Bypass Fever or The Dirt Track That Refused To Budge

[hawkeye]

It started out as a lack of space. 100 sq km of wilderness was not enough.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357806485

So the dirt track had to go and a bypass was needed.
But a simple bypass did not work.
Perhaps it wanted a scenic bypass or a bridge bypass.
And even an upgrade of the main road wanted a bypass too.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357806179

Several bypasses later and the little dirt track still refused to budge.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357805850

The moral of this story is:

Never give a user a feature they did not ask for.

[Ric]

lol...oh god thats nasty. Not had a chance to play under the new patch yet but I will over the weekend. Great looking patch apart from this. Maybe it just needs rejigged a little to make this new feature work for us.

[mikael]

Thanks for this analysis, this helps us to improve the bypass calculations.

The current implementation has some weaknesses. We will improve them in a next version.

One problem is that players don’t see from where to where a main connection is needed. Also, player don’t see the speed of the streets. Unfortunately the paved street in the example above have a lower speed as the very old country dirt roads.

Also, there is a problem when town auto-upgrade their streets from dirt to paved streets. This makes the connection worse and in some special cases, the value of the connection falls below a limit and then the player can no longer upgrade or downgrade any street of the connection.

Will be improved in a next version!

[Xanos]

The main problem is, that in my eyes you spend a lot of time (I assume) into implementing a feature which does not gives any benefit to the player whatsoever.
I personally never demolish connections; however, I very often demolish parts of connection in order to build overpasses, to straighten the connection, or just make it look nicer. All these things are now impossible, or at least a very big pain in the ass.

Whatever kind of improvement you will implement, the feature will definitely piss off more than one user for no good reason...

However, if you insist on keeping this feature alive, I have plenty of ideas ;)

First of all, I would not keep the player from demolishing roads, instead let the KI automatically rebuild broken connections in certain intervals (e.g. every 1st of each month). This way , the player has complete freedom in building the kind of connection he likes without being able to break connections completely.
If this is not what you are going for, than at least show the user, which roads are undemolishable (e.g. with the option to toggle an overlay for this) and make it clearer how to make them demolishable. At very last, let the player at least demolish roads even if the alternative is longer. I would suggest that alternatives which are at maximum 25% longer should still be okay. Otherwise it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to build alternatives at all, when wanting to replace small parts of a road.

However, it will still be a mayor drawback in usability regarding overpasses or good connections to industries!!! How often I have to demolish small parts of roads to build an overpass without collision? Now this is not possible anymore!
Additionally, There are still users out there who have problems with building roads and overpasses, even without these horrible restrictions. With them, you make them dissappointed. Not to forget the army people who love to use TF as their private model railroad layout, which is impossible if road building is restricted the way it is now...


At last I just want to say, that even if my words are harsh in this comment, I hope you guys know how much I love this game - which makes me even more cry when seeing things like that making it worse ;)

Looking forwards to the update, cheers,
Xanos

[Zocker-Earp]

I totally agree wqith hawkeye, this feature was neither wanted nor needed. If you want to make the gameplay impossible you are on a good way. The problem is not that 'The current implementation has some weaknesses"' , the inplementation is simply not usefull in any way.
Please reconsider to de-implement this feature.
We want have the freedom to create and/or rebuild the towns to our need.,
It's a nice game and you try to make it better with every update, I appreciate that.
Regards and lot thanks

[Robbedem]

I also have to agree with Xanos. While I understand why this feature was implemented, and I even like it, it is too soon for the state the game is in. THE GAME NEEDS A PLANING TOOL FIRST!

The reason is simple:
Two towns are connected with a road. I want to make a rail line that crosses the road, but don't want a level crossing (because the rail line might become very busy). The most realistic scenario is to make the road into a bridge or an underpass. This wil require demolishing of the road, which has now become impossible...
In planning mode, you could demolish and rebuild the road and the requirement of connection would still be met, because you'ld only need to check the requirement when executing the plans.

[Zocker-Earp]

Sorry, I can't understand this feature. The game is called Train Fever, so why tamper with streets? To get a profitable rail network you need to build a good infrastructure. If one is not able to "correct" / upgrade or rebuild streets, a working infrastructure is not possible. There are still some improvements regarding the railsystem, so why not let the streetsystem how it was and focus on gameplay improvements?

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Zocker-Earp:

Sorry, I can't understand this feature. The game is called Train Fever, so why tamper with streets?

I imagine the reason for this feature was to prevent cheating, or unintended methods of play. You could destroy a segment of road between two towns and cut off all road traffic, which would force everyone to use your rail lines. Similarly with frieght, you could cut off industries that were automatically servicing towns on there own in order to make your own competing lines do better.

I can appreciate this reasoning, but I disagree with their choice in making this kind of restriction. The negatives far outway the benefits in my opinion. It is a single player game anyways so let people self impose the restrictions if they want to.

[Zocker-Earp]

Cheating in a single player game? I can't bulldoze the streets, but now I set the car speed to 5Km/h, yes, I am a cheater to myself. ;))

[Stealthy]

Horrible feature which drove me off from the game until it is fixed. Either pull it back to what it was, or allow me to delete the roads for a while and if new connection is not made, rebuild it automatically.

More imporantly could you do a simple modification on whole building tool? Which is:

Everything is free and demolishable when game is paused. When i unpause, money gets taken and things what i designed on pause mode gets built. This way we could build and tweak as much as this sorry to say, pretty dreadful building system makes us to tweak to get things right without spending absurd amounts of money.

And another wish, please sort out the points for the railways rather than these street things. We need proper crossover X sections, three way points etc to allow realistic designs.

Edit: 4 lane road, 2 different speed vehicles (cargo on horse carriages, passanges with L'obeissante) and they go on the same lanes without even intention to overtake... Seriously? Empty lane, 7km/h speed difference and no overtaking? No chance to set the lanes manually either ... Tram lines won't help, since i can't dictate which 2 of the 4 lanes i want the tracks built into... Please, play some Cities in Motion 2 and nick some ideas how these things are done properly. Including the building tool.

[Clausewitz]

I played TF for about 100 hours now and it has been my favorite game for the last 2 or 3 month, but since that bulldoze prohibition thing came into the game i completely lost interest.

Trying to relocate a road to lay tracks I ended up with a screen full of streets, none of which i could remove.
If u wont remove that stuff from the game pls gives us a sandbox mode (maybe without awards/achievements, so no one can complain about cheating) at least, where it is possible to remove streets just as easy as it was before last patch.

Really looking forward to play TF again.

[SuperJesse64]

The #1 way to make the new road system work: ALTER THE INTERSECTION GENERATION CODE!

[Knub]

I can't understand all the hate for this feature. It is reasonable because you can't cheat the game mechanics anymore. Since the update I played a new game from 1900 until 1965 and I could always build a road bypass with a tunnel, demolish the old road and then continue my rail above the new tunnel. It worked every single time for every street connection. Same with upgrading streets. Sometimes I have to demolish intersections because there is no space for upgrading. I just build the bypass and demolish the intersection. It also worked every single time.

There was only 1 new bug I encountered: I earned 2 billion by upgrading and building streets in a town.

@OP
Why do you build town streets in the open land? Use the other type of roads and it works perfectly.

[hawkeye]

Because it is impossible to build a simple railway crossing over a country road, the solution is to build a major highway with a tunnel?

By the way, the RL process is to tear up the road, lay the track and re-lay the road over the line. It usually can be done in less than 24hrs, even overnight. In game time, this is a second or so.

This is what the game once allowed you to do, although the road had to be rebuilt before track could be laid.

Now, how long do you think it would take in RL to build a highway with a tunnel - assuming the geology will allow a tunnel? Yet in doing so you are taking over a year's planning, surveying, construction and doing it all with the game on pause probably, but this isn't cheating?

In reality, the bypass change actually now requires the player to cheat.

I suspect that the reason for the bypass feature is that the game has a major bug in the way it calculates feasibility of transport - not due to cheating. Deleting a road can cause a factory to downsize. It's too hard to fix the game code, so the bypass feature was introduced.

Perhaps they will bring the feature in for railway lines, because they have the same problem.