Mini Motorways Hyper Competitive Chrono Cup

[M00]

This rly ought to be Fraggles’ thing (and it very much is, lol, i just happened to create a topic for it), but anyways:

@Fraggles

The people behind mini metro went and released a new game, mini motorways. So now that I’ve resolved my game buying issues I had to grab this one. What you quickly learn is what American city planners seem to not figure out, the more capacity you provide the more demand is created. There’s no winning in building bigger, wider, faster roads, not that you “won” in mini metro either.

Just a first attempt of course, so I’m betting anyone who tries will beat it. Who will do it?

Edit: The first game had a very pleasant sort of expanding noise scape based on what was going on, different trains made different sounds and it all came together beautifully. Not so much the case in this title, the same idea is present but the execution is a failure. It got annoying quickly and even worse any time you pause the game the sound doesn’t stop, it just freezes and continues to play whatever tone was playing at that moment.

@Pylinaer

@Fraggles

Who will do it?

It’s on my short list of things to purchase.

@snake153

Just picked up the game, still don’t understand how to not have the city devolve into an absolute disaster.

@Fraggles

Looks like all of your yellow cars were stuck in a traffic jam by the traffic lights crossing. Was highway 2 a fairly recent addition?

One problem I run into myself is that it takes a LOT of time for an attempted fix to actually work and most of the time it’s already too late. In mini metro you could throw an extra train on a line or toss another carriage or two at a troublesome station and get a little leeway to figure out a more sustainable solution. Even massive redraws of your lines were possible to be accomplished in very little effective time. But in this game you have to prevent a problem before it is a problem.

Absolute disaster is the unavoidable end state.

@PeteMcc

Not pretty, got fairly inefficient but it did the job

I now also bought this game, happy it runs in windowed mode so it’s something I can keep busy with while waiting for work. Unhappy you can’t save a run though, so now that I caught a job, I either have to abandon my first run or keep the game running

[Fraggles]

Well, didn’t see there were enough people who owned the game to warrant a separate thread for it yet.

My first attempt at Moscow. The primary problem was outflow from the white/blue top neighbourhood. I tried a few attempts at clearing it up, tried a Y shape connection to see if I could separate left and right turning traffic, but the straight traffic across the top went down into the Y and just messed everything up even more.The traffic light was added a few minutes before failure so I’m not sure if it would have worked.

The game is interesting in that you have to figure out where your problems are before they’re visible, once traffic jams up it takes a lot of time for it to clear. I’ve been ruined a few times by needing to relocate a bridge but as long as anyone is planning on using that bridge you don’t get it back so you can’t place it down and for the entire duration no new trips will be planned across the bridge marked for destruction, causing everything to build up and then a sudden rush in traffic that gets all jammed up once the bridge is back.

Actually this was the first attempt, utterly screwed over by RNG.

Had to just restart this one. (because I only had one bridge, no possible way to connect blue while keeping white and yellow connected.)

[M00]

[PeteMcc]

I don’t understand the use of the traffic lights, I don’t use them unless there is bad traffic in a tight spot where you can’t put a roundabout and even then they are questionable

[M00]

yeah, im not using them either as after i placed one, i felt it was making matters worse rather than better (which i guess explains why ppl here just tend to ignore them, I guess )

… and now I’m 25 min behind schedule with work cuz i was 10 min ahead so i thought i could just play a bit in that game i had open

[PeteMcc]

Yeah I find that also a little frustrating where you get things that are impossible to connect. Luckily it doesn’t happen too often

[Fraggles]

I have found one use for them if you have to put in a 4 way intersection with most traffic in one direction they help as a 4 way intersection without one has invisible stop signs causing every car passing through to at least slow down a lot. With a light they will pass through at full speed.

Also I think lights are better than roundabouts depending on which way the primary traffic flow is turning. Roundabouts get clogged up easily if you have a lot of left turning traffic I believe.

[M00]

@Fraggles

With a light they will pass through at full speed.

half the time, and the other half they’ll stop and wait, making their own traffic jam for nothing…

[Fraggles]

The lights are not on a timer, they’re smart and will give priority if there is no competing traffic. A busy intersection with traffic in all directions will be busy no matter, but as I said if you mostly have traffic going one way through then that direction will be green.

One issue I’m struggling with the most myself is how to channel traffic into and out of a high way as I often find those points congested. I’ve stopped putting highways straight into the roads themselves and build a bit of an off/on ramp, this has helped some. But I’m still trying to figure out a better solution to that.

@moo Like your highway 3 is a real issue there. Leading traffic right into the intersection AT the store, 5 ways and nothing moves. Amusingly shutting all your blue cars into the high output store causing them to be unable to reach the lower density store up right which was the one that failed for you. Same problem with yellow hihgway 1.

[M00]

thx for now having to work not only craving continuing to play Death Stranding but also this game, dude. I didn’t need this

[DontBeSilly]

Need ‘dem game first…

[PeteMcc]

[M00]

tough cookie

[Fraggles]

Yeah this one was really hard.

Though most of the time it was bridges I felt the lack of. Sure highways work as bridges so having one or two more would have made a great difference. That central stop light looks awful at the moment, but for the most of the game it worked pretty well, it is obviously overloaded because I couldn’t find a way to move traffic across the river better.

Though curious to see that while the random seed might be the same, things do not spawn at the same places or configuration.

[M00]

@Fraggles

things do not spawn at the same places or configuration

yeah, that’s honestly what I thought would be the case and perhaps would be more interesting

[SPEXWISE]

I crashed my car IRL today. Not too bad only the cars we’re hurt. Torrential rain and a temporary loss of control. I think I’ll leave this game to the pros!

[Fraggles]

Put most of my focus on the left side red/dark blue clusterfuck. That place nearly lost me the game a couple of times, but I managed to do something to pull it back, towards the end I felt like I had nothing left to try so I put some lights in to see if it’d work. Then the light blue top middle messed me up while i wasn’t looking.

I was a bit annoyed with highway 1, because it was only being used for one green low density store, but there was no other way to get green over there without them messing up everything on their way.

[snake153]

Spawns are dependent on existing roads from what I’ve seen, so exact same configuration is probably impossible

[snake153]

Game is tricky in how much you need to build preemptively. I think I lost after I put highway 3 in, which caused the giant jam in the middle.

[Pylinaer]

I saw the problem coming, yet could not figure out a way to solve it so I held on for as long as I could.

The problem is the MASSIVE residential area and the area around the Y-split.