One strategy that destroys the idea behind the game

[Onomatopeya]

I just got 4698 points on New York without cheating. BUT I'M NOT HAPPY WITH THE WAY I DID IT.

The strategy:
Often you can stay alive quite a while when you have a spare line and locomotive that you build from the most overcrowded station to a nearby station that efficiantly empties the "problematic" station. While the locomotive is on its way, you cancel the complete line and wait fot the locomotive to reach the destiny. Now you have your spare line back and can start the whole procedure with the station that now is the most overcrowded.

The problem:
Although I would get about double the passengers before my metro is shut down using this strategy, it's quite annoying to spend half the game starting and cancelling a two-station-line over and over again. And the idea behind the game of planning your line well enough to survive would be destroyed.

The solution (just some ideas) :
-The player could have a limited amount of line cancelling (at least per week), e.g. one cancel per line per week. (I'm not talking about changing lines, but completely deleting them)
-After cancelling a line this line could go on cooldown for a few seconds before being available again. (imo not the best solution)


Do you have some more ideas how to deal with this problem? Or do you think this "strategy" should stay possible to do?

[Robert]

This is definitely our biggest gameplay bugbear right now. The main problem with this is that the obvious way of fixing it - restricting line cancellations/rebuilding - would go totally against the grain of the main gameplay of Mini Metro, which is having total freedom to build the lines however you like.

We could introduce a cooldown timer based on how many lines you have, however you'd still be able to move the line by expanding to where you want and then contracting it away from where it was - not a great move, because you'd have to wait for the train to move, but it would still get around the restriction. And it's probably going to make the game a lot less fun in mean time.

We've attempted to alleviate it by doubling the station collapse time (it used to be 20 seconds) and making station overflows cascade - so once one station goes it encourages others to do so - and that has had some impact but not enough I feel. So I might crank that up in the next build and we'll see.

[ignoreme]

I highly second the OP's solution of restricting the amount of line deletion per week. The first weeks into each round are always fun to play. But when the stations start to get desperately overcrowded and one needs to start following the outlined strategy to keep the system running, this otherwise strategic and enjoyable game becomes tedious and unpleasant work.

By the way, it's amazing to see developers reacting so quickly and so extensively to players ideas. Keep up the great work! I'm looking forward to seeing Mini Metro evolve into an even greater gaming experience.

[Perfect Info]

One idea might be a 'new line bonus' that attracts passengers to the stations of newly founded lines for a short period afterwards. It would discourage relief lines, since the extra passengers will just exacerbate the problem station. You could even add a visual indication (the station[s] affected could expand their icon briefly or have a small particle effect like ticker-tape in the colour of the founded line).

The problem I see with 'overflow cascades' is the cause is hidden to the player while the effect is plain and panic-inducing. Sure, the first overflow is obvious because you watched the passengers pile up at the usual rate. But the subsequent overflows happening at a faster rate would be completely missed by a player. A lot is going on 'under the hood' in this game, and without an indication one overflow causes more further down the line, I'd get frustrated quickly with little understanding why.

[KingyBear]

What about instead of restricting the game play of adding the metro lines you add a feature where you can temporarily add an extra train if you have it between stations for 1 trip. Because when there's big events they add extra trains so why cant we?

[GrandT]

First off, great game and very addictive plus buckets of fun.

Now for the deleting a route "tactic". I've spent some time reading over this thread and agree on the stance of having a cool-down ability where you can place a relief train on a line.

So here's a few ideas on how I'd fit this in to the current game-play:
- From a new icon you can drag a "Relief Train" (RT) to any station on any line, just like you would with a new train. This train would become identical in length to the shortest train on the line.

- Once placed the RT would stay on the line for 7 days and at the same time enter a 14 day cool-down before it can be used again, allowing the player a chance of rectifying the line at the weekend. Running time and cool-down are just ballpark figures.

- With the RT method you could then possibly tighten up the line removal rules, by locking a line from being removed entirely for 7 days (small padlock on the line icons in the icon bar perhaps, along with countdown).

- You could even expand on this, and maybe have it where new stations also have... say a 1 day lock before they can be removed. These could be displayed with small coloured padlocks around the station icon. The locks for stations could be delayed until a train actually uses that station, so you can quickly change your mind before the next train arrives.

Anyhow, just a few ideas to throw out there. It would certainly add to the game without changing anything too drastically.

[Dinosaur Polo Club]

We'll try with a cooldown timer that escalates as you open more lines. So you'll need to wait longer to reopen the 7th line after closing it compared to the 6th line. What this will prevent however is total network changes—those times where it's all a big mess, so you nuke all the lines and start again. If you did that you could only reroute three or four lines, and wait to do the rest. Not ideal.

The issue with any kind of change we make to disincentivise undesirable strategies is that we're then incentivising different strategies. Players will game around the incentives and find new, odd strategies that we didn't expect and go again how the game was designed to be played. Of course that's part of the wonder of games, people exploring the nooks and crannies of the design and finding all sorts of oddball ways to play it. What we don't want however is a degenerate strategy that you *have* to do in order to get a top score.

What the problem boils down to fundamentally is the ability to warp locomotives to exactly where you need them. Soon we'll be introducing a method to reassign carriages and locomotives between lines. We don't know exactly what impact that will have on the game as it introduces the possibility for a lot more micromanagement. Depending on how it's implemented it may replace the rescue line.

[Onomatopeya]

Originally posted by Dinosaur Polo Club:

What we don't want however is a degenerate strategy that you *have* to do in order to get a top score.

Because of this very reason I see no other solution than having to change something pretty "big", as the problem described in this discussion in my opinion is such a "degenerate strategy". I like a lot of the ideas in this discussion and I am curious which one will make it into the game and which impact it will have. As said, it's impossible to fully anticipate the meta-game. My biggest hope at the moment is that the change blocking "my strategy" is just going to come soon.

BTW: Great developers, great community, great game!!!

[hagaren]

I honestly don't like that idea.

Usually you need to rebuild your system completely from scratch at some point, because in this game an online algorithm/solution is significantly worse than one that works with complete information.

[macky_07]

I tried short temporary lines and found it is very effective to clean up crowding. Unfortunately I also don't like that way.

As far as I played, temporary line seems to be necessary to get a high score. I'm happy if any other way was there.

Others may enjoy temporary lines. So I'd like to suggest that add some bonuses to long lived line (like an extra carriage per 2 or 3 weeks), instead of adding some limits to the temporary line.

[Aslanex]

I like the Free Market's idea, to attract more passengers to a new line for a while. It's not absolutely realistic, but it sounds funny and effective :)

[geoffr]

It never occurred to me to make short lived lives like that - once I've put a line down I always try to do no more than tweak it's route... no wonder I never get above about 1700 passengers before it all goes bang. ;)

[Gakato]

Originally posted by Dinosaur Polo Club:

What the problem boils down to fundamentally is the ability to warp locomotives to exactly where you need them.

Yea exactly. I think the warping is basically the problem, which needs to be solved.
This could be done in several ways I guess. I can come up with something like, if you place a train on the map it will stay there forever, there is nothing like "vanish and reappear on the other side of the map". This would mean you get only a limited amount of trains which spawn out of nothing (the initial placement of the trains), and all the other reassignments, e.g. assigning a train to a new line, will require the train to travel through the network to its destination (while getting rid of all passengers on the next station as usual), or, if there is no (fast) connection, traveling "over land" by other means with a slower speed than on lines (also being the case when deleting the whole network, then they all just need to be reassigned to the lines).

I think this solves the rescue line pretty much and is obvious and understandable by every player. It also improves the feeling of train traveling around the map. Though it will probably make the game harder, i.e. when and which train to reassign, but I think that's a good thing.

[jorvalen]

i have used this strategy a lot to obtain high scores in previous alpha versions, and i like it a lot, for the micromanage aspect it brings to minimetro, and i would hate to see it gone completely.

what i would say though. its that. the more lines there are available the more powerful it is, there was an alpha version that only had like 5 lines max, so having a floating line had a drawback, since you only had 4 lines running, maybe thats a way to balance a possible different mode promoting more micromanage

[Princess Fuzzy]

Reading through the suggestions, and thinking about the mechanics of the problem I've come up with a couple of ideas.

It seems like a good way to counter the rescue line strategy would be to implement a cooldown that stops you from removing newly placed lines or disconnecting newly connected stations.

Doing it that way would allow you to place a rescue line once every now and then, but not over and over again in quick succession.

That method would also have minimal impact on doing total network redesigns since any long standing lines would be instantly removable and only the most recently connected stations would be locked up.


I do like the idea of trains having to traverse the existing lines to get to their new assignments rather than being warped in instantly.

[argh!]

I discovered the strategy, but didn't use it in subsequent games because it went against what I understood to be the point of the game: a working system.

On the other hand, there where situations where I thought I could have gotten further, because my new layout could have fixed the problems, but I got unlucky and the trains didn't reach the full stations in time. A little micromanagement could have saved the game.

Arbitrary limits (cooldown) suck, especially since you managed to keep them out of the game so far. And if someone enjoys micromanagement, you'd be taking it away from them. And infact, more control, like the ability to reassign trains to different routes, would be very welcome. I can already do it now by completly deleting the route and redrawing it, doing it directly would be very welcome. But of course, it makes the problem even worse.

*However*, as far as I can tell, the *only* real issue is that this strategy allows you to accumulate score. So why not just change the way you score points? One would have to run the numbers and experiment to find out the best way. I imagine not counting any passanger riding on a train that travels on a section of a route for the first time (a new/newly assigned train on an existing route, or an existing train on a new/modified section of a route), or even subtract them from the current score to make sure that it hurts when saving crowded stations, and offsets the score other lines are accumulating while running normally. Another possibility would be to have to "pay" for every/certain commands you issue with score. Or a combination of those. Or something different (ideally, a single, simple metric that scales well). As long as you can't accumulate a lot of score simply by delaying the inevitable. If you micromanage from time to time, that's ok, if you do it a lot, you might stay in the game longer, but someone else with a better layout would have accumulated more score in less time.

It would destroy the "score = # of passangers", but it's way better than imposing arbitrary rules on gameplay. Of course, people could then be gaming the scoring system, but just making it harsh enough should make this managable. It legitimizes micromanagement, while still discuraging it. The only reward would be prolonging the game, but just treating water if you rely on the strategy. It also allows for desperate measures when things are falling apart, instead of just sitting there, watching everything go to hell, unable to do anything because the cooldown or whatever isn't ready. And even if two hypothetical players don't use micromanagment at all, the one with the better layout, having to fix less, would score more. It means you can just play however you want if you just play recreationally, but have to think ahead and play optimal if you're going for score. How it works now is that the score is roughly equivalent to the time you survived anyway (new stations, and new passangers always appear roughly at the same time in every game, right? So, for every given time, you moved roughly the same amount of people), while a scoring system that punishes could be more meaningful.

Ok, I'm starting to ramble. I hope this is clear enough, and I didn't make some obvious error in reasoning here ;)