The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
[Cities in Motion] Public Transport Management Simulation? HELL YES
I want to get into OpenTTD, but goddamn train systems are a pain in the ass to setup and figure out. I look at the descriptions for what the rail signals do, and it all may as well be in French.
So, after spending some more time trying to build a railway that can have more than one train on a set of connected tracks at a time, I've decided I'd rather chew on a gun barrel. Why the hell does one train, very far away, HAVE to stop dead in it's tracks when a train on the far side of the tracks is moving, when it's not even moving anywhere near where it has to go? And why can't any of my trains EVER find the depot when I click the "go to depot" button? I know they can go there, because they eventually do after spazzing out for 5 minutes straight.
The signal patterns are built in 'block' form, more or less; if anything is occupying the 'block' it's trying to get to, it won't progress. That's about the long and the short of it.
The signal patterns are built in 'block' form, more or less; if anything is occupying the 'block' it's trying to get to, it won't progress. That's about the long and the short of it.
Through the use of waypoints, and figuring out that there's a two-way signal, I've made progress.
i check steam on my lunch break and it still had roughly an hour to unlock. Sooo... guess i shouldnt have stayed up late last night because im tired and im going to be up late tonight.
I'm pretty geeked out for this game. I'm a transportation engineer irl, but this is more planning while I'm more design. I had a blast with the beta, though, and had to restrain myself from over-playing it till Steam unlocks.
Note to self: Running a bus lane up a busy street does not decrease traffic it results in busses stuck in traffic and angry customers waiting for them.
This transport thing is tougher than it looks.
I think it's pretty much all related to the traffic routing.
Your trams and buses share the road with cars. So you'll want to plan your routes on quiet streets, paralleling the busy ones but still in range of the sources of the congestion. But the busy streets work horribly. One car on a side street will sit for a month trying to merge onto the busy street. Over time a other cars line up behind him, and soon many of the side streets are also gridlocked. Soon after, the parallel "quite" streets are intercepted by this queue and they TOO gridlock; and so does your bus/tram line.
It is much, much worse than the demo traffic was; at least in the starting campaign city of Berlin. I have to think they made a change somewhere, either in the routing of the traffic, amounts of trips generated by sources, or decision making of cars at intersections.
On top of it, the campaign objectives often require you to build routes in the most congested areas. Your route will not solve congestion, only trigger more of it.
Underground Metros seem to be the solution, but the campaign objectives often require trams or buses; plus the metros are very expensive from the start.
GOOD NEWS: The official forums are pretty busy with developer feedback and they've alluded to a patch in the works that will address this complaint.
I just hope they understand that the problem doesn't seem to be in the transportation demands, but in the individual traffic's routing process.
The only other issue is the game runs less than stellar, especially when compared to the demo. I have an i7 and 5870 and run at 15-40fps at 1080 res, with AA and Ansi off. It's completely playable so I haven't messed around with shadows or HDR, but it's one of the very few games not running at 60FPS on my system. Something is not optimized.
I do think they'll smooth things out a bit, at least in regards to the traffic issues above. And I bet it gets handled quickly, based on the forum activity. There is definitely a very fun $20 game here, it's just not fully fleshed out yet.
I still can't beat the first campaign mission and I blame traffic. Cars don't want to turn left or right onto a cross street, they like to sit there and let the traffic on the bigger road just pass by. For the mission it makes you run a tram line to one of the train stations which is the same as dooming yourself to bankruptcy. There's no timely way to get a tram past that busy 5-way intersection just north of the station.
I still can't beat the first campaign mission and I blame traffic. Cars don't want to turn left or right onto a cross street, they like to sit there and let the traffic on the bigger road just pass by. For the mission it makes you run a tram line to one of the train stations which is the same as dooming yourself to bankruptcy. There's no timely way to get a tram past that busy 5-way intersection just north of the station.
After a lot of messing around with the tracks I got to this, I think it is the best you can do since you are mostly just crossing the streets and the parts where you share with the cars are small and normally free of traffic.
I can actually turn a small profit each month, but this is because I´m paying $1500+ every month on loans for the subway I built, so things should be better in a few months. But yeah gridlocks are a pain in the ass right now, but since the devs are fairly active on the official forums they have said we can expect this to be better in a patch that should come out in a couple of days.
I'm not sure if it's the patch recently released or just that the later scenarios have less traffic problems but I'm finding I'm suffering less from those really big traffic jam issues.
THere's another patch on its way which is supposed to improve things further.
I swear traffic generation is based on the position of your own vehicles. I built a lonely bus loop way out on the ass-end of Berlin just to experiment and within a month it went from zero traffic to gridlock in all directions.
After the patch traffic improved a little but not much on Amsterdam on the scenario I was playing, but since I had totally avoided the downtown area except for ships it wasn´t much of a problem. Vienna which came after was awesome tough, no gridlocks at all, I kept playing yesterday until 1AM even tough I had to be up before 6. I had trams which generated almost as much money as subways, of course this being 2 trams on a line vs 5 subway cars, and buses weren´t very far behind. When I finished I had 5 subway lines and was able to pay all the loans I made to build them, was making $4k+ per month.
Now comes Berlin divided by the Wall, if the gridlocks don´t get in the way this can also be a great scenario, the disconnected subway lines you start with are great to set the mood of things to come.
I agree, traffic hasn't been a problem since Amsterdam.
I'm on the Berlin Wall scenario as well and I noticed you CAN just reconnect the metro lines, but I'm trying not to do that since it doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the scenario at all.
I'm having fair success throughout the game emphasizing one possibly unrecognized point:
Transfers of like modes of transportation don't pay a second fare.
So once a passenger pays his bus fare, he can link from bus line to bus line without again paying. If you have tons of bus loops touching, this leads to crammed buses with small return.
To capitalize on this, create links of varying modes such that a passenger changes modes often while traveling from source to destination.
My generic setup is a metro "spine" across the city. From the metro station I'll send out one or two tram lines. Along those tram lines I'll setup several bus loops, getting me the majority of my coverage.
So you're gathering people by bus, to tram, to metro, to tram, to bus again. This also funnels everyone into your metro which can net you the most money.
Anyhow, I'm having a lot of fun with this game. Many of the "objectives" in scenarios are random and should be ignored. Also, I try not to abuse pricing as it seems that once you've created a good latent demand in the city you can just skyrocket your ticket prices with hardly any fall off (altho the groups may protest, the demand mostly stays).
I´m having a great time with the Berlin divided scenario, seriously this is the most fun I have had with a "Tycoon" game since the times of Transport Tycoon and Sim City 2.
A new patch went live tonight, no official patch notes yet but from the official forums I gathered this.
- Traffic jams
This has been the most addressed issue in Cities in Motion. In the new patch the amount of private cars depends on the difficulty, making the easy level less likely to have so many traffic jams. The jammed cars also disappear more quickly. And in the sandbox you can even customize the amount of the private cars to your liking.
- Economy
We realized that the fluctuating economy is a bit too sudden, so we slowed the fluctuation down a bit.
- Press "U"
We added a shortcut to get to the underground view (nobody admits forgetting it in the first place..)
Haven´t had trouble with traffic jams after the first two scenarios, but like that it is now dependant on difficulty level. The economy was also a pain as sometimes I forgot to check the ticket prices for a few months (you know just look at all the pretty trams and buses going around!) and when I saw I had "triple red" or "triple green" prices, I normaly maintain then on the slightest red level. As for the underground shortcut what to say, it should have been there from day one...
Anyone have advice on playing this game? I make routes where i get objectives then no one uses them. I can barely scrape a total profit most of the time
Posts
Through the use of waypoints, and figuring out that there's a two-way signal, I've made progress.
Downloading it now and looking forwards to a nice relaxing (and pretty looking) experience.
I'm pretty geeked out for this game. I'm a transportation engineer irl, but this is more planning while I'm more design. I had a blast with the beta, though, and had to restrain myself from over-playing it till Steam unlocks.
Looking forward to some traffic jams tonight.
This transport thing is tougher than it looks.
Releasing on the same day as Bulletstorm probably doesn't help them out.
I'm a bit disappointed.
I think it's pretty much all related to the traffic routing.
Your trams and buses share the road with cars. So you'll want to plan your routes on quiet streets, paralleling the busy ones but still in range of the sources of the congestion. But the busy streets work horribly. One car on a side street will sit for a month trying to merge onto the busy street. Over time a other cars line up behind him, and soon many of the side streets are also gridlocked. Soon after, the parallel "quite" streets are intercepted by this queue and they TOO gridlock; and so does your bus/tram line.
It is much, much worse than the demo traffic was; at least in the starting campaign city of Berlin. I have to think they made a change somewhere, either in the routing of the traffic, amounts of trips generated by sources, or decision making of cars at intersections.
On top of it, the campaign objectives often require you to build routes in the most congested areas. Your route will not solve congestion, only trigger more of it.
Underground Metros seem to be the solution, but the campaign objectives often require trams or buses; plus the metros are very expensive from the start.
GOOD NEWS: The official forums are pretty busy with developer feedback and they've alluded to a patch in the works that will address this complaint.
I just hope they understand that the problem doesn't seem to be in the transportation demands, but in the individual traffic's routing process.
The only other issue is the game runs less than stellar, especially when compared to the demo. I have an i7 and 5870 and run at 15-40fps at 1080 res, with AA and Ansi off. It's completely playable so I haven't messed around with shadows or HDR, but it's one of the very few games not running at 60FPS on my system. Something is not optimized.
I do think they'll smooth things out a bit, at least in regards to the traffic issues above. And I bet it gets handled quickly, based on the forum activity. There is definitely a very fun $20 game here, it's just not fully fleshed out yet.
After a lot of messing around with the tracks I got to this, I think it is the best you can do since you are mostly just crossing the streets and the parts where you share with the cars are small and normally free of traffic.
I can actually turn a small profit each month, but this is because I´m paying $1500+ every month on loans for the subway I built, so things should be better in a few months. But yeah gridlocks are a pain in the ass right now, but since the devs are fairly active on the official forums they have said we can expect this to be better in a patch that should come out in a couple of days.
THere's another patch on its way which is supposed to improve things further.
Now comes Berlin divided by the Wall, if the gridlocks don´t get in the way this can also be a great scenario, the disconnected subway lines you start with are great to set the mood of things to come.
I'm on the Berlin Wall scenario as well and I noticed you CAN just reconnect the metro lines, but I'm trying not to do that since it doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the scenario at all.
I'm having fair success throughout the game emphasizing one possibly unrecognized point:
Transfers of like modes of transportation don't pay a second fare.
So once a passenger pays his bus fare, he can link from bus line to bus line without again paying. If you have tons of bus loops touching, this leads to crammed buses with small return.
To capitalize on this, create links of varying modes such that a passenger changes modes often while traveling from source to destination.
My generic setup is a metro "spine" across the city. From the metro station I'll send out one or two tram lines. Along those tram lines I'll setup several bus loops, getting me the majority of my coverage.
So you're gathering people by bus, to tram, to metro, to tram, to bus again. This also funnels everyone into your metro which can net you the most money.
Anyhow, I'm having a lot of fun with this game. Many of the "objectives" in scenarios are random and should be ignored. Also, I try not to abuse pricing as it seems that once you've created a good latent demand in the city you can just skyrocket your ticket prices with hardly any fall off (altho the groups may protest, the demand mostly stays).
A new patch went live tonight, no official patch notes yet but from the official forums I gathered this.
Haven´t had trouble with traffic jams after the first two scenarios, but like that it is now dependant on difficulty level. The economy was also a pain as sometimes I forgot to check the ticket prices for a few months (you know just look at all the pretty trams and buses going around!) and when I saw I had "triple red" or "triple green" prices, I normaly maintain then on the slightest red level. As for the underground shortcut what to say, it should have been there from day one...
and there are a bunch of DLC options that you can all get included if you pay 10 dollars
yes no?
But there is something I cannot seem to find out:
"People at X bus stop are unhappy!"
I how do I find out what line does this bus stop belong to, without having to highlight each single line to finally find out which one it is?