Help! Neva the Great St Petersburg achievement - impossible?

[OgNimaeb]

I have been trying for what feels like forever to get the Neva the Great achievement for St Petersburg (where only 1 line can have tunnels). Nothing I have tried seems to help!

At some point after transporting ~300 passengers the passenger generation rate seems to just burst through the roof. At that point I always have at least 4 lines (two on the main island, one for the smaller islands and all the tunnels, one on the mainland) and multiple carriages. The game starts with enough tunnels to complete the achievement, so I never pick those at the end of the week.

I have played this game a fair bit, so I regularly use most of the common sense strategies, including:
*Making sure not to have more than 2 stations of the same type in a row.
*Using a "ghost" line to de-clog problematic stations (set up a line between the crowded station and a useful destination, then delete it, rinse and repeat with any other troublesome stations).
*Avoiding sharp turns in circle stations so trains aren't slowed down needlessly.
*Modifying lines on the fly, moving trains/carriages around to meet demand.

Even with obsessive micromanagement I haven't managed to transport more than ~650 passengers before everything just collapses. It's so bad that in my last game I had a line on the main island with just 5 stations (circle, circle, square, triangle, circle, with the square connected to the line with all the bridges and special stations) and two trains, which couldn't cope with its own passenger load after the third or fourth week.

I have watched a couple of videos and read through several posts, but they were a couple of years old, and seemed to have a much lower passenger generation rate, somehow. Has anything changed for this level over recent updates?

Has anyone managed to beat rhis avhievement recently?

Any suggestions and additional strategies would be greatly appreciated! :)

[guth]

I just tried it, and managed to do it, but I had to work pretty hard, and use all little tricks I know, including my main "trick" that I always use in the normal mode daily challenges. A big part of that trick is to use more than one ghost line. So try something like that, maybe. And let me know if you want more hints.

[OgNimaeb]

Thank you! I had the impression that this achievement was easier than some of the newer ones, but I seem to be struggling more. I think I have used two ghost lines on one attempt, but it may be worth exploiting that angle, much as I feel it's a bit cheaty.

[Ginner]

I agree it's impossible to beat using the basic correct strategy. I'm playing it like the youtube video by Drawing Dead from July 2015 in which he never has the passenger burst like the current version. I think the game spawned way less passengers back then. My best score after about 10 plays is 897. I will try the ghost line method.

[OgNimaeb]

Thank you, I thought I was just playing very badly! :D

[Ginner]

I think you might be able to do it with a couple of ghost lines but it would take forever
as you would be pausing every 3-4 seconds to set a new ghost line after about 600-700 points.
I did not do any better than my 897 score using 1 ghost line.

[nelson]

I agree that it seems to have become more difficult now. I just tried four times and only got 1390 points at best (using ghost lines). I guess that with some luck in the station spawning it is still possible though.

[guth]

I got 1615 points on my first attempt. :)

[OgNimaeb]

I also seem to be having issues on this and other levels (Cairo, mainly) with some passengers never leaving some stations. E.g. some passengers on a triangle station that want a circle one, never seem to board any trains, no matter how empty or how direct the route. Adding a ghost line doesn't help, even when there are no other passengers on that station they just won't board the train.

[Ginner]

guth, whats your secret besides obviously extreme good luck. Not saying this about
you but this game must be easy to hack if some people can post scores in the tens of
thousands on other cities.

[guth]

I follow the game rules just like (almost?) everyone else, but in normal mode (only) I do something you wouldn't do on a real metro system. It's something I think everyone knows is possible to do, but either they just haven't thought of actually doing it, or they don't think it would work very well, or they don't like playing that way, because it's boring or because they think it's not how you're supposed to play (just like ghost lines maybe isn't).

But I too wonder about those random names with almost random scores on the scoreboards. It's too bad you can't know which scores are real and which aren't, and sometimes I feel that other people might think I'm cheating in the daily challenges. I'm not, but I'm also probably not playing the normal mode as the developers intended, which is also why I've asked that they should make it impossible to use ghost lines or teleport trains. Because if that wasn't possible, I wouldn't be able to play the way I do, which would make it more fun.

As I've said before in another thread, I have no problem sharing my normal mode strategy. I just don't know if everyone really wants me to. Do you?

And OgNimaeb ("be a mingo" or "beaming o" backwards?), I've also seen single passengers getting stuck on a station a couple of times, but not so much that it's bothered me. Think of it as passengers who have fallen asleep on a station. :)
I've also seen some strange graphical glitches when more than maybe 50 (I'm guessing) people are waiting at a station. But it doesn't seem to affect gameplay.

[OgNimaeb]

The lazy passenger glitch seems to happen more often when I restart a level, rather than go back to the menu and start it from there. On a couple of occasions it has meant failing a level, when 4+ passengers have accumulated in problematic stations (circles at the end of lines with more circles in a row - on levels with an overabundance of them in certain parts of the map). I have seen the graphical glitch too.

OgNimaeb is my name spelled backwards, blame my much younger self for thinking it was a cool nickname, it stuck... :)

[emorkovin]

This achievement looks very difficult, perhaps even impossible, compare to previous maps. For several days I tried to do something, but the ideas ran out.

When I check videos that were published several years ago, I noticed that I NEVER have more than two SQUARE stations, which are always located on a large island (20+ attempts). It's very strange.

[Flem]

Please devs. Fix this map. There's a difference between challenging and downright near impossible. I'm sure there are mini metro fanatics who have little issues with it but more casual players would like to finish this game also.

[Ginner]

Fix it please.

[Flem]

Just look at this. https://i.imgur.com/aPYF6pC.png (this is endless mode just for screenshot purpose)
The right side of the map will ALWAYS only have a triangle and a load of circles. How are you supposed to deal with this. Not only that, the spawn rate of passengers is too much.

I would love to see a video of someone doing this to 1500. But I'm also open for a walkthrough of how to do this if it's possible cause nothing works for me.