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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

In this genre, Mini Metro is really fun, highly recommend.

https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-metro/

The moment I have been waiting for: Top 1% player in all scenarios, both Mini Metro and Motorways. AMA.

No, they are both really fun (and highly addictive in my case). I like that you can do a scenario in 30-ish minutes (and even pause if you need to). I personally prefer Motorways over Metro, but alas, both highly recommended. Fantastic game design.

Wow. AMA, you say? When do you prefer loops, or lines? Additional lines, or carriages? How much do you tear down at once? if you don't mind me asking

I'm like median on Metro, ~60 hours over years (though perhaps just the one hour, 60x, &c). Never too late to learn some strategy, I guess. Never played Motorways.

Loops vs lines: Loops only in a dense core where you can keep shapes alternating and include a square. Use lines for suburb<->core and river hops.

Lines or carriages: Early add lines, midgame add a loco, then carriages on the trunk that is actually redlining. Late add an interchange at the first overloaded transfer before more cars.

Tear-down: Hm... how much, not sure how to quantify. Definitely something you must do in every long running game but the extend is different. As a heuristic: Pause and rebuild when queues outrun a single weekly upgrade. Reorder shapes, make sure every line touches a square, split any mega-hub into two nearby transfers.

As you probably have guessed: There is no real silver bullet. Knowing the best move is basically impossible, the space is too complex. As a most useful general skill, it's important to recognize problems very early and optimize ruthlessly.

How did you learn strategies? There are very few reliable sources of strategy for both games, compared to other, more common simulation games.

Just by observation/feel, really. I don't think I have looked at any strategy guides. Figuring that out to me is the fun part.

Thanks! I've played the daily Mini Metro challenge for years and very rarely made it into the top 10%. I've gone through phases with widening loops, grids, etc. I always feel like there must be some mysterious "trick" I don't know. Questions:

1. How important is it to make sure you alternate symbols? (Beyond the obvious of not having 3 in a row). Do you go out of your way to avoid two in a row?

2. Is it better to put major junctions at the most common circle/triangle symbols, or on squares, or the rarer ones?

3. How much imortance do you place on the slowdown from lines crossing not at stations? I always go out of my way to avoid doing it but I wonder if I overrate the importance of it in my mind.

4. When you notice that some random station along a single line is getting a lot more traffic than other ones, do you shift other lines to cross it or just add more carriages?

One of the most frustrating (but addicting) things with the game is that a couple of my highest scores happened when I first started playing it, before I thought I knew any tricks at all! Wish I could see what the best players' maps end up looking like.

Oh yeah, one more question... do you play the secret level? What actually happens there, or is it just a gag?

1. Alternation matters because circles spawn most often, triangles next, squares least. I avoid 3+ in a row almost religiously; 2 in a row is fine unless that segment is already stressed. If I can cheaply flip a segment into triangle-circle-triangle (or similar), I do it.

2. Where to put big junctions: Squares are rare magnets, so giving every line access to at least one square prevents square-bound riders from piling up on transfers. My "major" hub is usually a square near the geographic center or a bridge choke, and I try not to merge too many trunks into one block-split load across two nearby interchanges if possible. If you have special shapes (stars, etc.), connecting each special to exactly one line that meets others only at an interchange keeps flows predictable.

3. Crossing lines away from stations: It's not catastrophic, but on busy trunks the cumulative hit adds up. I'll avoid mid-block crossings on high-throughput segments; elsewhere I don't contort the whole map just to eliminate a single crossing. Net: treat it as a tax, pay it only when it saves tunnels or ugly detours.

4. Random station getting swamped: Triage in this order: turn it into an interchange (boarding speed), add a loco, then a carriage on the most burdened line, and only then re-route another line to cross it. If nothing stabilizes, drop a short "shuttle" micro-line from that station straight to a square/triangle sink, then delete it once the queue clears. Pausing to redraw aggressively is part of the game.

On those early "beginner's luck" highs: seed luck is real but also the game rewards ruthless mid-game rebuilds more than early cleverness. Don't be sentimental about lines-pause, re-lay, and keep every line touching a square.

I have not heard of or seen a secret level!

Thanks for the tips! I haven't normally redrawn as aggressively as you suggest. I'm excited to try all these strategies in practice, and it's enlightening as well to hear your thought process.

The secret level plays in endless mode. On the home screen of the game, tap the white arrow in the upper left corner to go to the credits page. Then return to the home screen and go to the credits page again. The second time there will be a sort of gear looking design next to the credits. Tap on that.

I don't know if there's a further easter egg to solving it but maybe you'll figure it out ;)

I have a similar set of questions about a different puzzle game.

I've reached a point where I don't feel I'm improving and I'm not discovering any more tricks.

Going online to find other people's solutions just feels wrong. Like buying a "how to complete $X" from the olden days. I don't learn when someone else provides the way to a solution; I like progressive learning, and I dislike the frustration when I stop progressing.

I keep wondering about the meta-problem of how to change my mental gears...

There's an itch to create my own version of the game which would force me to learn the underlying mathematics. Most games are designed to level your skills or knowledge up slowly (sometimes a social component involved). Building yourself forces one to understand the constraints better.

OR do I just train up my meta-skills e.g. playing similar but different games?

I do feel stupid!

Obviously I've also reached my limit on the metagame here, given that I'm asking...

When you reach an impass with a solo intellectual challenge, what's the next step?

Well, I don't usually ask for help and I don't want solutions handed to me, but getting another player's thought process doesn't seem like cheating. I suppose it depends on whether there's one trick to always solving the puzzle, in which case learning the solution without solving it yourself ruins the fun, or whether it's a game that you can always keep improving at and never completely be perfect at (like Mini Metro, which everyone loses eventually, or Poker, or chess, etc) where sometimes learning from others' strategies helps you level up and become familiar with concepts that unlock further skills and open up new questions as well.

How do you balance the struggle to recognize your own greatness while also making time to engage with the little people?

Also, how much time would you say it's taken you to refine your skill to get to that 1%?

> How do you balance the struggle to recognize your own greatness while also making time to engage with the little people?

Alas! I lie awake many a nights.

> Also, how much time would you say it's taken you to refine your skill to get to that 1%?

Just checked Steam stats. Surprisingly (well, to me) little: Around 60 hours of Mini Metro and 200 hours of Mini Motorways. I guess it's not exactly competitive esports.

I like it but it always felt like there was an escalating kill screen that happens way too quickly. Either that or I'm bad at it.

You're not alone.

I am also bad at mini Metro but the thing that makes me crazy is that when the game ends it says something like “your city shut down.” That makes absolutely no sense and the endgame message should’ve been “you were fired!” Such a missed opportunity!

Maybe it does make sense: public transportation is vital to your city. If you fail at it, your city fails?

Serves this city right for putting all its eggs into one basket.

Where are the alternate forms transport: the bike paths and bike shares, LRTs/buses, and yes, roads? What about other upstream policy levers such as WFH mandates, and a decentralized urban core?

I love Mini Metro, so chill, but challenging.

One catch is that riders only need to get a particular "shape" of station (roughly analogous to residential, commercial, industrial, stadium, etc). That is to say, they normally don't insist on going to a particular station. Also and it's free in time, money, and political captial to change routes. The model is, I feel, slightly too simple to feel like real transport infra. That doesn't stop it being hella fun though.

I figure all the triangle stations must have well-connected bus routes going to the same area, and so on down the shapes. I mean surely you're not responsible for building an entire transit system!

It’s obvious in hindsight, but before I lived in the Boston area I never appreciated just how critical it is to have buses to supplement a subway, subway & buses to supplement light rail.

Whenever the idea of light rail came up in my hometown, I would point out to my enthusiastic friends that without a better bus system, there’s not much point to rail.

My suburb has solid light rail to the city but a poor bus system to complement it. My closest bus doesn't run at all on weekends. There is a huge park and ride lot but, since I'm already in my car driving towards my destination, it always ends up being a question of whether I want to deal with a rail ride that might be equivalent to driving inbound but will be at least 30 minutes longer on the return. The deciding factor tends to come down to parking costs in the city or whether I plan to drink and need the long return ride to sober up.

It's the kind of game you can lose hours to without realizing, even if it's more "transit-inspired" than a full-on sim

Seconded. Big fan of network optimization rail games like the Empire Builder series, but Mini Metro is just simple fun!

I had fun with Mini Metro for a while, but in the long run it's a really frustrating game, because it always ends in failure - you start with a few stations and a few lines, but the game keeps throwing more and more passengers at you until you end up frantically trying to plug the holes in your network or "rewiring" it on the spot, and sooner or later everything inevitably blows up in your face. Plus of course it's wildly unrealistic with the way you are able to just delete your existing "tracks" and instantly construct completely new connections between your stations out of thin air, or just "teleport" trains/carriages from one line to another.

>it's wildly unrealistic with the way you are able to just delete your existing "tracks" and construct completely new connections between your stations out of thin air

You can disable that in the settings.

Mini Motorways is also really good if you like solving traffic problems

This game got me hooked on a long-haul flight and it's so much fun.

I love this game. And I have been waiting for the Mini Motorways for years...but for now it has not Linux version.

Mini Motorways is Platinum rated on Protondb, you should be able to play the Windows version on Linux just fine: https://www.protondb.com/app/1127500

Well, it is a option, but Mini Metro was linux native....I hope that Mini Motorways the same quality.

IMO, Mini Metro is the far better game. In Mini Metro it always feels like the congestion can be solved, it's never hopeless... in Motorways the congestion does really feel impossible to work around, and then you lose. Not sure if that's due to my lack of skill or the difference between rail (discrete, must connect stations) and roads (continuous, can be drawn anywhere on the map)

Transport planner here. Haven't played either game, but it sounds like Motorways has an accurate model behind it. That's how the real world works, too.

c'mon man just build us one more lane, we can get you additional traffic flow next year, you know we're good for it just one more lane will fix all our the problems

Subway Builder seems like it's aiming for the opposite end of the spectrum

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