I was just reading the topic 'how do you organize your network' and I saw that some people had ridiciously big maps (f.e 2000*1000) with 50 villages. How do you deal with those maps?
Do you connect all the cities or do you connect them in pieces (the first 3 years focus on a group of cities and then focus on another group etc) and with how much capital do you start?
Anime :p
I've got a map now of 1792x1792. I did start with 0 cities, and I'm gradually filling it in. I don't mind the starting capital, I'm playing free mode. The challenge for me is to connect everything with everything. At one point you tend to make huge profit and in the end you will always have positive cash. But that's not the important thing, it's just solving the transportation problems that makes the challenge.
You see, everyone is playing Simutrans in his own way. That's why it is such a nice game.
If you start with 0 cities, will they just pop up then?
No, but you can build them for $5,000,000 -- or switch to public player and look at the special menus :)
In my good game, I started with a 128x128 map, then once I got everything working well in there, I enlarged the map (under Special Construction) and did it again... And so on...
You can always look at my SVE on the Simutrans upload/download site. That shows connections to several large cities plus a few goods transport lines. There are many more cities on this map that remain to be connected. I'm still working on it, but it's slowing down as it grows.
Adding cities is fun! So as growing a city! ;D
I like playing maps around 1024 x 1024 or so. Generally I start by hooking up the easier freight to get a financial base. To start on p****engers I focus on the fact that a small but significant proportion of p****engers want to go to a local industry. Ideal is a large city with few industries (more industries just spreads the p****engers thinner). Generally I always expand from one point and keep all my p****enger routes connected. A combined network will have several times as much traffic as separate networks with the same total size. I sometimes make an exception if there are a couple very good cities for p****enger to industry traffic that are hard to connect, but I will still make connecting the cities a high priority.