How do I improve passenger numbers ?

[mbutton15]

Currently doing a free-mode run in South America. Task 11 is to deliver a total of 700,000+ passengers.

I have all cities connected, but only getting 23,000 passengers a year. I'm just madly trying to increase city populations in the hope that increase passenger uptake.

On my cities over 60,000 population I have been adding the 'attraction' buildings to boost passengers visiting a city. I have around a dozen cities over 60,000 but only half have the 'attraction' building. The rest have the museum to boost fulfilment while I was trying to achieve other tasks. Should I now change them as if I do I'm concerned those cities will lose population as many are already only below 60% fulfilment so a 10% drop could trigger population decline.

What should I be focusing on to increase flow of passengers ? Is there an optimum way of getting all passengers ? At the moment I generally have 2 trains connecting city to city. Is this too low ? Passengers only hang around for 14 days (maybe it's a longer period on the 100 year map?) so am I missing loads of passengers. Should I be using passenger only trains and setting minimum carriages to 8 so they only travel with full loads ?

I know I'm hundreds of hours into this game, but it's the first time I have to ferry so many passengers around.

[heervandering]

Long time ago, but I suspect to connect all cities with P&M trains twice, so A to B, B to A, B to C, C to B and so on, with priority for passengers. In Research you can research an item that improves your passengers in your stations or let them wait longer, I suppose you did all that. Carriages with minimum 8 passengers isn't OK, they will wait too long and may even block other trains while waiting in a station. The 23K a year is not a reference, just look at your task how many passengers you have already, if it doesn't mount build more P&M trains from A to D for instance and so on, it should work

[t.schmidt]

Do you have stations for different typs of cargo. I have in every city one station just only for P&M and one only for the actual cargo. And then I try to built at least 4 connection for every city, most of them connect to the nearest neighbours, but some are longer distance (but I think this is not important for your problem). And of course you have to take care of the population, the more the merrier.Attraction will helb your goal as well. And yes, after increasing the fullfilment it will help building attraction instead as well

[Thineboot]

700 / 23 = 30 ... it should complete on it's own :)

14 days is for 20-year scenarios. I know gardlt, chaney and a few others provided a correct number for 100-year games from time to time but I don't recall it, would have to look it up by myself.
Just 2 trains and 28 day routes in SA seem very wrong to me. The map scale it bigger (x2 iirc)... are you really sure about these numbers?
I've tried min cars for Automatic Express trains - inter city can handle the need for Meat and Chicha and industrial goods - but that works only if you know for sure which one of the two can provide more cars. Otherwise you're loosing express goods. And once you wait you can kiss your Express bonus goodbye. As long as the stations can handle the inter city exchange adding Dining cars (and Mail cars) help. Just don't use them during the early game as they're just too heavy for weak engines.

60K and only 60% with museums... there is much air for more. Increase the basic goods distribution and try to spread whatever industry goods are produced by the AI to any nearby cities.

Unless you're in a hurry push R&D to get all those nice boni and switch to attractions afterwards if necessary. I'd prefer museums as I believe those +10% are a better investment than attractions. But that's just opinion based on observation and not tested.

I never had 700K which sounds pretty much but 23K should handle it :)

[mbutton15]

I keep doing the maths - for the gold tick I currently need 27,000 a year. As I'm not meeting that, the numbers just keeps going up !! I think I have another 14 years for the gold tick.

I don't think the express bonus is important as that's for revenue rather than number of passengers. Or do more people travel if you have the express rating ? I don't know.

Similarly, isn't the dining car just a revenue boost, rather than passenger uptake ? Again, IDK.

I think I've got all the R&D 'passenger waiting at station' boosts... at least until another 1000 R&D points.

South America certainly feels a different scale to what I've played on before. Maybe I need to check on the supply of goods. I think my stations are fine. Whenever I check usage I don't think I've seen any above 50%-60% capacity. I think my big problem could well be I'm losing passengers as the routes are long so I think I'm losing lots to the '14 day' wait time (or whatever the 100 year equivalent is).

One thing I don't do is build A to C routes. All my routes are A to B. I could try using A to C and see what kind of uptake I get.

[Thineboot]

Express bonus results in more money you can invest in... let's say an industry that pushes growth of surrounding cities... so it affects the number of passengers - indirectly.
Same goes for Dining and Mail cars with Dining car also adding +20% to passenger rating...

I think it was "2 months" but again, I'd have to look it up myself.

While I like AC especially connected with DC I stick to AB in RE :)

[chaney]

14 day max wait is for 20 year games, for 100 years it is something like 2 months.

For capturing maximum passengers, the details of min cars, train type, other cargo, etc. are not directly relevant. You will capture all the passengers as long as they can all get on a train (not filled already with Freight) without waiting at a Station with no train at the Platform for their trip for longer than the max waiting time.

So you must always have space for them to load up onto a train going their way - leaving no long gap with such a train unavailable.

A natural network connecting nearby neighbors generally serves everything by passengers taking transfers, so if A-B-C are not at a right angle but are kind of in line, just serving A-B and B-C should do fine, and you should get twice the credit ... one count for each leg rather than a single count for the full trip.

Attractions will give the immediate boost, but with a longer time scale I suspect the added growth from Museums will yield a higher total over time than the Attractions do. It looks like you will meet the mark anyway, so no worries!

[mbutton15]

I had a Promoter recently so boosted one city. I also spotted a mistake in my calculations as I forgot the deadline is end of year so have 1 extra year. That has left me with 15 years left and just under 27,000 a year will get me there. The financial summary shows I transported just under 27,000 for the previous year. I'm hoping that's not artificially high due the Promoter being in operation so increasing the numbers.

I also discovered a couple of cities that I haven't actually developed at all so growing them should help the situation.

I added the dining car to a couple of routes. As well as the 20% boost to passenger revenue it did also give a 20% boost to the passenger satisfaction rating, which I'd never noticed before. However, not sure I'm gonna go and update 100+ routes !!

But, yes, is it beginning to look like I will hit the target. I think I should add at least one passenger train on each line as I'm pretty sure I'm exceeding the 2 month wait time.

[mbutton15]

Bugger...
As suspected, it looks like the Promoter has inflated the figures as I dropped to 24,698 passengers.

[chaney]

Grow and go, seems like it will be fine :) Keep pushing trains until demand is saturated :)

[mbutton15]

744,000 passengers safely delivered. In the end I completed 3 years inside the gold tick date. There were 3 Market Criers and 1 Promoter late on. By then I was already on target to hit the gold mark.

I really just concentrated on the combined effort of growing cities to level 4 and using the tourist site buildings to attract extra passengers. I did add a few extra trains, but didn't add any more dining cars as I wasn't going to do all 150+ passenger trains !!

The tech tree was also utilised to gain faster/stronger engines, plus a few to increase passenger volume/wait times.

In the end I finished with 401 trains. The most trains I've deployed on any map by a long, long way. Overall I had 1 green tick as I failed to grow the company big enough, quickly enough for task 2. Still managed the President rating, with use of Manual Pause.

[Thineboot]

How many Passengers did you have in your last full year?

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by Thineboot:

How many Passengers did you have in your last full year?

37,795 (1869), 37,351 (1870), 35,384* (1871)

The goal was reached on Dec 18 1871 so I've just let it roll on to complete the year to give me the 35,384 figure. I think in 1869 & 1870 I had Market Criers in virtual back-to-back operation. During 1871 I had a Promoter employed.

Those final few years were achieved from just letting the game tick by. I was confident that I would reach the target so had stopped growing as such. A couple of cities did reach the 60,000 growing milestone so I added the tourism boost building. And I think 1 (maybe 2) factory slots also opened up.

[chaney]

:)

[Thineboot]

As always, with enough money you can do nearly everything... to make more money - citizens and Passengers are just a convenient byproduct ;)