Mini Metro

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Minimalistic game about building metro systems. A puzzle game that is easy to learn but has significant depth. Challenges keep things interesting and goal-oriented

Genres: puzzle, city, simulation, minimalistic

Thoughts

This game caught my attention when it first came out on PC. The style of the game incorporates the design style of metro systems - A near-universal language of lines, colors, and simple shapes that are at once familiar to anyone who uses the metro in their daily lives.

Tips

Related Links

Strategy Guide

Network Design

• Alternate station types along a line as much as possible. A train going through CCCT is going to be full by the time it gets to the third C, because people at C stations NEVER want to go to another C. If you can make it CCTC instead, then many passengers will get off at the T, and you (might) have room to pick up at the 3rd C. Even if you have to zigzag a line quite badly to get from CCCT to CCTC, do it.

• The special stations are important. They are destinations, and people will travel across your network to get to them. A person on Blue line trying to get to the Diamond will get off to transfer if the Blue line doesn't go to the Diamond. Where they get off and how they transfer is within your control. Force them to do this where you want it done and where you can optimize things. Essentially, people will take the route with the fewest number of stops. So if Blue and Red line both go to X, then a person on Blue Line heading to X who arrives at an intersection with the Red Line will stay on Blue Line if it has fewer stops on its way to X, but they will transfer to Red Line if it goes to X more directly. (See comments about loop routes down below for more on this)

• I'm not certain of this, but it seems that some specials are far more popular than others in any given game. It's not like + is always popular, but in each game have a look to see what special most passengers are heading for. Then check that you are optimized for that. Maybe you are using the X as a hub, and people transfer to the Y, but if there are way more Y passengers in the network, make the Y the hub and have them transfer to the X instead.

• Occasionally pause and look at your trains. Do you have some that are running empty? Why? Can you rework a station/transfer points to fix it?

• Use unique or rare stations as hubs rather than C or T when possible. You want people getting off at hub stations and disappearing. If the hub itself is a C, then you're just going to offload all the S and XYZ passengers there, who are going to wait for a transfer train. If the hub itself is an S, then those S passengers will disappear. Generally you'll find the starting S to be a pretty useful hub. It's usually easy to get either the C or T passengers off of trains before arriving at the hub by going through a C or a T before hitting the hub.

• A passenger will never go East if the station they want is closer going West (unless the trains on the line ONLY run East, which can only happen on looping lines). So for example in an CTSCTTT line, if a passenger heading to C shows up on the S, he is not getting on a train going West. He will wait for a train going east, since it heads directly to a C. If this is a looping line with all trains going the same way, then the passenger will get on the first train no matter which way it runs because it's his only option. V1 Edit this is not true after all. There is some kind of route-finding code that will cause passengers to disembark a line and take a "shorter" route to their destination, but in my simplified example above on a loop with trains running both ways, a Triangle passenger will get on an eastbound train from the Square if that's the first train that comes through.

• Sometimes turning your lines into loops can help. With a loop you can run trains clockwise, counter-clockwise, or both. If you really need to transfer a lot of passengers from the north to the south (Guangzhou challenge, for example) then you might run all the trains in one direction so that they take people from the north and move them to a transfer point in the south very efficiently, and then the trains might go on a longer wandering loop before they pick up again in the north.

• Alternatively, you might run trains in both directions on a loop to ensure that you can serve people most efficiently throughout. A loop that goes XSYCCTCCC(then back to X) might have a feeder line coming in at the S. You may want this loop running both ways so that passengers arriving at S can go directly to X on one train or directly to Y on a different train. The alternating directions on this loop also mean that where you have CCC, the two trains will approach from different ends, meaning there is no single C that will always be third for pickups.

• You'll see a lot of recommendations for "make loops!" I think that's over-simplifying, but then again I'm not winning daily challenges so this isn't gospel. Loops can be great, but they're not categorically better. It's situational. One argument against loops is that they usually require two tunnels rather than just one tunnel for a point-to-point line.

• I find that running a very direct line that cuts a looped line in half can be very useful. Say you have a loop that starts and ends on the S. It's maybe SCTCTCCTTCTCTCCTTCTCT-S. As your trains go around that loop they're going to fill with passengers headed for the S (and the specials elsewhere on the network). So if the S is your hub, you could run a line that goes directly from the S to one of the C or T stations that's about half-way around your circle line. Passengers will take the route with the least number of stops to their destination, so all the S passengers will get off the loop route and wait for the cut-across train to take them to the S. It unloads the loop route trains half-way through and makes room for more C and T passengers. This was a big key for me to improve my routing. If the loop route is really long, you can cut it multiple times. Note that a loop route doesn't mean a "circle shape" it just means a connected loop. It might be more like a very squashed oval - very long and not very wide. It could even zigzag all over the map and not be even vaguely circular, it's just a line that starts and ends on the same station. The "cut across" line might actually be extremely short in those cases, which is actually good.

• Sometimes if you need to feed traffic into an exchange point making V lines is useful. Basically it's just a regular point to point line, but you put the transfer station in the middle instead of the end. This way you can make the two ends works to your advantage by trying to get alternating station types that maybe you couldn't otherwise get.

• When you are tunnel constrained, the V line is useful because you can snake the ends of the lines into stations that might otherwise have needed a bridge to get to. in fact, you may have to route the line to a weird station that you don't really want attached just to get the right angle of attack on your target station. This happens a lot in Auckland, for example, where a station might lie at the end of a pier.

• Point to Point lines that terminate in special stations can be useful. If you have SCTCTX and the S is a hub, then trains are going to pick up a few X passengers at the hub, head to the X, drop them off, and on the way back they'll pick up the C and T passengers. This falls apart though if you have SCTTTX, because the passengers at C that want to go to T can't get on the train if it's full of X passengers from the hub. Since the train never picks up at C without first getting passengers from the hub (and filling with X's) you have a problem. See advanced section, below.

• Allowing lines to cross away from stations will slow your trains down. It has its uses, when it makes for the best network/efficiency, but keep it in mind.

• Keeping curves to 90 or greater (oblique angle versus acute angle) will allow trains to roll through a station without stopping if there is no pickup/dropoff to make. If the angle is less than 90, the train will always stop in that station. Sometimes you can adjust the incoming/outgoing angle of a line to improve upon the default that the game gives you. Watch for those opportunities. This slowdown is NOT more important than station alternating on the line. Don't change CCTC to CCCT just to remove an acute angle.

• Remember that you can only run 4 locomotives on a line, but you can have as many carriages as you want. Eventually a line will be too long if 4 trains are so spread out they don't pick up often enough. That's really the only limit to line length in the game. I have played maps where I twinned a line so I could run more than 4 trains on one route, but it hasn't happened recently and I suspect it's not optimal.

Picking Options

• Any time you see a carriage and you DON'T pick it, you have chosen not to improve your network's carrying capacity.  The carriage is the only option that actually allows you to move MORE people per minute. Think hard before turning it down.  V1 Edit I overstated this. A carriage is the only option that explicitly improves your capacity, but a well placed line can improve your efficiency by a lot, and efficiency can trump capacity in many cases. A carriage is still well worth consideration, but if you're relatively happy with your lines, don't worry about making them longer - pick the carriage and extend existing lines when that is efficient routing.

• Lines will let you add more complexity and fine-tune your network, but they don't fundamentally improve the carrying capacity or people/minute that you can move. Also, transferring from one line to another is less efficient than just riding one train to your destination, so don't pick new lines unless you have to.  V1 Edit As noted above, a new line can improve efficiency and may well be a better option than a carriage. With experience you'll get a feel for the efficiency vs capacity decision.

• Tunnels should be selected when needed, but it's usually better to have more carriages than tunnels, as a general rule.  V1 Edit I don't really mean "if you have 4 tunnels you should have 4 or more carriages" I just mean that I would tend to pick carriages over tunnels, unless the tunnel is going to improve my efficiency a lot or the map simply requires tunnels due to islands. Good design can overcome a lack of tunnels. I mean, if Istanbul can be done with one tunnel, and Auckland can be done with two (theoretically?) then you only need 6 tunnels on a map where there are literally stations on small islands that force tunnel use.

• Terminal upgrades are great in very specific situations, but if you are just choosing terminal because your regular network stations are overcrowding (not a weirdly constrained one like in the Guangzhou challenge) then your problem is network design and carrying capacity, not a lack of terminals. Basically, don't pick these unless the scenario specifically calls for them. Chances are you could re-work your network and eliminate the need for the terminal (or the need will just move to a different station and your terminal will be wasted.

Advanced Stuff

• "Trainspotting" (I just made this up) is what I call the process of babysitting your trains and moving them around as needed. Above I talked about the SCTTTX line, where S is a hub. So you're going to have Triangle passengers at the C building up. They can't get on an eastbound train because it's full of X passengers from the hub. So once in a while you pick that train up after it drops off at the X and manually move it to enter the C, heading east. It'll clear the C station and then you can ignore it for a while. You'll have to come back though: these problems aren't going away without reworking your line.

• "Ghost Lines" are a thing in this game, and are pretty much vital to winning the harder achievements and getting high scores on daily games. Basically, you must have one line and one locomotive available to you. You drop the line down, unpause the game for about 1/2 second, and then immediately delete the line (you can use the X hidden under the line's colored circle on the right, in case you didn't know about that). It will load the train and run to its destination even after you delete it. You can then draw the same line in a new location, and the instant the first train reaches its destination the "ghost line" will disappear and the new one will run. As soon as that one starts running, you can delete it and repeat. You can use a ghost line to fix the problem above, by dropping a track from the C to the next T and deleting it. This will also clear the C just like the Trainspotting move above.

• "Ghost Network" (I just made that term up) is ghost lining on crack. With this you need multiple spare locomotives. Here you can place/delete/place/delete/place/delete and have 2, 3, 4 or more ghost lines all running simultaneously. You can have as many simultaneous ghost lines as you have locomotives to spare. This can get intense and slows games down. I personally don't like to do it much, but for Guangzhou and Auckland challenges it may be necessary.