– CiM2’s timetabling was an epic fail where the realtime timetable and long actual journey times just didn’t work. Has TF avoided this pitfall?

– Road/rail building was fantastic in CiM2 with a real organic feel. The recent videos of TF look like they’ve done an even better job with rail – is it as good as it looks?

– The roads, route highlighting on the street/tracks and residential/industrial/etc. overlay look very similar to CiM2. Has TF managed to learn from the good things that CiM2 did in these areas?

– Rail signalling in OpenTTD is really satisfying to use with some great capabilities. How is TF’s working out so far?

– Is being a rail-only player viable like it is in OpenTTD, or will I have to get my hands dirty with that horrible trucks/trams stuff?

– Train Fever doesn’t have any Timetables, it has intervals which depend on the length of the route and the number of your vehicles driving on this route.
To get some impression of the time, you start at 1850 and every 2 seconds 1 day passes ingame. Sure it isn’t real that a train needs over 2 months to get to his destinition (at least with early and slow vehicles), but the game is supposed to play over decades.

-The placing of rails and roads is really great in Train Fever, you have nearly complete freedom and it makes lots of fun to build a complicate network in this hilly terrain. In the BETA Version it’s sometimes a bit hard with tunnels and bridges, but this should be fixed in the final game.

-I think TF did an even better job, you can follow each person from their house to their destination, to work, shopping or entertainment. You can observe their behavoirs for a bit to find for example a good route for a new tram.

– Signaling is good in TF, but not perfect atm. You have (in the BETA version at least) 2 kind of signals, the normal one and the one way signal. It’s like the signals in Locomotion, but better. The train reserves its way to the next signal,  if you have a switch to a parallel track the train on the other side can still pass, even if there is no signal in between them. I think the signlas work just fine, but there is space to improve (maybe already in the full release or with mods or a DLC)

-Yes, rail only is possible. When you build a network you have to keep in mind that a person is only using your line, if it is faster than going or with a car later in the game and if takes less than 20 Minutes including walking to and from the train station. So you can play with train only, the passengers just go to your station, if it meets the conditions. Because of this system, the stations doesn’t have a direct influence radius, because every person has a different destination and therefore a different traveling time.

If anybody wants something else to know, we don’t bite. I’m sure other BETA testers will answer you kindly 😉

@baronjutter: That happens for passengers. The vehicle will wait a bit more in every station and be synced. I did not observe this for freight.

@Morat

1) Timetabling is only frustrating because ppl do not understand the system. Every public transport system have late vehicles. The thing is that ppl are not robots and if the vehicle comes 2 or 5 minutes late its not a problem. But if they are computers, any second late is a problem: Vehicle was late. I talk about that in the reddit of CIM2. Anyway, as speedcoaster said, TF goes by in days. In fast speed months goes by very fast. So timetable makes no sense for TF. You have frequency that is in minutes, real minutes, that is only to guide you in order to know if your line need an increase in frequency or not.

TF have a such beautiful system that station gathering area is unnecessary and your train lines can be right or left hand side or even both.

2) The way you lay tracks are not as easy as CiM but that is because its more complex. CiM is very dynamic and simple but it makes a lot of automatic choices. In TF you have more choices, so more manual things. One huge improvement from CiM 2 is the fact that you can create a junction between 2 tracks anywhere. So your trains can go from one track to another side track easily.

3) Route highlighting is very similar to CiM. Roads are better in a way they can be upgraded, no need to delete. Bus lanes can be placed by upgrading the road. And you can upgrade from 2 lane to 4 lane without demolishing any house. Like in Cities XL the extra space is taken from the sidewalks. Still there are things I have to take a better look at it. I saw for example 2 types of 4 lane road, both were 4 lanes but one had thicker lanes than the other. It might be related to the houses on the sides. Its a pretty smart system.

About the trams you can either make a loop or just don’t make anything and they will turn anyway. I like that, because since the game is more about freight and transport between cities, someone that doesn’t want a very detailed tram system can just not worry about details.

4) The signals are block signals. Normal and oneway like speedcoaster said. But there was a post about signals saying they would introduce path signals as well. So I don’t know. I’m new to signals and only recently I learned the difference between block and path signals.

5) Definitely can play with trains only. I get huge amount of passengers to fill a TGV without the need to transport passengers to my rail station by trams. Trucks in the other side are necessary at the beginning of the game, because trains are expensive and trucks can give you enough cash to build the expensive tracks. Plus the industries that are not producing anything because they are far from their suppliers, once you start to feed them, the production increases slowly. With low production, trains won’t be profitable. But once you have money you can just take this cost for some years like I do.