can anyone offer me some advice on gameplay?
I am playing a free game with a huge map on easy. However, no matter what I do I seem to run out of money quite quickly, and never make it to more than around 1880.
I tend to look for a town near a farm and a processing plant and then build a cargo line to get raw materials from the farm to the processing plant and then on to the town. In the town I build a passenger route around the town (and to the cargo depot). The passenger route seems to be a bit underused until I add a second route from one stop in that town to a single stop in a nearby town. This then means I have to add a local bus route to the second town too. I add enough buses/horse wagons to each of the routes so they run at less than 10 minutes, but they still seem to make very little money, never enough to cover the initial costs.
I've tried with trains for the cargo, but the costs there are even more so I never get to make enough money to break even.
Also, how do I get my trains to run on two lines? If I build a 2 track station at each end and join then with two separate tracks I can't add two trains. They both get stuck waiting for a clear route. I've tried playing about with signals but as there are two lines, I can't see how it's supposed to work.
On the cargo, it seems that unless I have a huge complex set of routes nobody does anything. The farm-processing plant-town chain is simple and easy to implement, but when I have to get crude oil-refined oil-plastics and slag-steel-construction materials and various other combinations in order to complete a single product chain, it becomes too expensive to be able to implement. Am I missing something?
Any help would be appreciated.
