Best way to start

[chef.harrison76]

As a new player, I'm interested in focusing on passenger services rather than cargo, but I'm unsure how to make this profitable or how to help a city grow with this play style. Could anyone offer advice or strategies on how to achieve this, especially since I usually start my games between 1970 and 2000 and play on easy mode?

[numbat]

There will be no money problems if your'e playing on easy mode, once you get going.

Starting that late, you might struggle to buy trains and lay track. Not sure if the track costs more to lay later on (faster track costs more), but certainly locos and rolling stock will cost you more, and therefore you might stuggle to get a footing. Once you do, however, you should be right.

To start, pick two large cities a reasonable distance apart, and lay a track between them. Build your train stations near the edge of town, and build a tram route throughout both cities to get all the cims to the station. I generally run two routes through town, a clockwise route, and an anti-clockwise route. I would start with a single track and a single train, and build from there.

If you can get all that setup within your starting budget (and take the max loans) then sit back and watch the $ start rolling in.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Don't use high speed tracks and focus on cargo traffic first, simple and straightforward lines such as grain>food or crude oil>oil works well and is easy to set up.

Passengers have competition from private cars, plus the market is not well developed - towns remain small, but trainsets tend to be larger and more expensive to operate - so that is best left for later, in a modern era start up.

Once you get a few such lines going, you can then think of more complicated and risky cargo setups, as well as passenger traffic.

[GIJoe597]

New player here also. Had the game for two weeks. What I have noticed is as numbat typed, once you get some lines up and running the money rolls in. You get a ridiculous amount. My current game I started on Hard with a Megalomaniac size map. The only difference I found was it took longer for the money to start rolling in. But once it does, you are swimming in dough.

One thing I think is worth mentioning, towns grow based on several things. You can influence those things by using the developer provided "sandbox" mod. There are sliders you can set to decide which factors affect town growth. There is a section in settings named Town Growth. It has the following sliders;

Public Transport
Private Transport
Cargo Supply
Overcrowded Stations
Traffic Congestion
Emissions.

I would suggest you may want to move the Cargo supply slider all the way down while moving the Public Transport to max.

[Gregorovitch]

The answer to your query, OP, is that if you want to play the game as intended you cannot rely on passengers only and you certainly can't start with passengers. This is because each cargo item demanded by a city (which starts at two per and goes uo to six with growth) counts as one growth multiplier whereas passenger services count as only one. In addition to this passenger services demand does not really kick in until a city experiences growth so starting with passenger services fails to a chicken and egg problem.

The purpose of the game is not really to make money (which is quite easy when you know how even on very hard), although obviously it is important, the real challenge of the game is to grow cities (develop the economy basically) and this is actually quite difficult, much more difficult than just making money because it is a quite serious logistical problem to fulfil the cities' ever increasing demands.

Consequently if you want the real TF2 experience you start with and concentrate thereafter on industry and cargo adding passenger services once you have kick started city growth with industry. Also the civs in this game have a maximum time limit that they are prepared to travel for to get somewhere. In the early game you are reliant on horses and very slow and exorbitantly expensive (relative to their performance) trains so the civs will be very reluctant to use such services. As you get better and especially faster vehicles this changes over time.

You can set up a game to change this such that you can play more or even exclusively with passengers. For example you can:

a) start late (1900 or even 1950 for example) giving you access to better trains from the get go
b) play on easy or even with infinite money
c) install mods to accelerate city growth regardless of what you do

You can also use a halfway house approach by increasing the frequency (i.e. density) of both towns and industries on the free game map setup which has the effect of making the set up of production chains much easier and passenger routes more attractive to the civs because the cities are much closer together and there are more destinations. Basically this opens many more opportunities much earlier leading to more growth and easier profits.

If you do this the game becomes more of a city builder with a particularly good train set added rather than a challenging transport management sim. The game can be played both ways.

[Furball]

When starting any map, no matter what you overall plan i would start with some basic cargo transport. Find raw material industries with a producers nearby and just run a short train or some trucks between the two. The supplier will always ship the initial level of cargo (200?) even if the producer has no customers.

If you add a couple of these to start with you be making an easy profit and this can act as your battery so you will have lot of money and can experiment or do whatever else you feel like, even if it makes a loss, as your batteries will be running endlessly giving you loads of money.



Trains need a critical mass to be worthwhile/profitable which is pretty easily achievable with cargo as it is easy to see how much cargo needs moving beforehand and it is generally constant.

It is much harder to achieve with passengers as it is difficult to guage how many people actually want to travel along a route, especially in the later years when people have cars, where unlike games like Cities Skylines where if you build public transport people will automatically use it, in TF2 people act more like real life where people will use their car unless public transport is immensly faster or they have no other choice.

If you ignore cargo you also lose a lot of the growth modifiers which grow town population and thus passenger demand.

Generally when starting passenger transport i put a few stops around two towns which start the public transport modifier going and help grow the towns. I then add a coach route between the two towns and the around town bus also act as collectors for the coach route.

You can probably start looking at a train when there are around 200 people using the coach at any time so you have a train which around 100 people going each way.

When you add the train, remove the coach and all the passengers who were using the coach should start using the train instead. If you lose the coach some will still use the coach so you will have both an underused coach line and train line.


If you want to focus on passengers you can also change the growth modifiers in the advanced setting (these can be changed any time you reload the save) so that towns grow much larger although this does have the issue of increased private traffic and people like to use cars, combined with the fact there isn't a mod like traffic president (Cities Skylines) often leads to endless hours trying to deal with traffic jams.



In the sliders i always turn off emissions as there is no real way to counter them and thus they are a pure negative and thus unfun manigerial game concept. You need vehicles to go into town for towns to grow. Sending vehicles into town increases emissions which decreases town growth. The only way to counter it is don't send vehicles in. Increasing maintenance has a minor effect but can be a micro management nightmare (there is a mod) and seems to make no tangible difference

If vehicles got much cleaner late in the game so you could actually do something to mitigate emissions i would leave it turned on.

[ROCKnROLLA]

I have a video that might help answer some of the questions you have @chef.harrison76. I've got tips and tricks included and plan to continue the series. Check it out on my channel.
https://youtu.be/E-imb1n1gbw