![]() The food plants have stock, the connected towns want food supplied but the plant just stops and will only accept grain. Perhaps the oddest of all is that food plants just stop processing cattle – this one I can reproduce every time. I had lines that ran construction materials for many years without a hitch, only to have production stop for some inexplicable reason. The only thing I changed was an upgrade to a station but the lines were intact afterwards. I have had several times that a farm stopped producing grain while the rest of the chain seemed to be waiting for that grain to arrive at the food plant. While that sounds very logical, it becomes an issue when things conspire to run a little less smoothly. There is a huge cost involved putting that entire line together and unless you do it all in one fell swoop, you’ll not generate any income at all, it will only cost. You’ll need iron and coal to be delivered at the steelworks, take that steel to the tool factory and transport the end product of tools to the towns. Imagine that you want to provide tools to a town. At the heart of the problem lies Transport Fever’s requirement to set up complete lines for freight. Actually, I’m not even sure if it’s punishment or just a bug. Not so easily forgiven is the game’s excessive punishment of line interruptions. In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor niggle that can easily be forgiven, however. Travel time versus distance is completely out of whack and a day in the game lasts mere seconds. By the time you’ve got five or six lines set up in the sandbox mode, you’re likely to have spent thirty years on the map. Once set, the game will take care of replacing the vehicle automagically. Replacement vehicles and schedules can now be assigned through a vehicle’s overview popup. A few small additions make life a little easier too. Even creating crossovers to allow trains switching tracks works well enough that the few times it mucks up can be forgiven. Those fixes made it into Transport Fever which means drawing rail tracks is now fairly smooth, plopping train stations is easy and intuitive and signalling works fairly well – at least once you resign to the knowledge that trains have fixed platforms and would not select an available platform even if their very lives depended on it. Train Fever launched with a number of issues but, deserving credit, developer Urban Games has supported their game with regular patches for well over a year. Also unchanged is that it doesn’t beat 1994’s Transport Tycoon. You still get a wad of cash and an empty map, you still get to build a transport empire, you still create lines between passenger or freight terminals and you still follow their income like a hawk to ensure your coffers become flush with cash. So, broadly speaking, the game remains unchanged. Yet, if you would look at both games side by side for the first time, you’d be hard-pressed picking the new one unless you knew the original did not have boats or planes and saw one pass by. The graphics have been updated a bit, the interface got cleaned up and a few things got fixed. Transport Fever follows the exact same formula, taking Train Fever to start off with. Take last year’s game, make a few tweaks here, a semi impactful feature there, change the colours a bit, “Et voilà!” a new Football Manager is born. I know some people will despise me for saying it, but Football Manager is pretty much the same game every year. I have your attention now, have I not? It sounds like a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. ![]() The “Fever” games and Football Manager have something in common. ![]()
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