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.
Don't be afraid to set everything to "easy" and only enable one thing at a time as you get a handle on them. All the oldheads like me have been playing since the game first hit steam basically got onboarded that way, because there were only a couple of features at launch and the game has slowly gotten more complex over time.
uh but yeah even that baseline level of difficulty requires a lot of fiddling. My advice is to start by putting a bunch of housing around a bus station, then service buildings around the housing, then having a single bus route to your industrial center where all your pollution-creating buildings and about half of your jobs are located. Do this with infinite money turned on and by importing electricity from the border, and once you can get this very basic city to function you can start adding complexity.