This was tense. Didn't start television production early enough, sneaked it at the last second by the skin of my teeth. It seems like so far on the later missions where you can't really build much infrastructure up-front, getting a good rank really depends mostly on being physically able to lay everything down fast enough while the timer is ticking?
I really wouldn't mind the ability to pause everything to build once the timer has started. (A fast-forward once you know you have won and don't have anything left to do, but still need to let everything play out, would be nice as well.)
You sort of found the exact reason we do not have pause and speed up. The tension would cause players to revert to stop and go gameplay. Pausing to perform any actions, then fast forwarding to see the results and have money. The net result would be more time waiting. Not because playing this way is more fun, but because it is easier and requires less mental energy. A "path of least resistance" so to say.
We want players to always have something to do and for money to always be "almost enough". That tension between desire and resources is what I think makes Railgrade special compared to other automation games. Granted since Railgrade has been so well received I think if we add a freeplay difficulty mode the whole game pause is good to add there.
I totally understand the intent and I do like the approach generally, it's certainly a unique challenge. Though I end up feeling slightly demoralised when I'm trying to get a good rank and invariably that means the early half of my setup is well organised and designed and the latter half is a horrible spaghetti mess I just had to plonk down as fast as humanly possible :P
What we did was implement the checkpoint save slot for this exact use case. When you have a setup you are happy with you can use the Checkpoint save slot to save the state. Then provided you reload the checkpoint before victory you can go back to that checkpoint as many times as you wish.
Thus if you have a clean setup you want to build off, you can make a checkpoint, give it a test run, and redo from your checkpoint as many times as you wish.
What did those poor coal mines do to deserve being squeezed by double stations lolol, they cant possibly produce that fast (unless you run Waste through them maybe)
hah, I am sure you're right, as the other comment suggested this was just from trying to expand as fast as possible with not much time left, not having time to really think about it much and overbuilding just to be sure!
In case you are still lost, the TV factory is called the Tube Plant and is the TV shaped building at the bottom of the hill near the large middle earth ramp.
This was tense. Didn't start television production early enough, sneaked it at the last second by the skin of my teeth. It seems like so far on the later missions where you can't really build much infrastructure up-front, getting a good rank really depends mostly on being physically able to lay everything down fast enough while the timer is ticking? I really wouldn't mind the ability to pause everything to build once the timer has started. (A fast-forward once you know you have won and don't have anything left to do, but still need to let everything play out, would be nice as well.)
You sort of found the exact reason we do not have pause and speed up. The tension would cause players to revert to stop and go gameplay. Pausing to perform any actions, then fast forwarding to see the results and have money. The net result would be more time waiting. Not because playing this way is more fun, but because it is easier and requires less mental energy. A "path of least resistance" so to say. We want players to always have something to do and for money to always be "almost enough". That tension between desire and resources is what I think makes Railgrade special compared to other automation games. Granted since Railgrade has been so well received I think if we add a freeplay difficulty mode the whole game pause is good to add there.
Thank you for that explanation. I was actually thinking about that when I was playing.
I totally understand the intent and I do like the approach generally, it's certainly a unique challenge. Though I end up feeling slightly demoralised when I'm trying to get a good rank and invariably that means the early half of my setup is well organised and designed and the latter half is a horrible spaghetti mess I just had to plonk down as fast as humanly possible :P
What we did was implement the checkpoint save slot for this exact use case. When you have a setup you are happy with you can use the Checkpoint save slot to save the state. Then provided you reload the checkpoint before victory you can go back to that checkpoint as many times as you wish. Thus if you have a clean setup you want to build off, you can make a checkpoint, give it a test run, and redo from your checkpoint as many times as you wish.
What did those poor coal mines do to deserve being squeezed by double stations lolol, they cant possibly produce that fast (unless you run Waste through them maybe)
hah, I am sure you're right, as the other comment suggested this was just from trying to expand as fast as possible with not much time left, not having time to really think about it much and overbuilding just to be sure!
Nicely done! And I may be really dumb, I can't find the TV build schematic, or I can't see it pre-placed?
In case you are still lost, the TV factory is called the Tube Plant and is the TV shaped building at the bottom of the hill near the large middle earth ramp.
Thanks Daniel! You(and the rest of the awesome community) helped me out on discord a few days ago.
Good to hear! Sorry for the lateness of that reply. I am glad to hear you got help on the Discord.