Cities in Motion

I have tried the tutorial three times now. I follow the instructions and am unable to build the metro line. I had to restart because when I was trying to build the bus route I accidentally bought a bus before it asked me to. The reason I am not going to try again is it is very difficult to read the tutorial while there is so much animation int he background. I have dug through the settings and there is no way to minimize or disable the animations. I will give this game a try again if I learn that you can turn off the animation.

Anyone who knows this game knows that the game has many detail deficiencies. Many things could have been solved better. Calculations are sometimes incomprehensible or even pointless. Nevertheless, I like this game. Once you have come to terms with the quirks of the game, it is a joy to play. If you bring the necessary time with you and take it very slowly in the game, especially if you are very careful with your money, you can play very relaxed and enjoy the game. There are also patches on the Internet that can improve the game.

I've played this for over 4 hours and can't make a profit. The tutorial teaches you basic mechanics (how to place a station, how to establish a line, etc), but does not actually demonstrate how to make a profit off of those lines. Each step in the tutorial rewards you for completing it, producing something of a greenhouse effect (for plants, not the atmosphere); you have thousands of extra dollars just from following the simple instructions the game gives you, and your system isn't actually tested for efficacy on its own. The bulk of the money you make in the tutorial is in these quest rewards. This is not a sustainable growth model in any other gamemode, and the tutorial inevitably ends, so the un-tested growth pattern you were following always fails. Quests give you lump sums after completion, which makes them attractive to pursue. There's almost no way you can keep the lines that were required to complete them profitable, though, so I find myself deleting those lines as soon as I get rewarded for them. In sandbox, you will frequently get quests to connect two distant buildings in *a single transit line*. From my understanding, this contradicts the game's basic function of rewarding complex networks which rely on passengers switching lines/modes of transit. Basically none of the lines that these quests suggest are profitable in and of themselves. It's not possible (that I have been able to find) to view the profit (+/-) from a given line. At one point in a San Francisco scenario, an NPC tells you he is the "governor" of San Franciso. That has never been a position that existed in all of human history to my knowledge.

Well worth a dabble at traffic managment.

Has a similar feel to Traffic Giant but is not as enjoyable a simulator -- nor as accurate. After a warm-up to get a feel for the game during tutorial, I went straight to the difficult setting. I did this because I already "cracked" the most difficult level on Traffic Giant which I mentioned is very similar. Difficult was *not* difficult in Cities in Motion. Where was the traffic? There was none. Yes there were streets going around in a broken spider web pattern that looks scary and complex, but after much practice on Traffic Giant with the same conditions, I'd developed a "mental algorithm" to solve that complex issue. Not a big deal to me now. For this game, it is the lack of traffic. Once I'd applied my so-called visual 'algorithm' to the crazy and empty road system, it was then that the cars suddenly appeared. Like the AI was "thinking" okay this dude's ready to play, lets begin the difficulty! That's not how it works in real-life. The powers-that-be in reality recognize that a traffic problem exists and then take the initiative to throw resources at the traffic problem to solve it. Not the other way around. The solution doesn't create the problem! The "straw that broke the camels back" for me was when the AI simulated a traffic jam in a contrived manner. In Cities in Motion, traffic jams aren't just created by a critical-mass of extra cars entering the roadway, stop-lights/signs, or pedestrians creating a jam (although that happens too), it is the obvious 5 minute stops by the car at the head of the line that, one-by-one creates the jam (although to be fair, handheld device laws have created this new age "laptop prayer" behaviour at stop-lights which create real delays in real-life, but I digress and mostly because not every driver does it). This isn't truly realistic. After I'd noticed this artificiality, the game was a wet noodle and I lost my interest in it. Maybe I'll just bust out the old 90s simulator CD, Traffic Giant, hope that Windows 10 is able to run it, and see if I can get any kind of satisfaction in traffic management that way. No probably not. Commodore 64 emulators can play the 80s game Traffic so maybe I'll do that instead. Now *that's* a challenge!