Cars and trucks and things that go

Below are two screenshots from my current Transport Fever 2 game on a French-themed map. There's one of a late-model tram plying the busy streets of the city of Deurdan, ferrying people between the southern and northern train stations and the aerodrome on the northern outskirts of the city. And the other shows a massive diesel freight train transporting what looks like a small load - planks, perhaps, I can't see closely enough - as it passes through an intermediate freight station loaded up with ore for another train on a separate route to collect.

I've been playing TF2 since January, having been inspired by the walkthrough videos of vlogger Katherine of Sky, who explained the basics with admirable clarity.

It's not a graphically complex game, but the bones are solid. One of the best features of the game is the player's success or failure in shipping essential goods to towns on the map is the main driving force in how quickly those towns develop. And the game evolves the buildings, vehicles and townsfolk's attire as the calendar progresses through the decades, starting out with horse-drawn carriages, cobblestoned streets and hooped dresses, and eventually graduating to modern cities featuring towering skyscrapers and 21st-century light rail. You can influence the direction the city grows in by spending funds on new roads, but without this input the city will grow organically, with a pleasing sense of realism.

One of the things I particularly enjoy about TF2 gameplay is it's quite challenging to make ends meet for the first fifty-odd years of the game from 1850 onwards, during which time the prevailing technology levels mean you have to rely on expensive and puny early steam engines that can barely haul any cargo, and tiny horse-drawn wagons and coaches that are incredibly slow and have limited capacity. It's really hard to make a living in the early years, and it's expensive to build the rail networks that will eventually unlock the full potential of moving goods and people around the map efficiently.

But when you realise that by filling in the gaps between a bunch of separate rail lines, and adding a few signals and double-tracking tweaks, you can fling a cargo from one end of the map to the other and make a huge profit to boot, it's a golden simulation gaming moment. 

I'd best be off: my electric passenger trains are getting old and I'm itching to build a TGV line.

See also:

Blog: The Night Mail, 17 May 2016

Blog: Wellington tramlink, 14 January 2015

Blog: The break of gauge, 14 January 2014