I have both Train Fever and Cities in Motion 2, and train fever was definitely no replacement for CiM2. I can't be the only one.
TF is great when I want to play with intercity trains like a big train-set, but in CiM2 I'm building an urban transport system for a single large city, not a bunch of little towns. Sorry, but I just can't figure out why everyone says that TF replaces CiM2 when they are vastly different games. In CiM2, I'm creating Light Rail and BRT systems, monorails, realistic looking highways and freeways, and transit centers. Again, if I'm missing something from TF, please tell me.
When I am saying that Train Fever is a
better game, I mean that it is a
better transportation game generally speaking. I am not saying that it is better at solely simulating mass transportation within cities. I believe it is a replacement if you are seeking a good, solid, general transportation game where you are playing as a business. I'm not saying it doesn't have its own flaws, like the zooming bugs you mentioned, and problems with optimisation (personally, I'd go with Train Fever's performance issues over CiM2's simulation issues (e.g. passengers randomly disappearing or not boarding their vehicle, or large swathes of buildings randomly becoming small residential houses) any day). But as a
transportation game, I believe it is superior to CiM2 (partially explained below).
No, when you just want to focus on mass transit, CIM 2 is a better game
But is CiM2
really a better "
game" if you have it just focus solely on mass transportation within cities? If I were to compare the amount of time that the average player would actually spent time interacting with either game, I predict that you would see the average player would be more engaged with Train Fever than CiM2. My reasoning is that because Train Fever, as it is not solely relying on only one type of resource, has a lot of variety to choose from in terms of how they wish to play their game, which makes it more interesting. Could I focus on goods transportation, or passenger transportation? Should I do long-distance transportation, or focus on inner-city transportation? Whereas, over in CiM2, you can only choose what method of transportation you can do; buses, trams, trains, or boats? It doesn't really make much of a difference in how I'm going to play the game or manage the system because they all transport the same thing, but capacities/speed/cost are the variables which have an effect on how you wish to play; trains are too expensive, so I'm going for buses or trams instead.
To a lot of other people (this is based on general opinion and from reviews), CiM2 becomes a terribly tedious game when you try to boil down to only one type of transportation (inner-city) management, which feels like it was meant to be a smaller feature to a much larger game. I mean, you would think that a "mass transport business simulator", which only focuses on transporting one type of resource (people), would try to bring more management to the table focusing on just that one resource? How about having to build your stations from scratch? How about having to manage differing levels of transportation at certain times of the year (e.g. seasons, weather conditions, events finishing at certain locations which causes a massive influx of passengers at a particular times (e.g. football match ends))?
CiM2 is said to be at the top of inner-city service transport simulation genre, but why do you think that is? It's because there is no competition; no other game has tried to solely rely on inner-city transport services, other than Traffic Giant (but CiM is heavily inspired from this sort of gameplay to the point where CiM1 and CiM2 could be labelled as TG2 and TG3). Simutrans, as good as the game is, does not count; it doesn't solely rely on inner-city mass transport gameplay. I believe it's because the scope of the game will be severely limited to what you can do. To me, CiM2 would be a great game if the simulation had a lot more depth and you had to manage more than just your timetables (
yawn) and routes (suggestions to make it more interesting and involving are in the above paragraph). That is what CiM3 needs to be, if CO ever go back to the series, which a part of me hopes they do. However, if they return and make minimal gameplay changes, I won't be interested.
