| Strategies & Tips |  |
TTD is a PC game by Microprose (a subsidiary of Spectrum HoloByte, Inc.)
| Strategies & Tips | |
To Make Your Ride More Comfortable (Tips)
Fellow Transport Engineers are asking for tips and strategies for multiplayer games. Would anyone care to contribute an article on their experiences and thoughts with multiplaying?
Use the grid when placing stations so that you can optimize how many goods are available at each position. Remember that you can't put stations too close to each other -- the Local Authority won't allow it.
Don't make trains with more than 4 cars of any one kind. They won't fill up fast enough and will be costly to run. Usually trains with more than five cars cause problems because they "hang out" past the train signals and lock up additional areas of tracks while stopped at a station.
When running multiple trains on one set of tracks (or even multiple tracks with switch overs), you will find that they occassionally all get to your train station at the same time. When this pile up occurs, trains waiting to unload will eventually reverse direction and head back towards where they came from. If there is no loop or train station close, they can go rolling off for quite a distance and you accrue expenses without gaining income. Your trains that have unloaded may also head out of the wrong way from the station and go down a track they shouldn't be going on because they can't reverse direction in the station and head back to where they came from due to a waiting train blocking their path. To prevent this, put a side track that bypasses your busy stations and create a loop of track that the trains in the station can travel out on, loop back around pass the station, and head back to where they came from. The waiting train can then pull into the station behind the departing train without having to back up. If you have the room, put a loop line on each side of your station and make sure that all tracks in the station connect to both loops on both entrance sides to the station. No more trains reversing direction when they can't get into a station to load or unload.
You don't have to go to each transport unit to see how it's doing. Pick the drop-down and pop-up charts to list all units of a genre (train or plane or truck or ship). If it's April or later and a unit is "in the red" you have a problem with that unit. Double click on it to go find out what's up.
About Banks, valuables, and what to do with them... Banks are an industry. They can only be found in towns with populations exceeding 1,200 people. They produce valuables which are usable only by other Banks. So to exploit them and earn transportation fees and subsidies you must transport valuables between Banks. Don't bother attempting to setup depots or stations and purchasing transport units for this if you only have one Bank on your map. You'll be able to load up, but there will be no place to go.
About dynamiting and ground leveling... You almost always need to level or dynamite ground to lay routes or place transportation depots. Sometimes you need to dynamite to see the slope of terrain hidden by trees. However, the local authorities get REAL irritated when you do too much dynamiting or leveling. In fact, once you've done so, they usually forbid you to build in that area, which can be real annoying. One way around this when you need to get to a service such as a Bank and you can't find a large enough area close enough to the industry without dynamiting and leveling is to place a heliport there. They take up very little room, require no connecting ground transport corridors, and provide relatively quick transport. They are especially good for transporting valuables.
You can build warehouse depots next to your stations to store incoming/outgoing resources. So build them first if you are planning on linking two transportation modes. Why not let them start piling up the resources even before you're ready to transport it!
This part is mainly made by Phil McCrum's
So, your sitting down playing TTD with several competitors,all is going well you have a good solid income base and youve just built that airport in that big town so it will accept all those goodies and you Know that it is going to be a BIG cash cow, But whats this? your competitor is trying to muscle in on one of your scams,err...operations, and he's pinching all the goods you worked so hard at getting,heck,you paid good money to set up that operation and here comes some pokey little upstart transport company trying to parasite off your hard work, what do you do about it? Buy the little bugger out? no, too easy and they are losing money hand over fist anyway,no you want to make them suffer.. and here's three ways to do it.
1.WHERE HAVE ALL THE PASSENGERS GONE? Before we begin please bear in mind that these are not "Dirty deeds done dirt cheap" you must have a fair amount of money or a sound income base in order to make your competitors suffer, as is the case with this first tactic, Find out your competitors busiest city one where you have a small share of the action (or no share at all) and then select 'Buy exclusive transport rights' from the local authority menu, it might cost you a fair amount of readys but its fun to see your competitors stations deserted for a whole year,depending on how much buisness your competitor was generating from that city will determen how much harm you have done to your competitor,do that for a few years and they are as good as sunk.
2.ROADS TO NOWHERE. So your competitors got a lot of road vee-hickles huh? lots of buses and trucks? good! another golden opportunity to wreak havoc on your unsuspecting competitor, once again find a city with a lot of road traffic,preferebly a city that your competitor passes through to get to its destination ( this rarely occurs however) make sure YOU have no road vehicles in that city and then select 'Fund local road reconstruction' from the local authority menu,this causes considerable disruption to all road traffic for six months as the city authorities take there shiny new front end loaders and bulldozers out for a spin, it will also leave your competitor tearing his hair out in frustration as the workload piles up,and the trucks and buses GO NOWHERE.
3.DEAD IN THEIR TRACKS. You have to be very lucky and very vigilant to be able to pull this one off with any degree of success,find out (usually by watching his 'construction section of his financial window) to see if he is laying any track/road,if he is find out where ( use the big map ) and start buying land in the path of his road/railroad, this frustrates the construction proccess and may cause your competitor to reroute the road/track or rip it up alltogether,a hollow victory but a victory nevertheless.Also it is often wise to leave a lot of "redundant" track (if you have converted from railraod to monorail for example) lying around so as to frustrate your competitors efforts even further.
this part of the page is mainly made by Russell Spragg -- President, The Viking Union Transport Company
These cheats are for TTD only and they may not work in TT
Cheat One
WARNING: THIS CAN CRASH YOUR SYSTEM BUT IT WILL NOT HARM ANYTHING EXCEPT DATA SINCE YOUR LAST SAVE!!!
Cheat Two
To decrease the price when building in farmland plant trees in the squares where you will build
Cheat three
1. Find or make a saved game that brings in a lot of cash each year (don't include running costs and loan interest in your decision)
2. Go to load games in TTD and count how far down the list the game save you want to cheat on is. ( Count Autosave as 00, and continue 01, 02 etc)
3. Exit TTD and rename TRTxx.SV1 to TRTxx.SV0 (xx is the number you counted). You will find this file in your tycoon directory.
4. Restart TTD and choose Create scenario. Choose load scenario and you should see your game save on the list. Load it into the scenario editor. Leave TTD running for a while. Your vehicles will carry on running and making money all the time the game is in the sceanrio editor. The advantage is that you are not paying running costs or loan interest, and you can expand the towns you operate in, at will.
5. Choose Save Scenario.
6. Choose Load Scenario and count how far down the list your game save is (starting at 00 on the first one on the list).
7. Exit TTD and rename TTDyy.SV0 to TTDxx.SV1 (yy is the number you counted in stage 6, xx is the number you counted in stage 2).
8. Restart TTD and choose Load Game.
9. Load up the right game save and have fun!
Thanks to Tommasso Picardo who told me about this cheat.
Cheat four
At the beginning of the game make a very long train tunnel that you canīt afford by clicking the mouse on the spot where you want to put the tunnel. A message should come up like this "canīt build tunnel here costs 1834304039". If this message comes up, try putting the tunnel in another place. Suddenly you might get the tunnel and the money that the tunnel costs. If it doesnīt work try it on another map.
This cheat was submitted by Thomas Ivholm. It only works on the original version of Transport Tycoon.
Cheat fife-> Sabotage
The picture above shows how to sabotage the competition. I am
yellow and have constructed a depot leading into the back of
opposition's depot. The opposition has a train in the depot and a
train in the station. Both of those trains are incurring running
costs and neither can move because my diesel is keeping the
signals red. My train is stopped, so it costs me only the price
of buying the train in the first place.
Also a way(see below): connect the backside of
the competitors depot to both backsides of his station! (When a
train is inside the station, it won't come out). This cheat is
cheap and works good but not when a station, like on the picture,
lays next to a city.
/===============\
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=and / and \ mean railroad
|||| means station or depot
Train Unloading
To make a train stop unloading and continue, click on send train to depot just after the money is paid, then click it again once the train has left the station. Clicking the icon the second time cancels the order and the train continues on it's normal route. This works for loading as well, but it will decrease your station's ratings.
Station Ratings
To increase your ratings, order a vehicle with a large capacity to full load at a station. The station's ratings will increase all of the time the vehicle is loading. If you do this, make sure you have facilities to load/unload more than one vehicle at a time.
Passengers
It is always good to start your company with a passenger service as you make money on journey's both to and from towns. If you want to run an industry transport service, check the cargo payment rate graph and run a medium or long distance link carrying the cargo. Short distance links work alright with road vehicles, but when using trains etc a long distance, efficient (2 or more fast vehicles) link is more profitable. The rich.zip game save above shows how effective a fast, long distance, passenger service is.
Heliports
Bulldoze a square in the middle of a very large city and place a heliport there. Passengers will gather in their hundreds.
Shares
At the beginning of the game buy 75% or as much as you can afford of your competitors companies. When one of them becomes succesful, scrape together enough money and buy the last 25%. Check the companies' loan before buying them out as you take this over as well.
Cost Estimate
Hold down the shift key whilst building something. This will show you how much it will cost if you actually build it. I know this is in the manual, but you have probably forgotten it anyway.
Money from other Companies
This page is brought to you by James Dove
"Blacktopping" -- The computer's airports can be reduced to income holes by blowing up all buildings within it's coverage area and replacing them with roads so the town can't rebuild. With all possible passengers from the airport's coverage area now replaced by your zero population streets, the plane (expensively) waits forever for a full load of passengers while still paying maintenance. You can usually tie up an entire AI's airline with one blacktopped airport acting as the trap. At hard levels you may need to build a local bus line while you do this to keep the city council from revolting. The few successful AI will always build airports ASAP. This cheat will allow you to kill off all remaining AI in the midgame, clearing the board.
"Transporting" -- Sometimes there are two resources close together, but not close enough for one station's coverage. The truck and bus depot can be "walked" away from your train station to increase coverage. Build the bus station adjacent to the train station. Now build the truck station off of the bus. Blow up the bus station between truck and train --the truck station magically still routes goods back to the train, despite an empty square between them. You can alternately build and blow up the bus and truck station eight squares away before you get an error message preventing you going further, and goods will still magically be transported across the gap between stations.
In the tropical zone scenario, the saw mill works interestingly. Unlike the magical self-regenerating forests of other scenarios, the saw mill actually takes one nearby square of forest and replaces it with grass for each car load of lumber. The zone cleared expands in a square with the saw mill in the center, and apparently has no limits --I've let it run for 30 years and got a clearing 28 squares across and still growing. To save some cash, run a single track into the saw mill and expand your rail head and station only after the mill has cleared the land for you --forest is very expensive to clear yourself.
Cities always grow symmetrically outwards from the intersection under the city name sign, and city center is always the most developed area. "Walking" in a bus station to the center that transports passengers to your train station on the edge will be very profitable. Unfortunately, it is impossible to blow up streets that the city has built a sidewalk on (unless you built that street yourself). One workaround is walking your bus station along the city fringe to transport at least a larger slice of the city. Or invest in a city street that runs to city center early in the game on those cities you have earmarked for major passenger service routes.
Trucks move faster on dedicated straight-aways with no intersections. Removing all side roads makes them _much_ faster. Unfortunately, your city likes side roads, and the only way to keep them from being built is building depots to block this. Blow up the side street and then build truck depots on the branch road squares to keep them from being rebuilt again. Don't face the depot opening back to your highway, either, because that would be an intersection (All my blocking depots face not streets, but other buildings --the same view the Honeymooners had from their apartment).
Obviously, never buy a large bankrupt AI. The amount of debt they rack up while going bankrupt is staggering, and you inherit it as part of the purchase.
Trains determine their path by looking at tile paths, but the minimum path algorithm doesn't check to see that the tracks inside each tile actually connect. This can lead to missrouting of trains. So having a route that goes A-B by tiles 2-5-4 and a second route that goes C-D by tiles 3-6-5 will lead to "lost" trains stubbornly trying to go C-B or A-D because of the shared path in tile 5, meanwhile blocking everyone else trying to pass. Really not that much can be done about this except avoiding the situation altogether. Try to keep rail lines simple and clean so that the routing AI can figure out the routes, and always leave a one tile gap between parallel rail lines. As trains become blindingly fast in the mid and late game you're more likely to be suffocated by your own poor signal and track layout than by any of the AI.
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this part of the page is mainly created by George F. McQuary