I have to manually buy every single vehicle? Why are there so many steps to setting up something as simple as a bus line? What the fuck do railway semaphores even do, and why at no point does the tutorial explain when to use which type? Why don't my airports come with places to park my planes, I have to buy them manually? Oh god there's voltage and wattage and different voltage wires and how do I know when to use which and make sure everything has the right amount of power the tutorial never explained that-

On one hand, I want to get into this game, but on the other, it seems like I'm going to constantly have my economy crash and fail and have to start over because I forgot the one obscure step in dozens to set up even the most basic of industries.

  • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Some of the other comments have good plans, but I thought I'd add some tips I learned the hard way.

    • there is a difference between a direct factory connection and a factory connection with fork lifts. The direct ones must be very short, but have infinite capacity. The fork lifts can only carry a few tons per day.
    • cable cars are awesome because they're cheap to build, don't use gas, and run continuously. However, they have low capacity. I think it's around 100 workers per day, or ~80 tons of aggregate.
    • for intersections between train networks, make a traffic circle. This keeps the signalling pretty easy. Gotta make sure the segments are longer than the longest train or shit gets stalled.
    • use a completely different rail system for your passenger and cargo trains (I guess this should be obvious to any Americans). Electric trains are good for passenger rail, but don't use them to get workers to the power plant.
    • a small grocery store can feed about 2000 people before the lines start getting long. Because food is a priority, citizens will stand in bread lines all day instead of going to the gym if things are tight. Confusingly, this means that the first sign that you don't have enough store capacity is actually citizens being unhappy about missing recreation.
    • there's no reason not to send most or all of your citizens to college. If you don't have any colleges, you eventually run out of school teachers, which means citizens can't get their basic education and you suddenly have no workers.
    • only build large farms. ~16 big fields per farm (I think). Build 6 grain silos off the farm, connect in pairs to road cargo stations. Silos will be like 70% full after a full harvest. There are also weird metagame strategies where you use farm fields with no tractors and plant with workers.
    • early game you usually have to rely on trucks, which have limited capacity. Good starting industries are those that can be profitable with low export tonnage. I like textiles, 1 clothing + 2 fabric per instance. Add on chemical factories for greater profit. Once you're making money, start working on a steel mill.
    • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Oh I forgot a really useful one: how to prevent stores from ever running low on realistic mode. Connect the store to a road cargo station. For each commodity sold at the store, but the largest truck you can, and set a manual route from the warehouse to the cargo station. Then, check the "wait until loaded" button. This means the truck will sit there at the store full of bread or whatever until it's whole cargo has been sold, then it will immediately go get more, while the store still has it's entire inner stockpile to keep selling. Distribution centers are wonderful, but they don't scale for grocery stores in bigger cities.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      there is a difference between a direct factory connection and a factory connection with fork lifts. The direct ones must be very short, but have infinite capacity. The fork lifts can only carry a few tons per day.

      What. I've been doing forklifts for everything