Terraforming tutorials please

[molly_zero]

I've had this game a little over 2 weeks, and played about 70 hours. I started off very easy, gradually adding more difficulty, learning new things from tutorials or by trial & error, but always end up stuck; it's the terraforming that gets me every time. No matter which button I use, the land just goes up & down by some unfathomable algorithm, and I can't see rhyme or reason in it.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that when levelling rail track or roads, it would start from where you are and build embankments or dig cuttings to keep you at that level plus or minus a small gradient; but no.
Or when placing a station on a track, shouldn't the station tracks sit level with the tracks on either side? And then just level under the footprint. As it is, I can't figure out what point on buildings it uses for levelling, they always end up sitting in a hole.

Sorry to go on so, but it's driving me bonkers. Are there any useful tutorials on the subject that I haven't seen?

[tivaber]

If there would be a tutorial about this, it would be very short and straight forward:
"Yes, no matter which button you will use, the land will just go up & down like a boiling pudding". At least according to my experiences that's the way it 'works' right now in places where there are already buildings, rails and roads. (But in remote, 'virgin' landscape regions without infrastructure already existing, it's easy to use the 'level from center' tool)

[MG83]

Originally posted by tivaber:

If there would be a tutorial about this, it would be very short and straight forward:
"Yes, no matter which button you will use, the land will just go up & down like a boiling pudding". At least according to my experiences that's the way it 'works' right now in places where there are already buildings, rails and roads. (But in remote, 'virgin' landscape regions without infrastructure already existing, it's easy to use the 'level from center' tool)

actually there were one at you tube or something thats pretty nice.

[M00nshine]

My answer would be yes, this is how it works right now BUT try these couple of suggestions that i've found to work.
So firstly, when you try to lay the track and see it's needing levelling, rather than letting the game do it for you, cancel that build and level it yourself first. Perhaps build a gentle gradient rather than letting the game go too low or high. Use the average height terraform tool and slowly work your way along. Or pick a different route - the map is huge afterall.
Secondly, the game won't touch anything close to stuff you've already built so sometimes it's worth just deleting what's in the "way" so give you more room to terraform. That's why it's best to do all this paused as all buildable items cost nothing until time progresses. This annoys me a bit as you find you have to delete a road to fit a building in but then after it's build you can build the road anyway.
I'm sure there was a "thirdly" but i forgot :).

Oh yeah i remember - thirdly, build a bit at a time rather than just one long stretch. It's a bit counter-intuitive but you'll either find it works, or just one slight adjustment makes it work rather than having the game do a hatchet job on the whole long run.

No tutorials but i've picked up a lot watching other people play on youtube and see the approach that they take.

[TheAmishStig]

The "boiling terrain" problem seems to come from the increased leveling speed a couple patches back. When you're paying for it, it's like having 50 bulldozers at your disposal, and they move the points so far in a single tick that it never gets "in tolerance"...overshooting too high, then overshooting too low, then overshooting too high, back and forth and forth and back.

It's slower, but if you build a Road Depot within 3km, stock it with bulldozers/diggers, and then uncheck the "with money" checkboxes, the terraforming will be slower...but it'll also do a much better job of hitting the thresholds.

Moonshine's point about elevation points that are 'locked in' is also a big one. The game can't modify terrain within a certain range of a building (the dots that turn red when moving the 'level this?' cursor around), and when placing a building the act of flattening the pad site can touch terrain as much as 5 or 6 elevation points away. It's what makes pre-flattening so important, if the land is perfectly level then it doesn't 'flatten the pad site' and you can put stuff a lot closer together.