So you've just started playing and you've completed the tutorial and are trying the campaign, but money seems to come in slowly and you are wondering if you have a good strategy or not.
Having just been through this myself recently I thought I would share my revelations with you.
This is just one way, there are many, some people won't agree with this approach, but it works.
You start the map with 100k. The first thing I would do is focus on inner city tram loops. There are a few reasons this seems to work. First buses are tricky to get into good profit. While they are cheap, they suffer from traffic or lines being too long. Interlink a chain of bus lines and you will suffer from high transfer traffic at stops, full buses and annoyed passengers. A composite multi line route is only as good as it's slowest link and bus links suck.
Trams while more expensive due to infrastructure required tend to work with longer lines, have higher priority over traffic and carry more people. Also the game is bias towards, spend more to make more. Metros are just too expensive although your 100k will buy you an inner city loop, you can get about 4 - 6 tram loops for the 100k. Try both.
If you are having trouble with the mechanics of creating a tram loop, save your game and go into sandbox with unlimited money and have a play around for a few hours, then come back to the campaign.
For a busy inner city, inner loop I would go for a bidirectional loop, so you have one clockwise line and one anti-clockwise line. Try and span maybe 2-3 blocks in one direction (say East-West) and 6-12 blocks the other (North-South). Use dual direction track and be careful to save before you lay out your line as you may find you messed up and part of your line is on one-way road when you need 2 way track. You can place stops for clockwise and anticlockwise in the same city block to make it quick for people to swap directions on the loop, or for more economical coverage, alternate them, clockwise stop on one block, anti-clockwise stop on the next. One depot will handle both CW and AC loops or two loops generally, go large on depots.
The first map is "Central City" and has two main "business district" island sub cities. You can max out either with maybe 2 bidirectional loops and 2 single directional loops, giving you a good 75% coverage of the who island, all within your 100k budget. Alternatively, you can make 2 bidirectional loops in each. Doing so will allow you a bonus revenue increase should you later interconnect the two busy city islands as you have plenty of infrastructure in each to "funnel" passengers to your intercity line. Your revenue will jump.
Now most of my early attempts worked well right up until I ran out of cash. Then I was a bit stumped for what to do. Optimising routes, increasing timetable rates, buying more trams, adjusting ticket price (I recommend an auto ticket price mod) keeps the game interesting for another hour maybe more, but then it gets boring. You look at your cash and it's a few grand at most. You look at your cash flow and it might say 12-14k if you have done a fair job, more if you have done an excellent job.
But... 14k a week profit is great and all for a 100k outlay, but, 14k won't buy you much and even if it did you have to wait a whole week to get it. Even when you go to Very Fast Forward time a week will take about an hour to pass. You are making 14k per hour game time. You'd need to wait an hour to get enough money to build another small tram loop. What do we do?
Well, you could go and see the bank. It works like this, if you had that 14k right now, you could build an extra tram line. That tram line will increase your revenue by about 5k maybe. Meaning you will make 19-20k this week, not 14. In fact as you will probably be interconnecting routes and providing more journeys for your citizens, more of them will start using your services, so a new line can boost the revenue from existing lines.
So you borrow your whole weekly profit estimate of 14k, on a one week loan. You use it to build another tram line, maybe a NorthSouth interconnect up the middle of your loops. Maybe a city-city link across the river. Once complete and lines made, trams bought you look at your cash flow and find that even with the repayments you are still making 10k. Borrow the 10k and use it to get more profit.
Basically the profit increase you estimate to make from adding a new line will more than likely cover the interest of the loan 10 fold. It's pre-2007 business practice of running in the red all the time, the further into the red you go, the more capital you invest and the more profit it will make you. Avoid long loans though, if you max out your cash flow with a failed line or a line that just doesn't make the profit you expect and your balance goes south, it is much easier to wait out a 1 week loan than a 10 week loan.
Be careful the more you borrow the more interest the bank asks for. So when it starts to get up to a total of 1000 credits a month consider backing off a while. I have at times been paying out half a million in loan repayments, but only a couple of grand interest for a 0.6 million turn over.
Continue using trams for your main inner city line and add bus lines to cover those pesky random objectives. Pesky they may be, but they make good money early on. Don't be afraid to reject unreasonable ones, or if they ask you to build a line somewhere and you already have one there. No point doing those. Some of them will surprise you, I get the feeling these objects are often trying to help you, in that they know a link from A to B will be very profitable, while you may not have seen this.
There will come a point when you can't borrow enough to cover a large expansion with a 1 week loan without going badly into the red on repayments. At this point I suggest you take a break and leave the game in highly accelerated time. Come back in half an hour and you will have loads of cash and a clear or nearly clear loan sheet ( if you stuck with 1 week loans ).
Alternatively take out a longer, larger loan and build an inter-city metro to connect your tram networks. A basic city-city underground metro link will cost you around 60-100k, but with the right location and setup can bring you 60-70k profit a week! So a 2 week 100k loan with repayments of 51k is not a bad business plan. (this assumes arcade mode).
Only worry if your cash flow goes negative. It may recover as more and more people start to use your services or it may not. Worst case you have to wait out your loans, remember they are mostly 1 week loans so it shouldn't take more than an hour or so to clear them. Then your funds will come back to the green. Remember if you have a weekly profit of 150K, then borrow that 150K so you can use it now and instead make 200-300k a week and when you are making 200-300k a week don't be afraid to borrow that 200-300k in a one week loan.
When you start to make over 100k a week, leaving the game in accelerated time for a few hours can make money concerns a thing of the past pretty quickly. Completing the rest of the campaign map becomes easy.
Paul
Having just been through this myself recently I thought I would share my revelations with you.
This is just one way, there are many, some people won't agree with this approach, but it works.
You start the map with 100k. The first thing I would do is focus on inner city tram loops. There are a few reasons this seems to work. First buses are tricky to get into good profit. While they are cheap, they suffer from traffic or lines being too long. Interlink a chain of bus lines and you will suffer from high transfer traffic at stops, full buses and annoyed passengers. A composite multi line route is only as good as it's slowest link and bus links suck.
Trams while more expensive due to infrastructure required tend to work with longer lines, have higher priority over traffic and carry more people. Also the game is bias towards, spend more to make more. Metros are just too expensive although your 100k will buy you an inner city loop, you can get about 4 - 6 tram loops for the 100k. Try both.
If you are having trouble with the mechanics of creating a tram loop, save your game and go into sandbox with unlimited money and have a play around for a few hours, then come back to the campaign.
For a busy inner city, inner loop I would go for a bidirectional loop, so you have one clockwise line and one anti-clockwise line. Try and span maybe 2-3 blocks in one direction (say East-West) and 6-12 blocks the other (North-South). Use dual direction track and be careful to save before you lay out your line as you may find you messed up and part of your line is on one-way road when you need 2 way track. You can place stops for clockwise and anticlockwise in the same city block to make it quick for people to swap directions on the loop, or for more economical coverage, alternate them, clockwise stop on one block, anti-clockwise stop on the next. One depot will handle both CW and AC loops or two loops generally, go large on depots.
The first map is "Central City" and has two main "business district" island sub cities. You can max out either with maybe 2 bidirectional loops and 2 single directional loops, giving you a good 75% coverage of the who island, all within your 100k budget. Alternatively, you can make 2 bidirectional loops in each. Doing so will allow you a bonus revenue increase should you later interconnect the two busy city islands as you have plenty of infrastructure in each to "funnel" passengers to your intercity line. Your revenue will jump.
Now most of my early attempts worked well right up until I ran out of cash. Then I was a bit stumped for what to do. Optimising routes, increasing timetable rates, buying more trams, adjusting ticket price (I recommend an auto ticket price mod) keeps the game interesting for another hour maybe more, but then it gets boring. You look at your cash and it's a few grand at most. You look at your cash flow and it might say 12-14k if you have done a fair job, more if you have done an excellent job.
But... 14k a week profit is great and all for a 100k outlay, but, 14k won't buy you much and even if it did you have to wait a whole week to get it. Even when you go to Very Fast Forward time a week will take about an hour to pass. You are making 14k per hour game time. You'd need to wait an hour to get enough money to build another small tram loop. What do we do?
Well, you could go and see the bank. It works like this, if you had that 14k right now, you could build an extra tram line. That tram line will increase your revenue by about 5k maybe. Meaning you will make 19-20k this week, not 14. In fact as you will probably be interconnecting routes and providing more journeys for your citizens, more of them will start using your services, so a new line can boost the revenue from existing lines.
So you borrow your whole weekly profit estimate of 14k, on a one week loan. You use it to build another tram line, maybe a NorthSouth interconnect up the middle of your loops. Maybe a city-city link across the river. Once complete and lines made, trams bought you look at your cash flow and find that even with the repayments you are still making 10k. Borrow the 10k and use it to get more profit.
Basically the profit increase you estimate to make from adding a new line will more than likely cover the interest of the loan 10 fold. It's pre-2007 business practice of running in the red all the time, the further into the red you go, the more capital you invest and the more profit it will make you. Avoid long loans though, if you max out your cash flow with a failed line or a line that just doesn't make the profit you expect and your balance goes south, it is much easier to wait out a 1 week loan than a 10 week loan.
Be careful the more you borrow the more interest the bank asks for. So when it starts to get up to a total of 1000 credits a month consider backing off a while. I have at times been paying out half a million in loan repayments, but only a couple of grand interest for a 0.6 million turn over.
Continue using trams for your main inner city line and add bus lines to cover those pesky random objectives. Pesky they may be, but they make good money early on. Don't be afraid to reject unreasonable ones, or if they ask you to build a line somewhere and you already have one there. No point doing those. Some of them will surprise you, I get the feeling these objects are often trying to help you, in that they know a link from A to B will be very profitable, while you may not have seen this.
There will come a point when you can't borrow enough to cover a large expansion with a 1 week loan without going badly into the red on repayments. At this point I suggest you take a break and leave the game in highly accelerated time. Come back in half an hour and you will have loads of cash and a clear or nearly clear loan sheet ( if you stuck with 1 week loans ).
Alternatively take out a longer, larger loan and build an inter-city metro to connect your tram networks. A basic city-city underground metro link will cost you around 60-100k, but with the right location and setup can bring you 60-70k profit a week! So a 2 week 100k loan with repayments of 51k is not a bad business plan. (this assumes arcade mode).
Only worry if your cash flow goes negative. It may recover as more and more people start to use your services or it may not. Worst case you have to wait out your loans, remember they are mostly 1 week loans so it shouldn't take more than an hour or so to clear them. Then your funds will come back to the green. Remember if you have a weekly profit of 150K, then borrow that 150K so you can use it now and instead make 200-300k a week and when you are making 200-300k a week don't be afraid to borrow that 200-300k in a one week loan.
When you start to make over 100k a week, leaving the game in accelerated time for a few hours can make money concerns a thing of the past pretty quickly. Completing the rest of the campaign map becomes easy.
Paul