Strategy tips and suggestions

[Simon]

Thought we needed a thread to discuss strategy and tips. as there's a lot more complexity than Mini Metro.

For starters, roundabouts are indeed awesome and I found it even more necessary to 'protect space' around the destination shops (are they shops?) to allow their placement once you get them. It can cause problems when the shops and houses spawn too closely and you don't have the 9 x 9 tile space required to place them, which is a very large space after all.

I'm still unsure when and how traffic lights should be used, or if they're even beneficial at all.

Please post any strategy tips and tricks including for each individual map.

[LotusBlade]

Have played only twice and watched other people play twice, what i have seen is - traffic lights are not useful at all, even more, they will slow down cars compared to 'no lights'. Maybe at 2500+ score you do need them for very high density areas where cars are driving non-stop.

The other one is, placing 'high-way exit' directly near shop is a bad idea, since even same coloured cars are messing with each other if 15+ of them pile together.

[Sense_101]

If you want strategy, I just completed the daily challenge in fourth place with over 7000 points and I can tell you that the biggest misconception about this game is that all the houses and destinations of a colour need to be connected. It's completely untrue!

For a square destination, you need 2-3 houses connected, and for a circle destination 4-5.
Then simply have every single destination on its own connection to a few houses, which almost completely eliminates traffic problems you might face.

Another useful thing to know is that motorways are AMAZING, always pick one if you get the option, as later in the game everything depends on how fast your cars can get to their destination. If you have to route some cars from one side of the city to the other, having a spare motorway makes it easy.

I can confirm traffic lights are almost always useless, except when you have some unused houses that you can't avoid connecting to a main road. Adding a traffic light just stops the main flow of traffic from slowing down, as the unused house won't be outputting cars anyway.

[Simon]

Wow, that's an impressive score. I'd love to see that. I always bomb out before 1500.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Sense_101:

the biggest misconception about this game is that all the houses and destinations of a colour need to be connected. It's completely untrue!

Yea, I figured that out immediately and was concerned for the depth of strategy in this game.

[liq3]

Originally posted by Sense_101:

For a square destination, you need 2-3 houses connected, and for a circle destination 4-5.
Then simply have every single destination on its own connection to a few houses, which almost completely eliminates traffic problems you might face.

It's rather disappointing that this seems to be the best strategy for highscores. It basically removes the actual traffic management part of the game.

[Sense_101]

Originally posted by Simon:

Wow, that's an impressive score. I'd love to see that. I always bomb out before 1500.

Here is a screenshot of what it looked like at the end:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553246568

As you can see, everything is kept as separated as possible

[Sense_101]

Originally posted by liq3:

Originally posted by Sense_101:

For a square destination, you need 2-3 houses connected, and for a circle destination 4-5.
Then simply have every single destination on its own connection to a few houses, which almost completely eliminates traffic problems you might face.

It's rather disappointing that this seems to be the best strategy for highscores. It basically removes the actual traffic management part of the game.

While that is true, there anyway is next to no traffic management anyway, because of the way the car AI works. All cars simply pick the fastest route, no matter how much traffic there is there. So adding different routes to go places doesn't even help unfortunately

[Kitsunin]

This is honestly rather disappointing. One of the awesome things about Mini Metro was how it paralleled real congestion problems. It is very satisfying to have cars drive on the roads you drew, but it is honestly rather sad that you aren't making a proper network to try to minimize congestion, but rather creating discrete routes.

Back when I thought houses chose the mall they wanted to go to at random (yesterday lol), I thought the game was a lot more interesting :(

[Sense_101]

Originally posted by Kitsunin:

Back when I thought houses chose the mall they wanted to go to at random (yesterday lol), I thought the game was a lot more interesting :(

I agree with you 100%, and I wish it was like that, it would make the game way more fun to play

[Matt]

Originally posted by Kitsunin:

but it is honestly rather sad that you aren't making a proper network to try to minimize congestion, but rather creating discrete routes.

Back when I thought houses chose the mall they wanted to go to at random (yesterday lol), I thought the game was a lot more interesting :(

Yea, I strongly agree.

You can ignore inconvenient houses. Focus on efficient, discrete clusters. You don't even need to route with the ridiculous highways.

[LotusBlade]

Guys i understand what you are upset about but that is something that exists in every game since forever.

Take a shooter games — the best strategy is to hide behind few other teammates to not die and attack from hiding spot, which eliminates action from the game turning it into camper boredoom.

Take Transport Tycoon Deluxe as another example, it's a game about transportation, but instead of making complicated mega roads intersecting with many stations, you just make separate roards for each station and ruin transportation element. Cus this is simply faster, more efficient and safer.

In Binding of Isaac randomness is main aspect of game, but people restarting first floor until they get desired first free item and only then continue run, which ruins roguelike+randomness.

[Kend0]

Originally posted by Sense_101:

Here is a screenshot of what it looked like at the end:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553246568

As you can see, everything is kept as separated as possible

OH MY GOD IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE.

Metro had passengers spawn randomly, meaning your entire network needed to be ready to service both massive groups of common shapes and the awkward rarer shapes. This game doesnt have that. Its strictly colour-coded, you dont actually need to make a 'proper' system of interconnected roads like cities actually have, because cars only need 1 destination and malls only need 1 type of visitor. You already know what they spawn, and you already know what they want. You just need to create as little overlap as possible and 'feed' the Mallsǃ

Have some awards, you just opened my eyes xD

[Quinn]

While this is the best strategy so far, it completely ruins the fun for me. I will keep connecting everything to everything. Failing at 2000 is part of that then.

[guth]

I've been a Steam beta tester for the past 5 weeks, and came to the same conclusion, and I also think this separation is a lot more boring than how the game *could* work. My proposal to them was to force *one* road network. Roads that weren't connected to it, would be inactive (and shown in a different color maybe). I also proposed combining this with car path finding that took amount of traffic into account, so the whole network would actually be used. Today all cars take the same route.
It didn't feel like they *really* listened to me, though. Start a petition, and I'll give it to them! :)

[Matt]

Originally posted by Kend0:

because cars only need 1 destination and malls only need 1 type of visitor. You already know what they spawn, and you already know what they want. You just need to create as little overlap as possible and 'feed' the Mallsǃ

Have some awards, you just opened my eyes xD

It's simpler than this.

Malls need cars at a rate determined by their size. Connect ONLY as many as it needs.

Homes don't need anything.