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unmerged(263525)

Recruit
Feb 5, 2011
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Hi everybody!

I've been playing the open beta of CIM for a couple of hours now and... have no idea how to generate income that will cover all the expenses of my company and not even mentioning of gaining any profit.

How chellanging this situation may be, I'm affraid that it will finally make me give up and abandon the game forever... or at least till it's cheap enough to try it once again.

Take the tutorial town in the sandbox mode for instance. We have a couple of houses in the top left corner of the map. According to the map's info, these houses are homes for a part of the citizens. Workplaces for the citizens are more or less in the center of the town.

I'm creating a bus line, two stops in the houses area (to cover as many houses as possible), two in the downtown, other - somehwere in between. 6 stops total. 3 busses assigned to the line.

Ticket prices are the "default" ones, regarded as "white" by the citizens. And... nothing happens.

Basically no one (except maybe of a couple of citizens) ride the busses to and from work.

I had the same situation in Vienna, sandbox mode, when creating a bus line covering the houses and workplaces on the island.

Am I not getting the idea of the game? Is the beta code so unballanced? Is the game just so damn difficult? Or am I just too stupid?

Help anyone? (And sorry, but I'm not interested in hacks/exploits like temporarily boosting ticket prices to 99.5, as suggested by some players).

Regards,
J.
 
- First thing to do is to create a line from the train station/airport to the center of the town. Metro is you can afford, otherwise tram and again if you can't afford buses.

- Second thing to do is to focus on the center of the town... this is where most people are or want to go.

- Third thing is that people don't really care about price. I set a metro line with price of 24$ and they just don't care at all. (well, they do care but enough people come so you make tons of money)

- Fourth thing to do is to start creating long way line. If you create a long way, you increase the chance that the line is good for someone.

- Fifth thing is to create annex line around the center (link ring)

There you should have a nearly perfect cover and nice money.
 
It's extremely hard to make money with buses (believe me, I tried). Even if economy is in good shape, in best case scenario with good lines you will be earning a few hundred a month (my best was 800 with entire Vienna covered by buses). Trams earn around 20% more (better speed, cheaper energy and higher ticket prices for same trip) but they are still not enough to actually launch your enterprise into space. Even if you manage to get a good set of lines going, eventually you will hit a massive traffic jam or an economic downturn and it'll all collapse like a house of cards.

To get some actual buck rolling in you need a good subway network. That's how the game was designed to be played. Trams and buses are for feeding passengers into subway, you aren't supposed to rely solely on them, their role is only supplementar. In general you should identify key locations in the city (market places, railway stations, hotels, churches, museums, big factories - more you know the city, better your lines get, every game of mine is better than previous one) and connect them with a network of subways. Then everything between them you connect with buses and slowly replace bus lines with tram lines wherever they seem to make any actual profit.
 
If it's possible, I didn't find it yet. I only rotate with arrows. :-\
 
It seems a key thing is to make sure you're sharing stops with other lines, or all your lines are joined together, because people will pay multiple times to travel. So, if you drop them off at a shared stop, they will sometimes wait at that stop to pay again for the other line.

I played 15 minutes and I'm making 1,306 profit on tutorial island with 4 trams and tram lines. Ticket price is 10.

tutorialtn.gif

I doubt this is anything special, but I started with the top-left, then middle, then top-right, then bottom left line.

The bottom-left line makes the most money, because the shared stop, at the left of the Department Store (see red line going downward with dot in the middle), has 30+ people waiting at it, along with one of the other stops on that line.
 
They don't pay multiple times. If they need to hop three trams on their way somewhere, they only pay fare in the first tram they get into. It's hard to catch but it's true if you watch a particular citizen move around.

"Ticket price is 10" - price exploit doesn't make your line right.
 
That sucks. They should pay multiple times as in real life.

I wouldn't say 10 is exploit. It affects happiness and the amount of people waiting at the stops.

I just put trams down to 3.90 and I still make tons because of the increase in passengers. And since then I've only added a helipad at the airport to the city which makes a lot.
 
1. Even in real life it hugely depends on the city. Sometimes you pay multiple times (Warsaw I live in is such an example, new bus, new ticket unless you buy hourly/daily). Sometimes you don't.

It's a shame there's no season tickets in CiM. They'd make people pay for using public transport even if they aren't actually using it and make some good buck on top of regular ticket sales.

2. 10 is an exploit because it doesn't affect happiness and line usage as much as it should. Try 99.5 to confirm how exploitive and game-ruining overpricing can actually become.
 
delra said:
2. 10 is an exploit because it doesn't affect happiness and line usage as much as it should. Try 99.5 to confirm how exploitive and game-ruining overpricing can actually become.
Click to expand...
And try running with 99.5 for 5 years? How many customers do you think you will have?

The exploit is that they still pay the higher price but decided to go to the station when the price was lower...

As long as you run with a high price a long time and don't make dramatic changes its no exploit as far as I'm concerned.
 
so the metro is the key

delra said:
It's extremely hard to make money with buses (believe me, I tried). Even if economy is in good shape, in best case scenario with good lines you will be earning a few hundred a month (my best was 800 with entire Vienna covered by buses). Trams earn around 20% more (better speed, cheaper energy and higher ticket prices for same trip) but they are still not enough to actually launch your enterprise into space. Even if you manage to get a good set of lines going, eventually you will hit a massive traffic jam or an economic downturn and it'll all collapse like a house of cards.

To get some actual buck rolling in you need a good subway network. That's how the game was designed to be played. Trams and buses are for feeding passengers into subway, you aren't supposed to rely solely on them, their role is only supplementar. In general you should identify key locations in the city (market places, railway stations, hotels, churches, museums, big factories - more you know the city, better your lines get, every game of mine is better than previous one) and connect them with a network of subways. Then everything between them you connect with buses and slowly replace bus lines with tram lines wherever they seem to make any actual profit.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the headsup! I suggest that the tututorial states this upfront. Metro makes money, tram and bus feed the metro. Not making money on the beta demo is very, very frustrating. Are there any cheat codes? Love the game/demo so far. It has a lot of potential.:rolleyes:
 
I don't know about cheat codes. Key to making lines profitable is to never add extra trams or buses unless all the existing ones are making money alraedy. Also it's good to stop and restart a line every once in a while so vehicles space out again. They have tendency to clutter over time since there's no scheduling.

Every 2-3 months I am inspecting all my lines, adding vehicles where everyone is making profit, removing vehicles where they aren't making profit and restarting all the lines manually. It's a bit of manual work but keeps the system optimized and running smoothly.

If I see a line has 3 buses making 150, 200 and 17, I remove third bus. If I see a line making 200, 250 I add my third bus there. This way even buses start making cash over time, provided there isn't too many stops to maintain compared to amount of buses working them. I don't give a damn about crowds waiting. If there's 100 people somewhere, I only promise "you will get subway one day". Adding buses where I saw red faces was my biggest mistake and made my lines unprofitable over time, causing lots of traffic jams.
 
I simply keep an eye on overfilled - and thus unhappy - stations. If it is that the central stations in the inner cities are overfilled it is a simple guess to assume they could afford 1-2 more cars.

I probably restarted the game for several hours before figuring out how to make money. In essence buses don't scale, aka you'll cause a massive jam with them quickly to meet increasing transportation demands. Trams are better and by making use of the tram lines between roads and not on them you can avoid car traffic alltogether on those distances. If spacing between stations is sufficient you can add quite a bit of trams on a line assuming no sections of stations or railroad are used by multiple lines. Had 8-12 cars running on a circular pattern and they still got their fair share as they made their way through.

The important thing is to identify the money makers (which I find a bit difficult to guess without trial and error). In essence railroad stations and other long distance transportation are the key since loads of passengers will end up here and then you distribute those to a network. I first always tried to connect workplaces to homes but I guess this is an impossible task since you don't know which people want to get to what workplace. The transit approach is far better.

Overall the trams will be the early moneymakers and if running smoothly can rake up the money necessary for a metro system. In essence the metro will connect the long distance points of interest (railroad stations and airport to city center, maybe statium and university, depends on the area), the trams creates a web connecting to some of those areas of interest and buses are really only the added cream for areas without full loadout.

Thus far ferries can be good if you have specific crossing points but metros are better and thus far I only built helipads for fun though they at least broke even.

Also try to figure out where different transportation systems might add up. In tutorial city I built a ferry point from the stadium to close to the railraod station, then extended a tram from the railroad station to the ferry and introduced an express bus at the stadium reaching further to the airport. The ferry points were constantly overpacked and while passengers don't pay twice within one mode of transportation they do pay each time when switching the type of transport (at least I guess so because trams made heaps of money picking up the ferry people).
Similarily I had one end point of a tram connected to a bus line which reached the farthest housing out there and it made this final station very popular as well.

Other than that: Paying your employees well gains your company good reputation and is cheaper than ads, I also managed to run my company only with white prices in the recent game which again helps boost popularity and I guess overtime makes the people willing to pay more.

Overall the game has some places where it feels cluttered and lacking ways to access information but the beta made me waste a good number of hours so it does what it's supposed to.
 
mangalore said:
The important thing is to identify the money makers (which I find a bit difficult to guess without trial and error). In essence railroad stations and other long distance transportation are the key since loads of passengers will end up here and then you distribute those to a network. I first always tried to connect workplaces to homes but I guess this is an impossible task since you don't know which people want to get to what workplace. The transit approach is far better.
Click to expand...

I had that feeling but later, it appeared that it is not an impossible task.

Charm of the game is the strong individuation of the passenger population.

Designing specific lines for specific areas (and possibly specific social categories) is transparent as soon as the population of the area is sampled through individuals.

There is a tab in the high hat tab screen showing every saved profile of individuals. One sampling is done, it indicates where to build lines so they get customers.

I wonder if strategies on specific social categories are to be implemented: for example, developping a network specifically for white collar workers are they might be ready to pay more for transportation.
 
What I am fiddling with currently is custom routes for different groups. A bus line between student homes and nearest school. A tram line connecting hotels and nearby landmark locations for tourists. Everything you can read from different map modes when you switch between house/leisure/work for different work groups.

I moved to 1970 when there are some really great buses and trams available so my experimentation can be easier conducted because it's not jeopardized by breakages and inefficiencies. I'd suggest starting at that date, it's easier to get a hang of the game mechanics this way.
 
I do not understand why so many people have problems with money making / "too small buses" etc etc. In my opinion, game is fairly easy with normal difficulty. You just have to think carefully your first lines, and after year or two, you make easily 6-7 grand / month and only thing left to do is to expand your empire and feed your best lines with more customers. I can't say that this game is difficult by any means, but still, it is really interesting to plan your network.

After 10 years, I usually achieve a way that I can support "stupid" lines, which just increase my coverage but in reality do not produce anything. Only problems what I've faced this far, are crashes in scenario games and lack of 4-line metro stops. In my opinion, it is way too difficult to create a "hub" station when metro stops only have 2 lines..
 
Just build metro and metro only and you'll be raking in the cash. A fully efficient and packed bus system will make almost no money, a busy popular tram at the best will make you a trickle of money, but even a half busy metro system will be a fire-hose of cash into your bank. Even if you have to take our a huge loan, metro always.
 
I have a theory that tracks should cost maintenance too to level the playing field between various means of transportation. Thoughts?
 
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