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Buses line, it's hard to figure it out

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Surprisingly I find myself agreeing with Fintilgin's idea of maybe reducing, not increasing the complexity of bus transport.
We just need some simple way to make a bigger effect on what's currently there.

Well, being able to set the number of buses isn't asking much. But it still is micromanaging what is already a micro issue in the overall perspective of the game.
Simpler way would be to tag some lines and they would receive a set amount of extra funding. Tag = +50%.
Counting the number needed and then adjusting a slider will be too much micro for the non-sim crowd (whether to put 15 or 16 buses for one specific line is definitely not a question for the mayor to decide).
But if you ask them to just tag a line if they see it having red efficiency that isn't asking too much.

In real life (at least here in Finland) the municipality plans the bus lines and sets an accepted level of service. The provider decides how to achieve that. The specific amount of buses on a line is not a consideration for the officials.
Politically it's realistic that you can basically only adjust the level of funding instead of directly being able to adjust what you get.
You definitely have a tighter control of zoning than what happens at the floor level of transportation.

Here's what I mean by suitable level of added control:
YWC6SSb.jpg
("Boost" triest to be a button that gives +50% funding)
 
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Your bus route does not matter, it does no more than provide a happiness bonus for your CIMS, even when it is geographically impossible for them to reach Industrial, or commerce the simulation keeps going. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...rkers-not-getting-to-work-has-no-consequences!. As long as you have bus stops in the general area of your residences and businesses they will all get the happiness boost and that is all they are good for.
 
Hexcaliber said:
Your bus route does not matter, it does no more than provide a happiness bonus for your CIMS, even when it is geographically impossible for them to reach Industrial, or commerce the simulation keeps going. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...rkers-not-getting-to-work-has-no-consequences!. As long as you have bus stops in the general area of your residences and businesses they will all get the happiness boost and that is all they are good for.
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You are not completly right..

If you don't have busses, your CIMs will use cars, even if they are not getting "for real" to the work. This will cause traffic, which will influence the transports of your factories.
So, you need public transportation, to remove car traffic and to have a working industry ;)
Beside that, every tiny worker, who reaches the industry, gives a boost to the effectivity of that industry.
 
Being able to affect the number of buses on each route would be nice, but only if you also add in statistics about how busy each route/bus stop is.

Without the statistics you could only really know the number of buses on those obvious routes, like an express route with 2 stops on it that goes over the highway to a distant industrial site. In that case the game normally would give you a huge number of buses because it bases it on distance traveled, which is obviously wrong in the case of an express route.
 
+1, I would like to be able to see more information about buslines.

Busline 1 using 90% capacity (add more busses to the busline)
Busline 2 using 50% capacity (reroute busses, or less frequest busses)

Budget per buslines, metroline, trainline would be usefull for this, just using the 50-150% slider works. Cause global budget can overcrowd one busline but other one still being empty.

For anyone who wants to simplify, I think its makeable without extra work for people who don't like to have an as optimal public transport in your city as possible. Standard bars can be equal to global budget unless you untick & modify a specific busline, metroline etc..
 
I really love mass transit but these lines are so hard to manage. The one thing Sim City did right was laying out mass transit, placing a depot or bus bench and then simply connecting it. As it currently stands I have no clue where anything is going. All I see are green lines and dots flipping around and going places I don't want them to go. At this point I avoid mass transit all together because I spend a few hours laying it out only to delete it because it doesn't make sense. Even in the demo video you can see the person struggling to lay lines.
 
I haven't used buses yet, but I have used Subways and Trains, and I definitely have a few issues.

1) As the OP said it's VERY hard to see the individual "lines" when you have several going thru the same stop
2) For trains I've noticed it will auto-choose the shortest route between stations for you when building a line, which I do like. I build a rather large train loop, but only add a few stations, the rest is future development. I wanted the trains to go to the 3 stations on the loop in a big circle, but since I don't have any stations on one side, instead my train "line" made a double U-shaped line, which is annoying but also not efficient. The trains back up at the two end stations, as the one approaching has to wait for the in the station to switch tracks, vs just going out the other end if it was a loop. I don't "think" the subway did this, I think I made some large loops there, so I believe only trains have this problem.
3) Deleting a line is a pain as you have to zoom WAY in to see it and right click on it, which doesn't always work or sometimes you click the wrong one.
4) Looking at the train lines gives you a filter that also shows subway lines. As far as I know you can't connect the two, so why does it show both? I just makes it harder to build train lines when a subway station is near.
5) Really surprised different lines aren't different colors. Probably because it shows all transporation in the same filter, so subways are green lines, trains orange, buses blue. Kind of annoying, these should be broken out into their own filters at least be building them, and then each line could be a different color, so you can more easily see where they all go.
 
I am going to experiment with laying two lines in an identical route sharing bus stops. By my calculation that will have the effect of giving one route twice as many buses as another route without micromanaging the individual line's budgets
 
I see elements of Cities in Motion in the bus line layout. This isn't a mass transit game though, and I almost worry that we're able to do too much with bus lines, not too little.

If our level of control was any greater, we might as well be playing CIM2. But as it is, the level of control we have is just enough to set things up badly if we're not careful, but not high enough to fine tune and make things smooth and precise.

I might be in the minority here, but I almost wish buses were MORE abstract. Like maybe you could assign a bus depot to 2 districts, and the flow of passengers from one district to the next would be automatically calculated and and maybe out of every hundred cars, 20 of them would be converted into a bus.
 
name lips said:
I see elements of Cities in Motion in the bus line layout. This isn't a mass transit game though, and I almost worry that we're able to do too much with bus lines, not too little.

If our level of control was any greater, we might as well be playing CIM2. But as it is, the level of control we have is just enough to set things up badly if we're not careful, but not high enough to fine tune and make things smooth and precise.

I might be in the minority here, but I almost wish buses were MORE abstract. Like maybe you could assign a bus depot to 2 districts, and the flow of passengers from one district to the next would be automatically calculated and and maybe out of every hundred cars, 20 of them would be converted into a bus.
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Hi :)

Well yeah it is kind of obvious as they developped the CIM series and of course it not a transportation game.
However they try to get as close as any citybuilder would dream, to create a close approach of a city builder game mixed with transportation.

In SimCity, the lack of depth into transportation led to its unpopularity and many disliked the game just for that. Having placing randoms bus stops and see your buses going randomly to one stop to another without any specific route was horrible.
In cities skyline, they really tried to make it look appealing and realistic which is kind of great because when you place a bus stop, it creates a bus pocket and you can see your buses with different colors (aka different lines) deserving the stop :) it is simply a lovely design.
it needs polishing though, because it is blurry in information when you creates / deletes bus stops. But they surely did a great job introducing it.
It is not only rewarding to construct your city, but some people might want to spend time creating great bus routes and be proud of their "network"
so if you simplify that already you take off some aethestics putted in the game.
As well as many people talking about the size of the airport and the seaport (because it is really too small)

As i said, it was a real turn off in SimCity to see your buses, trams doing the hell what they wanted, going to the most crowded stop doing U- turn everwhere.
to not set up a proper train track too because trains would come randomly.

You can see that transportation is important and vital to any city builder games, and therefor you can see that almost all city builder who didn't had proper transport, got modded to be able to get it proper.
Cities Xl was modded, simcity was modded, because lots of people wanted something close to cities skyline, something that they actually did it, and hook up more than 250 000 people at the moment.

so i wish they will include more transportation options and also polish that aspect :)
this is just amazing to see your city thriving with buses, trains, metro and hopefully more! :D
 
vonhaubitz said:
Well, no trams...I would have expected a full set of public transport from THIS developper given their previously released games.....
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relax, they will come with a DLC.
and surely we would have more :)

but they would come, they already gave us lots of content and material to play with. It is a great release.
 
The bus system is fully-functional, you just have to learn how to game it.

1) If you set the funding slider to 150% you get the maximum number of buses on all routes.

2) The number of buses on an individual route is determined by the length of the route, NOT the number of passengers or the number of stops. To increase the number of buses on one route and not others, increase the length of that route. Sending it on a detour over a segment of highway is one way to do it.

3) If you still get long queues of passengers waiting, the only thing left to do is remove some residential bus stops. More bus stops equals more passengers. Buses are not high-volume, so you HAVE to reduce the number of passengers. Remove stops from residential areas while keeping the length of the route the same. This will reduce the passengers to a number that the line can handle. Eventually the buses will catch up, then you can experiment by adding back in some of the residential bus stops until passengers start queuing up again, then back off.

That's the only way to do it, since you can't directly add more buses above 150%. It works. It may not be up to the standard of CiM or CiM2 but it does work.
 
I must admit I find setting up bus routes awful. I did set up a route okay, but as my city evolved needed to add additional routes & amend the original one. This is where the problems started as it is really awkward dragging these along, leaving my original route in a right mess, which I had to destroy. Very user unfriendly. Why cannot you just press a bus stop like when you set it up, & press where you want any changes to go. Doesn't encourage me to set up any more that is for sure.
 
I'do totally support this idea but in a different way.

There is no question this game is awesome and features the best public transportation system in any game of the genre seen yet.
That's to expect from the creators of Cities in Motion (also one of the best of its genre), in fact most of the system seems to be very similar to CiM, the first one, where as the second though still good, featured a much more complex system that potentially let down a lot of people. The simpler is best.

The only real issue with the public transport is really the interface and to allow a little more control over it. There's even already a way to change line colors and assign names.
There is only two major changes that need to be done to allow for perfectness in this system:
  • Allowing to edit only one line without having the others interfere, currently its a lucky shot which line you pick when there are several lines in the same path (and I have a lot of them)
  • Allowing to directly control the number of vehicles of each line, this is very important to allow more buses on high demand routes, but also to allow lower number of vehicles in certain situations (for example if I get a pass train line it creates chaos among the rails)

Having these two items alone would make a major difference.
All needed now is a proper interface for this. So I suggest using the info view for public transport window (instead of the depot, since there are several methods transportation).
A tab for each mode of transportation, this tab would now contain a list of lines with some details for it, as current usage, a direct option to the number of vehicles in the line (not some random budget) and a button that allow to edit that line only (without interfering with others).
Right now bus routes have no real maintenance, only the depot has, so maintenance for each line could be dependent on number of vehicles and distance traveled alone. The edit line window allowing to name and change the color should be the one up when editing the route itself.

As you see these are actually very simple concepts of very simple and direct implementation, something very doable that could improve a lot this aspect of the game.
If your lines are getting too crowed just add vehicles to it.

Another side Idea I have for transport, is to allow routes for cargo as well (which would apply only to trains possibly). To allow cargo to behave a bit like people on transport, waiting for the scheduled train and whatnot.
Right now the cargo trains seems quite inefficient, lots of trains going around in a mess and some times nearly empty. Allowing for designated routes between terminals, as well as to outside cities could help with more smarter cargo movement, and even cargo exporting. Again with the same management system mentioned above: too much cargo? add trains to the line. Simple and easy.

Please read this thoroughly and help spread the idea so the devs can read it. (may do a specific thread in the suggestion section of the forum).
 
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