Sweet Transit News

Routes

It is time to show how routes work in Sweet Transit. You will build many trains while expanding your colony. As we talked about before it is necessary to do so. Trains need instructions about where to go and what to do. Routes contain those instructions. Games with trains have many different names for this, but the concept is generally very similar. Let me explain the Sweet Transit routes system.



This is the UI you will be working with. Here you can create, edit, duplicate or delete your routes. One thing to note is that multiple trains can use these instructions. This is very useful when changes are needed. On the other hand, you can also have non-global routes for individual trains if you desire so.



A route is useless without destinations. For this, a station or a specific rail can be added. Be careful while naming your stations. A station destination means that a train will search for a station with that name.



Next is choosing your actions. They instruct a train what to do when it arrives. Actions try to guess what you want to do when adding your destinations. Otherwise, you can choose them yourself. As shown above there are multiple options to choose from.



Most of the time a destination needs some conditions to tell when the train can move. A train will go to the next destination as soon as it stops without those conditions. If that is what you are after then you can also choose a Pass action to avoid stopping entirely.



Finally, you can add filters. A filter tells the train what to load or unload, depends on the action selected. With all of these options, you will be able to make as advanced routes as you need.



Let us look at this route as an example. A train will have to pass a specific rail before heading to the station. With that rail, I control from where the train enters the station. Then it stops at Winechester station to load the stone. A train will wait until it is full or 20 seconds passes. Next, it heads to the Warehouse station to unload that stone. And the cycle repeats.


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Production

In Sweet Transit every production chain serves a purpose. In general, there are two types of goods produced. First, there are building materials that are used for expansion and upkeep. Others are for your population such as food, clothes, books and so on. Some are used to bring more people, some to raise taxes and some to keep happiness levels high. To produce these goods you will need production buildings.



Factories and farms are some of those buildings. Provide some workers with input goods and your output goods will be made. Just do not forget to swap tired workers with rested ones. A tired workforce does not work efficiently and can cause some problems. All production buildings that are not village or city based can also be expanded.



The simplest and most common expansion is storage. It is not required to have, but it is great to stockpile your goods in between arriving trains. A production building with full storage will not produce any goods and your workforce will be wasted.



Sometimes expansion is necessary to produce any goods. For example, cotton cannot be produced without cotton fields. Expansions such as fields influence production speed and how many workers will be needed. Later expansion buildings get more advanced with more requirements and rules.



As a bonus here are some smoke updates. From time to time I need to come back and finish some features. Smoke before served its purpose, but it lacked in quality and polish.


By now most of the early game should be clear. Write a comment if you want to hear about something specific!

Problems

For this blog post, I just want to speak about some problems you should encounter while playing the game. Sweet Transit is a sandbox game. In general, sandbox games offer problems that evolve with your choices. This is because of the freedom to play as you wish. Train traffic is an example of how your choices matter.




Building a new rail network system to some new destination is always relaxing and refreshing. Everything starts with elegance and a great idea. You start with an efficient solution and have a rough idea in mind for expansion. Just like a new mini-game that lets you forget about your current problems.



But expansion happens. Adding a new exit point in the intersection should be alright you think. Or reusing the main rail system to make your job easier. And soon after these trains are having issues sharing. The good thing is that you can always expand and improve.



Soon after those elegant ideas make spaghetti look organized. Trying to optimize each traffic issue separately produces many new extra rails. But I mean, if it works, it works. Looks are only for perfectionists. Now trains will be able to get to their destinations much faster.



And after that work, this is how one of those destinations looks like. Trains are coming so frequently that there isn't enough space left to fit them all. But you have solved worse problems before. This is just a setback for your skills. So you start rebuilding and rebalancing.



In the end, you get your own personalized mess where only one person understands what is happening and why. For me, this is one of the biggest joys that sandbox games can offer.


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City Building

I thought it would be a good time to revisit the city building after talking about trains. Managing your villages, towns and cities will take a huge chunk of your playtime. For that reason, it is important to make it more challenging, interesting and less tedious.



People will want to travel with an expanding colony. Traveling will make a big chunk of your wealth. It is quite easy to manage with only a few villages. But with the ever-increasing colony it will become a harder and harder challenge to make sure that people can get to their destinations. It is a good thing that there is some control over it. You can influence destinations by making your cities more or less attractive.



Attractiveness is calculated by what is built. Some structures make your cities more attractive, while others less. At the moment positive attractiveness only influences traveling. Negative attractiveness makes inhabitants unhappy, which drives down your production and taxes.



Factories and farms are separate structures that can produce goods. There are also some production buildings that can only be placed in a city. I like to call these commercial buildings. This makes a variety of interesting production chains. One of the earliest will be producing cut stone for building. Miners in a quarry will mine some stone. Then that stone will need to go to a village that has stoneworks. Workers at stoneworks will cut that stone into stone bricks. And this cut stone then will need to be delivered to the warehouse for further use.

On top of that commercial buildings require a storage building to function. At the moment there can only be one storage in a city with a limited amount of slots. This means that a city that can produce everything will not exist. Villages, towns and cities will need to support one another.



Stations also add to the puzzle. You can load and unload goods in any station that is connected to the city. However to load people you need residences in range. Residences that have no station in range will not provide inhabitants with work. No work means no new inhabitants moving in the city. This is why stations need to be placed strategically to make sure that everyone gets to work.



At this moment I am working on the mid-game and enjoying the gameplay every step of the way. It seems that the expansion will be a constant struggle as intended. Eather traffic problems or production problems keep me wanting to fix one more thing to reach the balance. In the image above you can see 8k people, 75 trains with 2 villages and 2 towns all working in harmony (more or less).

I can not wait to see how people will enjoy these systems. Maybe more importantly what works and what still needs more work. Write a comment if you want to hear about something specific!

Trains, again

I have talked about trains a bit before. There was some information on what kind of trains there will be. However, there was not much information about mechanics. I left that out on purpose and the reason was simple. I was uncertain about certain mechanics and wanted to put more work in. While nothing is final, this is what you can expect from the trains.


Video link

Trains are not equal even with the same locomotive. When you assemble a train stats are combined. Power and mass are added up. This provides some variation in acceleration and general performance.



For peak performance you should watch out for corners. To avoid any penalties a train can only be on one corner. On the other hand, two or more corners at the same time will force the train to brake until it reaches its maximum corner speed. This means that some locomotives will have a great top speed and low corner speed. Great for long straights, but horrible with corners. On the other hand, some will be good at cornering, but will lack speed for the long hauls.



You will need to fuel your engines. Refueling can be done at any station that has access to the fuel and it is automatic. Just make sure to not run out of it. A regular resupply train will do the trick. For the long hauls having only a locomotive will not be enough. For this case you can add a tender to extend the range. The other way would be making a station purely for refueling. Everything depends on your designs and ideas.



In Sweet Transit collision rate should be minimal. Of course, accidents can happen if you remove a signal at the wrong time. Driving into oneself is also an option, even if it is not a good one. Good thing that there is a way on how to control which train goes where apart from signaling.


This should cover it for the time being. Write a comment if you want to hear about something specific!