My
playing style: almost always transparent (x), and the option set to
disable trees in transparent view. So trees are never bothering me
while building. They can be annoying. ONly sometimes I dont use
transparent view.
I use a lot of shortcut keys, a few:
-x for transparent view
-r for cheap removal of all kinds of things
-b for bridge building
-shift to see the expected costs (use to check out various route possibilities at start, or expensive bridges/tunnels)
-d for destroy (depot/town stuff)
-t for tunnel
-s for signal placement (ctrl to autoplace, r to remove)
When
building stations in towns to get most coverage while working on a
tight budget, i build bus stations to extend the station, bus stations
are cheaper then railroad stations.
Signals are placed with 4-tile
distance at start, but on larger maps where the income starts to kick
in early, I use 1-tile signal spacing: No extra work needed at bridges
or tunnels. The extra cost of the extra signals is payed back by the
building time: extra time to build more network.
Network style:
Always use at least 2 tiles of corner distance, never use 90 degree
turns. Only rarely at 1950 maps where Wills engines are used quite
long, i might use 90 degrees corners. They dont slow Wills engines
down.
When the game starts later on, I might only be using 3 tiles
of corner distance, as trains doing over 131 KMPH will be slowed down.
An SH125 will notice the corner easily.
Bridges are early and
later in the game build from complete tile to complete tile: much
cheaper bridge (saves about 10-20K depending on situation). No bridges
going to half tiles, this is quite costly. I might build on a half tile
nevertheless, if I can get a high speed bridge instead of an 112KMPH
suspension.
Sometimes, in large maps with quite a big train
network, I build islands costing about 80K (two terraform tile points
in the middle of the sea) each to shorten the distance overcome by
bridges, so I can use faster and shorter bridges to reduce or remove
the bottleneck. If only slow trains (<129KMPH) are used, I probably
build an extra bridge.
RORO stations are rarely used by me at
Kurts servers, since they are quite expensive. Off course, the cheap
roro variant with a depot behind the station is technically a roro
station too, but somehow it 'feels' not like a roro station.
I
mainly use 20 carriage trains where possible. If the starting year is
low (50's, 60's), where only slow and weak trains are available, I
might use 14 carriage trains. Sometimes, in case of pax, I buy really
short trains consisting of 1 mail+4 pax or 2 mail + 6 pax carriages.
I
use mostly bridges in network junctions as they are cheap, fast and
make the junction cheap as a whole. Tunnels require terraforming
usually, so that adds up to the already higher costing tunnels.
In
case of a hub and spokes system style of resource gathering of food
primaries (grain/livestock) I tend to build a station with 2 platforms
for seperate grain/livestock loading. One time I even needed 4
platforms, since the throughput was so high that there where a lot of
moments where 100+ resources where waiting at the station. So I built
two platforms for both Grain and Livestock. Note that when you are in
such a position, your network might need an upgrade to 4 lanes....
I
hardly ever use U turns, the bad 61KMPH turns. You might argue that
they are in fact usable at stations, where trains slow down anyway. But
I think they are ugly, unnecarily slow down your network, and are just
too dang easy. No pride for me here
.
Oh,
and feeders stations are my favorite. They are quick to build, cheap,
easy to maintain competition on, reliable (never a netowkr hickup), and
use the advantage of the network to the maximum. Furthermore, feeders
tend to improve train efficiency: 10 trains moving while having one
train waiting is more efficient then 3 trains moving while having one
waiting. Also, feeder trains can be quite neatly adjusted to the
transportaion demand. A single line with a double station at the end
requires two trains. The train length is then determined by the time
the train uses to move the resources to the feeding station. When the
train comes back, the other train should be about 75% full. This
enables breakdowns and resource production improvement to be handled.
Anyway: these are my playing methods. Mind to share yours? Or is this under NDA of your company
?
BTW: what is the shortcut key to build track using the magic track builder? And to build a station?
Should be a good help for newcomers and also for some already experienced players.