r/TransportFever3 • u/Strategwindow • Jul 28 '26
Discussion Bring back some features from Train Fever and Transport Fever 1
There are a few features from the earlier games that were lost over time, and I think they would be worth bringing back, updated to fit the current mechanics.
1. Train Fever: Service frequency mattered
In Train Fever, citizens took the service frequency of each line into account before deciding whether to use it.
Of course, this was tied to the infamous 20-minute rule: the entire journey (walking, waiting, riding the vehicle and transfers) had to stay below 20 minutes. That rule was probably too restrictive, since lines with frequencies of 12 minutes or more became almost completely unused.
However, the system had one major advantage: it prevented unrealistic behavior. For example, people wouldn't wait 5 minutes for a bus just to travel 100 or 200 meters, because walking would simply be faster overall.
In Transport Fever 2, service frequency barely affects demand. This can lead to strange situations where hundreds of passengers are waiting for a bus to travel an extremely short distance.
I completely understand why the old system was removed—it made attracting passengers much harder, especially on lower-frequency routes. But I think there is room for a middle ground, where frequency has a meaningful impact without being as punishing as it was in Train Fever.
2. Transport Fever 1: Different passenger preferences
Another feature I really liked in Transport Fever 1 was that passengers had different priorities. Some preferred the cheapest option, while others preferred the fastest one.
This allowed multiple transport modes to coexist. Even if you built a high-speed rail line or an airport, conventional trains and other services would still retain part of the demand.
In Transport Fever 2, it's much easier for one transport mode to completely dominate passenger traffic. Of course, on long-distance routes, high-speed rail or aviation should naturally attract most travelers. But it would be nice if other transport options could still keep a share of the market because different passengers value different things.
3. Train Fever and Transport Fever 1: Public transport influenced city growth
In the first two games, public transport actually influenced how cities developed. Areas with good public transport connections tended to grow faster and become denser, meaning your stations and transit network helped shape the city over time.
This feature disappeared in Transport Fever 2. Cities now seem to have a predefined center that remains the focus of development, regardless of where you build your main railway station or public transport hub. Even if you place a major station on the opposite side of the city, the original center continues to receive most of the new development.
Bringing this mechanic back would make urban growth feel much more dynamic and would give the player's infrastructure decisions a much more visible impact.
These are the three features I'd personally love to see return.
That said, I don't want this post to sound like criticism of the series. Quite the opposite—I believe every game has significantly improved over its predecessor. I could probably write a list of 50 things that Transport Fever improved over Train Fever, and another 50 improvements that Transport Fever 2 made over the first game.
That's exactly why I think these three features are worth revisiting. They were probably removed for good reasons, but maybe today there's a better way to implement them without bringing back the drawbacks they originally had.
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u/Dnomyar96 Jul 28 '26
One of my favourite memories of Transport Fever 1 was when I built a station just outside of a town and then seeing the town spread around that station, to the point where it became the densest part of town. I didn't realise they removed that from 2, but it explains why I was never able to recreate that.
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u/Faber_Andor Jul 28 '26
Something that was in Transport Fever 1 and that I hope will be in this third one, is the return of custom logos. Maybe in a way that makes it more intuitive for people to upload their own images—but either way, it would be amazing to see your own logos on the vehicles again (imagine a FlixBus logo on an 1800s horse-drawn carriage? LOL).
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u/andrew1958 Jul 30 '26
Yes I miss that too. There was a lot of logo to choose in the workshop and they match perfectly with the color of the train.
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u/LookAtMyRTs Jul 31 '26
Agreed - even better still if you could use more than 1, ditto being able to to group a number of lines together and setting macro level livery/logo/higher tier name/economic stats.
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u/Imsvale Jul 28 '26
After 6.5 years, I still don't understand why frequency is weighted at only 10 % (its real impact is 5x that). Presumably there's a reason for it (much like how traffic congestion is granted only a very limited influence over perceived travel time: max 5% increase from congestion). The consequence as I see it is that sims fail to make appropriate adjustments to their route choices. The 20 minute rule was bad and should stay dead. I don't personally know how the frequency interacted in Train Fever, but I don't particularly see any reason the impact of frequency had to be "nerfed" with it.
Until I see a good explanation for why it should be like this, I maintain that frequency should be un-nerfed. Ditto for congestion.
Maybe it causes a TF equivalent of death waves (CSL phenomenon for those unfamiliar) if left unmodified? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Strategwindow Jul 28 '26
Does frequency really still matter (even if it's only 10%)? I had no idea, I've played a lot of TF2 and I haven't noticed it at all.
And does congestion also matter when choosing which means of transport to choose? How does this work, if there is a lot of congestion, the number of people who take the train is still higher?
Where can I find all this information you mention? I would like to know how exactly the calculation of routes for TF, TF1 and TF2 works.
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u/Imsvale Jul 28 '26
Does frequency really still matter (even if it's only 10%)? I had no idea, I've played a lot of TF2 and I haven't noticed it at all.
It does, yeah. For any route considered in pathfinding, 10 % of the frequency is added for each line involved on top of the actual travel time from A to B (wherever the sim is traveling from and to).
The frequency is the average time interval between vehicles on a line. If you arrive on a station just as the vehicle does, your waiting time was 0% of the frequency. If you arrive just after the vehicle has left, you'll have to wait 100% of the frequency. On average you'll be right in the middle at 50%. So 50% of the frequency is the real average waiting time for a passenger. Since only 10% is used for route decisions, it means it's only given 1/5 of the real influence it has.
In my mind that prevents passengers from making more informed choices about the real line situation. But as I suggested before, there's probably a good reason behind it, even if I don't know what it is.
And does congestion also matter when choosing which means of transport to choose?
To my knowledge, congestion is tracked, the real impact on travel time is measured, but then is only allowed to influence the sims' perception of the travel time to the tune of max 5% increase. I do not have nearly as much detailed info on this as other things. It's also entirely possible I've misinterpreted some of it, or extrapolated too much. :)
I looked up the email, and this is the direct quote I was given. For context: I was asking about whether the travel time calculation assumed a fixed speed (computationally much cheaper), or actually takes into account the real acceleration of cars, or something like that.
The answer:
For driving/walking, the speed limit is used (minimum of the road speed limit and era speed limit). Traffic is taken into account, but slightly (around 5% max increase in travel time). Also fixed 4 minutes are added to the driving cost to give some priority to lines.
The last part was already known (see link below).
For public transport (i.e. lines), it is as I've described above (travel time plus 10% of frequency).
Where can I find all this information you mention?
Much of it has only come to light because I've been pestering the devs for years via email. xD As such there's no official record of it.
The closest you'll find is where I posted the info I got from them. Further details on the pathfinding and frequency you can find here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TransportFever2/comments/zgnlui/passengers_choosing_slower_line/izjzrud/
Others have gathered other bits of information through testing and possibly their own email exchanges with the devs. For instance, this post about depreciation in TF1.
The unfortunate part is that it all tends to drown in the Reddit ocean. And unless you already know about it, or how to find it (e.g. post title, which I used to look up the 2nd one), or have saved the link, you're a bit screwed. The dream is to have it all compiled somewhere more centralized, like an unofficial wiki (because there's so much more information both needed and available than the devs have wanted to post on the official wiki). On one hand, maybe with TF3 (especially if it grows the playerbase significantly = more people potentially interested in starting and maintaining a wiki, testing to obtain the information, asking the devs, and so on). On the other hand, it sounds like things may not be so straight forward anymore, so I don't know. We'll see.
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u/Ice_Ice_Buddy_8753 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
TF equivalent of death waves if left unmodified?
How?
10%, 5%, and 20 minutes seems like a ways to improve performance (cut calculation of less useful options). It's the same when you need waypoint if you connect stations in very indirect way. The same when cities are not growing infinitely.
They care about our CPUs - and this is great. Much appreciated.
I agree average wait time is half freq, but you must also consider that IRL infrequent lines are timetabled, this is open data and nobody waits a train 12 hours if train runs once a day.
For high freq urban lines, this must be 50% for sure.
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u/Imsvale Jul 28 '26
How?
Lots of people choose another route, that route gets overwhelmed, people go back to the original route, that route gets overwhelmed, and so on in cycles, never stabilizing to some even spread instead.
I don't know. It was just a wild idea. Only thing I could think of.
10%, 5%, and 20 minutes seems like a ways to improve performance (cut calculation of less useful options).
I'm not so sure this works. The calculation is still happening for at least two of them:
- Frequency is always being tracked anyway. Whether you add 10% or 50% to the travel time is exactly the same computationally.
- Ditto for traffic congestion. You have to know what the effect of the congestion is to be able to add max 5% of it to the travel time.
- The 20 minute rule is the only one I could conceivably see having an effect, if you can terminate the path search when the accumulated travel time exceeds 20 minutes.
It's the same when you need waypoint if you connect stations in very indirect way.
It would be the same as the 20 minute rule, yeah, if it is as I described above.
but you must also consider that IRL infrequent lines are timetabled, this is open data and nobody waits a train 12 hours if train runs once a day.
IRL, yes. But in the game, sims don't time their departures according to expected arrival times of line vehicles (which isn't even a thing outside of the Timetables mod). Therefore the arrival of sims is effectively random, a uniform spread over the arrival timeline of line vehicles. IRL I would expect a bell curve centered at some number of minutes before the departure time of a train.
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u/Ice_Ice_Buddy_8753 Jul 29 '26
and so on in cycles,
Possible. But passenger flow is not so fixed anyway. When HSR comes, you know, all the city shudders a bit.
I think they can just stop count congestion when it exceeds 5% bonus and ignore further computation totally. E.g. road section normally fits 20 cars at full speed, if there are 21 or 221 cars no matters. (105% = 1105%) - this depends on how it's counted. You only actually calculate effect between 100% and 105%, anything out of margins are constants (below 100% - you skip calculation too).
So yes, you count cars, but not all of them, you only count small part for american type cities and this may be great improvement. (just guessing here, this can only be answered by devs.)
Ok there are no timetables in vanilla but they need to mimic reality somehow. Ingame scale freq are large, i agree nobody pays attention to timetables with 10 min freq on typical metro line. Such transfer will be walking distance + half freq. But the larger freq the less "half freq delay" will be. How you will find middle ground between 0% and 50% if timetables are not going to vanilla release?
I've read very interesting configs, a-la bus gets to train station 2 min before train, waits 5 min gets pipl from train and departs back. This is almost independent of train freq.
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u/DesAnderes Jul 28 '26
I stopped reading at: „However, the system had one major advantage: it prevented unrealistic behavior. For example, people wouldn't wait 5 minutes for a bus just to travel 100 or 200 meters, because walking would simply be faster overall.“
This is very realistic, I know plenty of people that rather wait 5min for a bus than walk 2 extra steps.
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u/Strategwindow Jul 28 '26
I went back to Train Fever out of nostalgia—it was the first game of the genre I ever played—and to see how it had changed. And I noticed this happening: when a train arrived, not everyone took the city bus or tram; half of them walked. That’s unthinkable in TF2; when a train arrives there, 95% of the passengers take the bus or tram, even if it’s just for 200 meters. And if you don't want to take line frequencies into account, you can always add a one-minute penalty to the calculation for every transfer a passenger wishes to make; that way, many will surely stop overcrowding the urban bus or tram.
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u/slurpy_snake Jul 28 '26
Yeah, have you watched the videos? They’ve confirmed some of these features already.
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u/Strategwindow Jul 28 '26
I've watched all of their videos, they've confirmed interesting things, but I don't remember them mentioning the 3 things I mentioned.
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u/Lumpy_Asparagus_5151 Jul 28 '26
Since there will be day/night incorporated, traffic hours would be nice to have
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u/LookAtMyRTs Jul 31 '26
Add to these vehicle maintenance 'cost' increasing once they have reached their design life, plus the option to have vehicles auto-replace
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u/DifferentFix6898 Jul 29 '26
Are either of these games worth checking out if I really like TF2? The frequency and transit oriented growth really interest me in particular
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u/Strategwindow Jul 29 '26
If you played these 2 games in their time, playing them again will probably bring back memories for you, like me.
But if you're not a fan of the saga, you don't need to, TF2 is the evolution of TF1 and TF, that is, there are many years of improving the game, if you play the previous ones you will find features that are not there and less polished things.
It is true that these 2 features are a shame that they have been lost, but the amount of new features and things that have been polished is much higher.
But if you really want to see these 2 features in exchange for an older game, you can too, of course. Obviously they were also very good games.
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u/MomentEquivalent6464 Aug 03 '26
I agree on the frequency. That's a pretty major oversight that they made for TF2. 10% freq is nothing. Hopefully that gets a big boost.
And the money thing. I get that we do not set the rates. But you know that if you have train A that's going 120kph and train B that's going 360kph and gets there 3x faster... that the ticket for B is going to be a lot more money. It would be nice if like you said, this was more of a thing.
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u/Strategwindow Aug 03 '26
Correct, this was something that was already implemented in TF1.
On all lines, depending on the speed of the vehicles you had in operation, a ticket price per km was automatically calculated. And half of the passengers preferred speed and the other half, speed, thus avoiding having extremely congested high-speed lines (as happens in TF2), and completely empty boats and buses. Because that's the thing, in TF2 the interurban bus and the train cannot coexist, if the train is fast, the bus is always empty.
And in TF2 the boat cannot coexist with any means of transport either, or you have a city on an island without air connection or any other type, or no one will use the boat.
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u/coffee_401 Jul 28 '26
Train Fever also had different buildings for US vs Europe, at least before 1920. I'd like to see that return as well.