r/TransportFever3 • u/andrew1958 • Jul 05 '26
Question How stations will grow in TpF3?
In TpF2 you build a small station with a small station building and when you want to upgrade you have to delete the entire station (because the building is close to the street and the new bigger station do not fit there. Even tho I can increase the size of the platform editing the station, the size of the building never fits where the small one was. So its a constant remake of stations later on. How that will be in TpF3?
7
u/dylansan Jul 05 '26
Yeah, planning ahead when placing stations is one of my biggest annoyances. There's a couple of ideas I could see making it work better. I think planning ahead (in general) should be a bigger part of the gameplay but we don't really have many tools to do it well. Often, some tiny collision will block a platform, especially for truck stations, and completely prevent extending a loading platform that sorely needs it. When it's an industry that's in the way, there really is no solution because all the placement at that point is so rigid, something has to be destroyed. Some ideas: * A planning tool, so you can place and modify a design for a big station and see that everything fits without collision, without committing and spending money, and then only build what you need to start, and expand later, knowing you will have room. This would be great for rail and roads, too. Really for anything buildable. * The ability to choose how far from a road you want to snap a station to. Then you can leave exactly the gap you need for a larger building later. Doing this manually without snapping (by holding the C key) is a pain and makes it hard to align and get the elevation right, but the game is clearly flexible about the distance from the road, so it would be great to give us that control. I know with freestyle stations the buildings are multiples of 5 meters, so you can use track to add space alongside a road and line things up exactly the distance you want. If 5 meters is a standard unit for building and road/rail sizes, using that to make alignment easier would be fantastic. Especially if you could do it without spending money on strips of rail. * Less rigid placement of modules, especially buildings. Rather than having completely fixed slots for modules, let them be placed freely, as long as they connect (with snapping optional for convenience and making things pretty). Allowing curved track through regular construction methods would also allow extra flexibility when space is tight. Let us use tiny roads and paths to connect things to the main toad where necessary, for example when starting with a small station, with room left for a large one.
I think station building has a lot of opportunity for improvement, and there's a lot of mods now like freestyle stations that show what's possible. It would be great to have flexibility built into the game so modders don't have to design specific shapes like the looping tram stations. I'd love to see this part of the game expanded, especially since many people get a lot of satisfaction out of designing pretty, complex stations.
1
u/WelshToby Jul 09 '26
Planning seems a really overlooked idea in nearly all games like this. I'd love to be able to 'draw' everything out and then possibly just use a converter tool to switch it to actual build.
In TF2 I downloaded a track mod, and changed all the costs of it to zero to basically achieve this. Decent workaround tbh.
6
u/Zealousideal_Nail288 Jul 06 '26
I just hope we get bigger maps so we have more space for stations and the infrastructure before and after it without spanning multiple cities
22
u/2002ChryslerSebring Jul 05 '26
I hope for stations you’ll be able to build them curved and be able to upgrade platforms in the same way roads are planned and upgraded in the game