Playing the game for about a day now, I've discovered a couple of things:
1) The bus and tram systems just aren't worth the headaches. It's far better to take out loans and get the metro working than to risk the traffic algorithms blocking your buses and trams on the streets. If this gets tweaked, I'll reexamine it, but for now it's just not worth the hassle, since I basically know that the capacity won't be there while the buses and trams will get caught by traffic blocking them.
2) The "real" way to make money is to pick a core location where you can put three metro stations in on each level and plan to run trains out of each side of the station on one platform (i.e. eastbound trains on the left and westbound trains on the right). If you do this, you'll eventually wind up with 6-8 trains running out of a single packed hub, people switching at the hub, and new lines out-earning their cost of capital (that is, if you're making X before you put the line in, you'll be making X+something after you get it running for a few months, even once you deduct loan interest). Do this, and your biggest problem will be dealing with too many passengers at those terminals.
3) It is too easy to "cheat" on objectives by creating a temporary one-bus line between locations, winning the objective and getting the bonus, and then killing the line. I kept two buses on an under-used line I had around once: One to keep the line there, and the other to fill in on paper. If I created a bus stop at the destinations, flipped the spare bus over, won the objective, and then got rid of the line and bulldozed the stops, I'd spend $20 or so to get as much as $2500-3000.
4) It's not net profit/loss that matters, it's EBITDA. This is...actually a surprisingly accurate portrayal of how corporate finances tend to work. More importantly, when looking at profit and loss, remove loan payments to see where you really are in the scheme of things. Losing $100 a month isn't a big deal if it's because you're paying out $600 a month in loan payments, as you are building up equity at about $500 a month.
5) Treat going into negative cash as basically a no-interest restricted line of credit: You can't do much while you're there, but if you've got time to spare in a situation, it's not a big deal as long as you're at least slightly positive on the equity front. Thus, if the choice is between taking out a loan to get the bank balance positive or sitting in the red for a few months, sit in the red.
6) 4&5 mean that you should take the shortest-term loans possible for a given loan amount, regardless of payment size. The payment goes away at the end of the loan, and if it kicks you into the red, that's not the worst thing in the world.
Honestly, the negative float option needs to be looked into: Perhaps if your balance is negative at the end of a given month, you get hit for an "insufficient funds" fee equal to X% of the amount you're still in the red (or for X% of the new deficit at the beginning of the following month).
1) The bus and tram systems just aren't worth the headaches. It's far better to take out loans and get the metro working than to risk the traffic algorithms blocking your buses and trams on the streets. If this gets tweaked, I'll reexamine it, but for now it's just not worth the hassle, since I basically know that the capacity won't be there while the buses and trams will get caught by traffic blocking them.
2) The "real" way to make money is to pick a core location where you can put three metro stations in on each level and plan to run trains out of each side of the station on one platform (i.e. eastbound trains on the left and westbound trains on the right). If you do this, you'll eventually wind up with 6-8 trains running out of a single packed hub, people switching at the hub, and new lines out-earning their cost of capital (that is, if you're making X before you put the line in, you'll be making X+something after you get it running for a few months, even once you deduct loan interest). Do this, and your biggest problem will be dealing with too many passengers at those terminals.
3) It is too easy to "cheat" on objectives by creating a temporary one-bus line between locations, winning the objective and getting the bonus, and then killing the line. I kept two buses on an under-used line I had around once: One to keep the line there, and the other to fill in on paper. If I created a bus stop at the destinations, flipped the spare bus over, won the objective, and then got rid of the line and bulldozed the stops, I'd spend $20 or so to get as much as $2500-3000.
4) It's not net profit/loss that matters, it's EBITDA. This is...actually a surprisingly accurate portrayal of how corporate finances tend to work. More importantly, when looking at profit and loss, remove loan payments to see where you really are in the scheme of things. Losing $100 a month isn't a big deal if it's because you're paying out $600 a month in loan payments, as you are building up equity at about $500 a month.
5) Treat going into negative cash as basically a no-interest restricted line of credit: You can't do much while you're there, but if you've got time to spare in a situation, it's not a big deal as long as you're at least slightly positive on the equity front. Thus, if the choice is between taking out a loan to get the bank balance positive or sitting in the red for a few months, sit in the red.
6) 4&5 mean that you should take the shortest-term loans possible for a given loan amount, regardless of payment size. The payment goes away at the end of the loan, and if it kicks you into the red, that's not the worst thing in the world.
Honestly, the negative float option needs to be looked into: Perhaps if your balance is negative at the end of a given month, you get hit for an "insufficient funds" fee equal to X% of the amount you're still in the red (or for X% of the new deficit at the beginning of the following month).