No, they are both really fun (and highly addictive in my case). I like that you can do a scenario in 30-ish minutes (and even pause if you need to). I personally prefer Motorways over Metro, but alas, both highly recommended. Fantastic game design.
1. How important is it to make sure you alternate symbols? (Beyond the obvious of not having 3 in a row). Do you go out of your way to avoid two in a row?
2. Is it better to put major junctions at the most common circle/triangle symbols, or on squares, or the rarer ones?
3. How much imortance do you place on the slowdown from lines crossing not at stations? I always go out of my way to avoid doing it but I wonder if I overrate the importance of it in my mind.
4. When you notice that some random station along a single line is getting a lot more traffic than other ones, do you shift other lines to cross it or just add more carriages?
One of the most frustrating (but addicting) things with the game is that a couple of my highest scores happened when I first started playing it, before I thought I knew any tricks at all! Wish I could see what the best players' maps end up looking like.
Oh yeah, one more question... do you play the secret level? What actually happens there, or is it just a gag?
2. Where to put big junctions: Squares are rare magnets, so giving every line access to at least one square prevents square-bound riders from piling up on transfers. My "major" hub is usually a square near the geographic center or a bridge choke, and I try not to merge too many trunks into one block-split load across two nearby interchanges if possible. If you have special shapes (stars, etc.), connecting each special to exactly one line that meets others only at an interchange keeps flows predictable.
3. Crossing lines away from stations: It's not catastrophic, but on busy trunks the cumulative hit adds up. I'll avoid mid-block crossings on high-throughput segments; elsewhere I don't contort the whole map just to eliminate a single crossing. Net: treat it as a tax, pay it only when it saves tunnels or ugly detours.
4. Random station getting swamped: Triage in this order: turn it into an interchange (boarding speed), add a loco, then a carriage on the most burdened line, and only then re-route another line to cross it. If nothing stabilizes, drop a short "shuttle" micro-line from that station straight to a square/triangle sink, then delete it once the queue clears. Pausing to redraw aggressively is part of the game.
On those early "beginner's luck" highs: seed luck is real but also the game rewards ruthless mid-game rebuilds more than early cleverness. Don't be sentimental about lines-pause, re-lay, and keep every line touching a square.
I have not heard of or seen a secret level!
I'm like median on Metro, ~60 hours over years (though perhaps just the one hour, 60x, &c). Never too late to learn some strategy, I guess. Never played Motorways.
Where are the alternate forms transport: the bike paths and bike shares, LRTs/buses, and yes, roads? What about other upstream policy levers such as WFH mandates, and a decentralized urban core?
/s
You can disable that in the settings.
One catch is that riders only need to get a particular "shape" of station (roughly analogous to residential, commercial, industrial, stadium, etc). That is to say, they normally don't insist on going to a particular station. Also and it's free in time, money, and political captial to change routes. The model is, I feel, slightly too simple to feel like real transport infra. That doesn't stop it being hella fun though.
Whenever the idea of light rail came up in my hometown, I would point out to my enthusiastic friends that without a better bus system, there’s not much point to rail.
OK nvm my congratulations to the game designer!
https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Local%20authority#bribe-t...
I do kind of miss riding it though. For the last couple years I was living there, I got to ride the Ashmont-Mattapan trolleys as part of my commute. That was a treat. One of the last weeks before we moved to Vermont, my wife rode down to Ashmont with me and rode the trolley to Mattapan, then back to Ashmont to take the Red Line back to her office.
The biggest changes are that you can pay with tap to pay everywhere, which is nice, and the trains drive a lot more cautiously, which irritates me because they feel considerably slower now.
EDIT: Nevermind, purchased and answered my own question. Outer cities included going clockwise from north bay: Novato, Vallejo, Benicia, Brentwood, Livermore, Santa Teresa, Los Gatos, the full peninsula northward starting from Half Moon Bay. So a good amount, but missing some outer commuting areas like Santa Rosa, Fairfield, Tracy, Gilroy.
There is a class-action lawsuit on this that's been ongoing for half a decade now, but as far as I can tell the plaintiffs have not been able to produce any actual contract text supporting this claim. The closest their filings come is some random customer support rep.
It's a hard sell for me, considering Factorio has a ton of actively developed mods (cough Space Exploration 0.7 cough), a demo, and in early access era it's cheaper and insanely polished.
From a quick glance, I'm not sure whether it's a fun game or not, as realism tends to be not fun. Requiring an internet connection for map tiles also sounds not good for offline play.
Well, I'll wait for reviews when it's out before deciding then.
This feels something closer to Puffin Planes ($12), Rail Route ($25), Station Flow ($18).
The difference between $25 and $30 isn't too much, but there's another significant hurdle to get up to a perceived $40 value.
It does look interesting, but for a purchase at that price point, I'm going to need to feel that its worth more than a weekend or two of gaming and something that will be a game that I want to pick up again after a month or two away from it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ is pretty niche (and is in my library) ... and its $25, which is a fair bit less than the $40 price point planned for Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ NIMBY Rails is at $19 (also in my library).
It could very well be a great game... though that price is one that's setting the expectations for it high.
But this is a very weird way to sell a game.
1st, we have Steam. That's where I and most people buy games. 30$ for a random exe is going to be really inconvenient.
Launch it on Steam at the same time, or at a minimum promise a key.
It's also not clear why it's just a bunch of American cities, if you're pulling the data from Google anyway, any city ( within reason) should work. If you need additional data, let users add it.
Maybe on steam I'll buy it
They said they pulled commuter data from the census and another source. They'd need to get a few datasets from other countries to pull it off that aren't in google maps.
I'll wait on the Steam release.
Now excuse me, my Pather friends called and there is a colony using ai which must be purged by Lud’s holy fire.
Highly recommended space sim for anyone else reading this!
I like the concept and am intrigued but at this price point I'll wait for reviews from people who have played it extensively.
He had some pretty interesting methods for 3D building transparency and stuff like that