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North America (West) 1910

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 07:46
by whitehexagon
I could do with some pointers for this one please. I've tried a few different approaches now:

Staring with buses, then trams to build slush fund, then rail for Ore, but it was just way too expensive building in the mountains and ran out of time. A 'Profitability' graph would help a bit.

Similar approach but trains for Oil down by Albuquerque - okay this was my fault because I got the load/un-load orders back to front. I thought I would have gotten a 'zero profit for train' warning like in OpenTTD... Oh and then the plant shut down through lack of delivery.

Same approach but order the right way around, Oil well ran dry just as I got 3 trains running :( Is this random for resource levels?

Same approach but with 2 Oil Wells, trains got lost and caused a collision on a 1 way semaphore :( I had a few vehicles not path finding correctly now, on very simple systems like two towns with a single road connecting, and the bus in just in circles at one end of town.

Same approach 3 trains bigger Oil Well, but just ran out of time (35% goal)

My typical train is loco + 5 Tanker Wagons, and 6 length station, is this reasonable? In TTD it was a bit more clear if trains struggled with power, but here they seem fine.

It would be nice to have Sandbox for learning all this! Or I wish the game was closer to TTD or even better OpenTTD... :)

Re: North America (West) 1910

Posted: 11 Oct 2013 05:14
by Zakos
Well it sounds like you've just had rotten luck with industries. Their closing date is random, and usually is not within 5 years of the game's starting date. Lack of delivery does not cause an industry to shut down.


Another thing: Don't start building costly train lines until you have established several easy delivery lines. By easy I mean rail routes on flat land. Buses and trams will not be a good enough cushion for expensive projects.

Re: North America (West) 1910

Posted: 11 Oct 2013 15:59
by wallyweb
Connect a coal mine to a power plant. That'll give you a steady income. Then work on some passenger stuff between a couple of your larger towns. After that, go for broke! Serve the other resources and get goods and food for your towns. Stay the heck out of Donner's Pass. :wink:

Re: North America (West) 1910

Posted: 15 Oct 2013 16:04
by whitehexagon
Well I finally got past this one, and no thanks to trains... It seems to only way to get a sensible profit vs running cost is to use trams. So I'm a bit disappointed now with the game, since the trains are my favorite part of TTD. On top of that, the train junctions are just a nightmare to edit as soon as you get more than a few lines coming together. The routing is also very strange, and the calculation for which train has priority needs some attention. Shame because the game was holding great promise for me. Now I can only hope that OpenTTD will one day make it over to iOS. I would at this point consider that prospect to be more the 'definitive TTD' game.

edit - just to add the above solution only worked if I was borrowing to the max nearly the whole time too. Just in case anyone else tries the conservative approach of buying what you can afford :)

Re: North America (West) 1910

Posted: 15 Oct 2013 19:16
by metalangel
whitehexagon wrote: Now I can only hope that OpenTTD will one day make it over to iOS. I would at this point consider that prospect to be more the 'definitive TTD' game.
It happened, and got removed from the App Store by Apple.

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=61180 if you want to know about it.

There is a port of Simutrans on the App Store, but it's almost impossible to use without a stylus.