimes I want to add some additional capacity to a line and I need to send a train back to the depot to do this. This leads to lost revenue and sometimes even industrial collapse as it sees the line not longer being serviced and halts production. This hurts a lot when it is the first step in a chain: stop your crude oil and your oil stops making more, which stops delivering fuel and stops delivering to make plastic, which stops making machines...etc. Just to copy a train.
    • I wish there was also a way to automatically upgrade or renew vehicles as well. I'd like to be able to say "Upgrade all the trains on this line to this particular engine next time you get a chance", or "Replace these old passenger cars with new ones". At the moment it seems very manual.
    • Once you get into the era where people have cars and travel between cities, it becomes hard to see where those people are coming and going from. When they are using public transport it will say for example "Heading for Work in Pasadena", so you know what town they're headed to. With the cars it doesn't say where they're going to, so you just have to follow them and see.
    • I wish there was something I could do to provide additional loading speed for my critical stations - maybe an upgrade to build gantry cranes? Or another upgrade to ferry goods from the nearby industry to the station faster?
    • The tooltip says that I can raise or lower track with the m and n keys, but these don't seem to work. I need to use the mouse button to click on the grade icon and do it there.
BlueBrixx