Quick Mini Motorways Strategy Guide

Tips, hints, and other information to get you started without overloading your brain.

Basics

Gameplay Elements

Roads

The basic building block of Mini Motorways. Allows a car to take a path that you draw. You receive a certain amount each time you choose an upgrade.

The biggest tip I can give you regarding roads is this: Diagonal roads use just as many tiles as North/East/South/West roads do, but are approximately 40% longer. Keep this in mind when building roads from remote houses to their respective destinations. When optimizing how you place your roads, look at the grid. Each square can have a segment pointing in 8 directions. North, East, South, West, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest. It can be deceiving when multiple roads are clumped together, because the graphics smooth them out into one blob, but all roads are formed in one of these 8 directions.

Cars and Pins

Cars are fairly self-explanatory. They are happy when they can travel to a pin and go home.

Pins are located at "destinations" (stores and other buildings). If too many build up in a particular building, a timer begins, accompanied with a "ticking" sound. If you let that timer build all the way up, it's game over!

It should be noted that there are several different types of buildings, each with a different "pin generation rate", so to speak. You'll notice that, save for challenge criteria, some "square" buildings might be upgraded to "circles". Some stores that appear may have two buildings in them (keep in mind, you can direct traffic THROUGH these! can come in handy, but don't divert a huge amount of traffic through them or the cars can't service them!).

Furthermore, if you're coming from Mini Metro, you might distress when a few houses are formed way out toward the edge of your map -- this is okay! Houses are just "car generation resources" and can't cause you to lose -- it just means you might need shorter roads to the other houses of that color and their destinations to pick up the slack.

Traffic Lights

Alternate the flow of traffic like a real-life traffic light. These seem underwhelming at first (and often are!), but what they do is allow for one direction of traffic at a time to NOT have to slow down, providing a small efficiency boost in some situations.

Roundabouts

These allow cars to not slow down much at intersections.
Generally better than traffic lights, but the downside is that you get fewer of them, and they take up far more space in congested areas. Reserve Traffic lights for small, clustered intersections, and reserve roundabouts for high-traffic single intersections.

Tip: (Courtesy of Jcar444) -- place these EARLY! They take up a lot of space, and encroaching houses and businesses can completely ruin any plans you may have had to place them.

Each roundabout requires the 4 tiles around it to be free OF BUILDINGS (not roads), and when connecting roads to it, keep in mind they connect to the center dot from one of the 4 squares surrounding the center.

Motorways

Hops over everything, from point A to point B, and allows cars to travel quickly. You want to use this on your weakest links of your entire map. If you have a bunch of green houses and a green store separated by red and yellow traffic, use a motorway to improve their commute.

Alternatively, you can observe which stores are building up pins, and use your motorway to ease the pressure off of that store by connecting it to a cluster of houses of that color.

Bridges

Making a return from Mini Metro are the all-important bridges. Depending on the map, you'll really want to plan these based on how lucky or unlucky your map layout is. Having too few bridges can really constrict the flow of traffic and lead to your untimely loss. Something to note is that bridges (and tunnels) still use one road tile per segment.

Tunnels

Like bridges, but through mountains instead of over water.

Laws of the Road in Mini Motorways

• Each car will only depart from a house if there is a destination pin for it to go to. This means that no cars will leave "early" to get to a pin before it exists.
  
• Each car will return to the house it left from. This seems inconsequential, but combined with the previous rule makes long "shortest distances" a double-whammy.
  
• Each car will travel the shortest possible route to a destination, and they will tend to prefer stores that are closer.
  
• Cars will not "compete" for a pin, meaning that each pin is reserved by a car as soon as it leaves the house.

Optimization

Much like its successor, Mini Metro, Mini Motorways is a game of optimization -- making the most of what you're given. After all, just connecting the roads is the easy part!

Optimizing Road Tiles

Pretend I have to connect this light blue store to some houses that are coming in from the south.



It might be tempting to just draw a road to the left, like this:



But the more optimal way would be diagonally, which shaves off a fraction of a second for any car pulling in:



This is one of the easiest ways to step up your game, and the benefits are twofold. Firstly, your cars will drive shorter distances on average, and you will also end up using fewer tiles for longer distances, rather than stairstepping everything.

Keep in mind that this does NOT apply in every situation -- The more houses you have, the more competing goals you will have in the name of optimization. And optimization with multiple factors is always a balancing act -- you can only truly optimize one thing at a time, and our goal in this game is to make sure that the "longest road" (the longest distance any one car will have to make to reach a corresponding destination) is as short as possible. In other words, we want the shortest "longest road"!

Don't Go Crazy

If you were to draw straight point-A-to-point-B roads for every house and its destination, you'd run out of roads incredibly quickly. Visualize how branches on a tree join together from twig, to tip, to trunk. It's not the fastest route for any one leaf to any one root tip, but Mother Nature has optimized pretty well how to get nutrients to and from leaves and the roots using minimal energy, and you would benefit to learn from her.

Consider Separating Roads by Traffic Color

This is easier said than done, and can often result in long, meandering roads, but when possible, it's good to separate traffic by color so they drive parallel to each other, rather than having to stop at intersections.

Extra Tips

Planning Suburbs

This is a bit more advanced technique for shooting for those 2000+ point achievements.

You'll notice that houses NEVER appear on top of an existing road. You can use this to your advantage, if you know you want to place a roundabout somewhere, for example. You can block off existing free space with extra roads you may have.

You typically don't want houses and businesses to intermingle (hey, like real life zoning laws!), which is why making "suburbs", or groups of houses, is ideal. You can see in the screenshot below an example of using extra roads to build "roots" so that the houses come in nice, neat rows that flow efficiently, without leaving enough spaces for stores to insert themselves.

Floating Motorways

Another advanced technique. Quite similar to moving trains around in Mini Metro, there is NO penalty for moving roads, roundabouts, and motorways around to deal with and react to congestion as it happens. This is what separates the newbies from the pros, and it can't hurt to occasionally assess if your map needs a complete overhaul.

You'll notice a road will leave a "ghost" imprint after removing it sometimes -- this is because a car has reserved that road momentarily, and it will be available for use AFTER that part of the route is completed.

Being Proactive vs. Reactive

Generally, if you are shooting for a high score vs. just a passing grade, you should pause and assess the situation every time ANYTHING happens. If a single house appears, make sure it's connected correctly so that it can service stores correctly. If you get new roads, place them to plan more suburbs. If you get roundabouts or highways, place them immediately. The game can pick up the pace very quickly if you get a curveball you're not expecting, so make sure that every advantage is effectively placed as soon as you get it.

[mauriciogc]

Excellent guide, it has given me another perspective on how to build roads.

[lucidDriver\]

This was extremely helpful! Thank you for posting this guide!

[Korrava]

Thanks for this guide, this was helpful!

[Asxrow]

Went from 400 to 1.1k trips!

[wojtylamol]

wow

[Nubbarus]

In real life, though, you DO WANT houses and businesses to intermingle. Drastically reducing the need for cars in the first place

[Anderswan]

remember - SEGREGATION IS THE WAY

[ALLLIK]

"Planning Suburbs" Genius

[glatzinator]

thx
this helped me

WoW

[louiswouters71]

When there's two shops of one color close to each other it's tempting to make a fork. However, to force equal traffic between the two, it's usually better to have them both connected to their own neighborhood. However its perfectly fine to join a red and green neighborhood with road that then forks towards a red and green shop since the color will force the right distribution between the shops