General tips Transport Fever Guide
Last update: 28 November 2016
1. Remember, to always link up the station with roads! This is a thing that you will have to learn, unlike in other, similar productions. Regardless of whether it is a port, airport or railroad station. Such a location needs to be connected via road to at least one factory/mine/farm or building in a city. Otherwise, the goods/passengers will not reach the station, and your transport will be put on hold. When you build a station and place it close to a road, each building in its range and the roads are highlighted. It is much better to build a short section of the road and check if the station is in range, than to place the station first and then connect it with a road later.
2. Not every transport requires maintenance. Unlike in many similar titles of this genre, especially the older ones, visiting the mechanic regularly is unnecessary. It is enough to have one depot to purchase a vehicle. A net of such locations in not needed, however, it is worth it to place such buildings by the initial station, so that our machines are as close to their first stop as possible. After a certain amount of time the game will notify you, that the effectiveness of a certain vehicle is decreasing, and the upkeep costs will now be much greater. The depots do not require any upkeep.
3. Resources, goods or passengers will appear in stations, if you create appropriate connections, which means that at the destination point there needs to be a demand for the specific good/cargo and simultaneously you need to designate the appropriate transportation. The stations will begin filling up after a certain amount of time passes by, about a month of in-game time. If your transports are still standing empty on the stations it means that you have made a mistake while setting up the route. You may have assigned a type of good that a given factory does not produce. Check if all desired locations are in the range of your station! While building or clicking on a certain station you will see highlighted roads, buildings and other stations. These objects are in range of the "internal transportation" and products or passengers will be automatically transported between respective locations.
4. While dealing with road or railroad transport, use machines with the same maximum speed. Trains cannot overtake other trains, so the faster model will simply drag behind the slower one. When it comes to cars, in the current version, they also cannot overtake on a straight road. If you choose the same models, they will always drive with the same distance between them, which means that they will never block one another and will always drive at their maximum speed.
5. Production chains - resources have to reach the appropriate processing plant, then production plant, and then finally, a city, e.g. iron and coal have to reach the ironworks, then steel has to reach the tools factory, and the tools have to be transported to an industrial zone in a city. It is important, that you do not stop at any point in the production cycle, to create a full chain of connections. If the goods are not transported up to the final stage of delivering them to the consumers, than at a certain moment the factories will stop working. This means that, e.g. mines will stop mining for resources and all previously prosperous lines will now be yielding large losses.
6. Passengers - in cities there are three zones, the residential, commercial and industrial zone. Each citizen has his own specific places, that he wants to visit. It is not worth it to build small bus or tram connections, it is much more effective to create a line, that stops by all locations. Then the citizens will use your transports as the passengers. If you are building e.g. an inter-city railway, than it would be ideal to make an additional stop near the station and add it to the main city line. The tourists will then not only use your train, but after leaving the station they will head to the nearest stop and also use your buses.
7. The profits from connections are not simply down to the quantity of transported goods. Speed and distance are also crucial elements. A truck, which will reach the target destination quickly, can earn you more money than a train, that has a shorter distance to cover but is also much slower.
8. The game offers various types of transportation. Each branch is described later on, but it is worth following the rule, that road transport is the most effective when dealing with short distances (small upkeep costs), while rail transport is better suited for the longer routes. Similarly ships are a great way of transporting goods, however, they are quite slow and the lay of the land on the maps sometimes does not accommodate their use. Planes are designed to transport passengers exclusively, but they are extremely quick, which will often result in higher profits.
9. When building roads or railways, try to design the simplest and the shortest routes possible. The game will always try to lead a straight line between the starting point and the destination, when designating a section of the road. If you are designing a very long section of the route, the game will force you to make tall ramps, bridges or tunnels. All of these are extremely expensive. You can avoid such costs, by building short sections of the route. You will save a lot of funds, but it will take your vehicles a bit longer to reach their destination, due to the curved road. In the starting phases of a mission or a free mode game, this solution can be extremely useful.
10. When creating railway junctions, make sure to do so while you are zoomed in quite closely. The game has a tendency to create intersections instead of junctions. You have to make large curves, in order to avoid that. Sometimes it is easier to create the starting point on an existing track, on other occasion the game will have an easier time of designing the right section, if you designate a point on an empty field leading to the track. It is also important how you lay down the section when you move the mouse. Draw a curve, instead of moving the cursor in a straight line.