How to get 2000 passengers on a normal map without ghost lines

[dholland]

Here's an example on Washington. I'm not saying this is ideal -- I would have preferred only one intersection but was forced to choose between tunnels I didn't need or a second intersection. I also don't have much recent practice of playing this way, since I usually play normal daily challenges and use ghost lines to be competitive.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1872970044

This post is not about being competitive in daily challenges, it's just for people who are having trouble getting to 1500 passengers on any line. The good news is you don't have to use any ghost lines, and so you don't have to spend more than half an hour playing.

What I did was balance the different lines for the number of stations as well as trying to achieve some station alternation. In practice, I would have to redesign the network every time a new line was offered in weekly rewards to avoid some lines getting too many stations and others too few.

About station balance: it probably looks pretty terrible in the screenshot! I was a lot stricter earlier on, trying very hard to avoid 3 circles in a row or 2 triangles in a row. Beyond a certain number of stations, the imbalance of too many circle stations (and clusters of circle and triangle stations) makes it eventually impossible to avoid even with the maximum number of lines if you connect all stations (which is what ghost lines are for but that's a more advanced and time-consuming strategy).

Use your creativity. I took tunnels twice to give a bit more room for manoeuvre, say if I had to make a line cross water twice to be the right number of stations and balance with other lines. I would say it probably would have gone better if I had chosen a carriage earlier than I did instead of extra lines, but you have to work within the weekly choices the game gives you. Probably I didn't need the first interchange so early, either, but I wanted to show how it is useful to have a square station as a central station common to all lines. Ignore the second interchange, I had to put it somewhere, but it's not a great help!

To fit in the last line, I had to be creative and move away from the idea of lines radiating out from the central square without crossing, but I kept to that idea for as long as I could balance the stations that way.

Also, one time I got a new line, I didn't have enough stations to integrate it properly, so I didn't use that line until the next week when I had more stations.

I also paused and moved trains or carriages from one place to another to deal with angry stations a few times. Unless you build the perfect network, that will probably be useful to survive longer.

Hope that gives people some idea of how to get over 1500 passengers without spending too much time on it. Have fun.

[dholland]

I should also have mentioned, I was keeping all stations connected all the time. If you leave a few unconnected, but still don't use ghost lines, you can get a much larger score, but you'll have to move a lot of trains and carriages and edit a lot of lines and there'll still be a lot of pausing and it's time-consuming. Still more fun and less pausing than using a lot of ghost lines, though.