July 26th, 2019 at 3:16 AM
I got a city up to about 160K and was able to have some luck with better subway lines. A few tips I can share:
- CIMS will walk a pretty substantial distance to get to a station. I've seen them walk up to half a tile. Obviously, you don't want to force them to walk this far, but you can very easily put one or two stations per several blocks and be fine.
- Go for relatively straight lines. Zig zag lines are terrible. They won't be used nearly as much as a much more linear route.
- You can put several lines through a station. They will switch lines if they need to.
- Make sure to have a starting point, and create stations (ideally no more than about 10-20 or so), and once you reach the last station, work backwards and create all of the stops going the other direction. This creates a single line that goes in both directions.
- The most important thing is to create lines from the residential areas, and feed the commercial, office, and industrial areas with them. Residential -> residential, or work areas -> work areas are not effective lines.
- In general, you'll have lines that go from residential areas to the workplace areas. You'll have a set of fairly linear routes (not necessarily north/south or east/west, but can go in any direction.) Some will go east/west, and others will go north/south, and you'll have various stations scattered throughout that have multiple lines going through them, allowing CIMS to switch lines.
- Increase funding to increase the number of trains, which reduces the time spent waiting on a train. The faster the route, the more it will be used.
In other words, create a lot of relatively simple, fairly linear lines with 10-20 stops, and space the stops far enough apart to not slow the route, but close enough that cims don't have to walk terribly far.
Doing this, I created pretty successful subway networks that alleviated quite a bit of the traffic in my city. Currently at about 80% traffic flow at 160K, which isn't bad.
- CIMS will walk a pretty substantial distance to get to a station. I've seen them walk up to half a tile. Obviously, you don't want to force them to walk this far, but you can very easily put one or two stations per several blocks and be fine.
- Go for relatively straight lines. Zig zag lines are terrible. They won't be used nearly as much as a much more linear route.
- You can put several lines through a station. They will switch lines if they need to.
- Make sure to have a starting point, and create stations (ideally no more than about 10-20 or so), and once you reach the last station, work backwards and create all of the stops going the other direction. This creates a single line that goes in both directions.
- The most important thing is to create lines from the residential areas, and feed the commercial, office, and industrial areas with them. Residential -> residential, or work areas -> work areas are not effective lines.
- In general, you'll have lines that go from residential areas to the workplace areas. You'll have a set of fairly linear routes (not necessarily north/south or east/west, but can go in any direction.) Some will go east/west, and others will go north/south, and you'll have various stations scattered throughout that have multiple lines going through them, allowing CIMS to switch lines.
- Increase funding to increase the number of trains, which reduces the time spent waiting on a train. The faster the route, the more it will be used.
In other words, create a lot of relatively simple, fairly linear lines with 10-20 stops, and space the stops far enough apart to not slow the route, but close enough that cims don't have to walk terribly far.
Doing this, I created pretty successful subway networks that alleviated quite a bit of the traffic in my city. Currently at about 80% traffic flow at 160K, which isn't bad.
