Have you played Mini Metro? No? Well, go download it now, and I'll see you in ~20 hours when it releases its grip on your life.
The rest of this post is a disorganized list of moderately interesting insights about the game, with an abortive attempt at a narrative arc.
Try to make your line cycle through the station flavors instead of having several of the same shape in a row. This gives the train a chance to unload along the way.
If you have a line ending in, say, circle-circle-circle-endofline, a rightward-bound train is going to run empty after the first circle (there are no destinations further down the line, so passengers won't board). This is, of course, a waste of train-miles. You can usually make things much better by extending the end of the line to a station of a different shape, even if it's a little awkward to do so. This lets a rightward-bound train pick up passengers and do some useful work removing passengers from the circles instead of running empty.
Surprisingly, linear lines are better than loop lines. In the few small examples we've worked through, it's actually always better to wire up stations in a line where the vehicles have to turn around at the end, not a loop. This seems to be because, on a loop, passengers will always board the train, even if they'll have to ride almost all the way around the loop to get to their destination. On a linear line, the passengers will wait for a train going the other way, which will get them there in fewer stops.
Spaghetti networks work. 1-3 are implications of an underlying insight about the structure of transportation networks: only capacity matters. The route a train takes is not important; what's important is how many trains per minute are serving each passenger flow, compared to the size of that passenger flow (a "passenger flow" is a number of passengers per minute originating at some source and headed to some destination). The main problem of the game is how to take your finite number of trains and assign them routes over the stations such that all passenger flows have enough service to drain them. You can see this as a problem where you have a static pool of "capacity", which is measured in passenger miles per minute; the amount of capacity you have is: [the number of trains you have] * [number of passengers a train can carry] * [speed of a train] Your job is to allocate dollops of that capacity around the map so that as much of it gets used to move passengers as possible instead of being empty. Since trains can't teleport to a different station after each leg, and since you have to assign trains to "lines", you're constrained in exactly how you can slice up your capacity pool, but (A) those two constraints aren't directly involved in whether you lose the game (only the capacity allocation is), and (B) you can slice up that pool in ways that look like insane spaghetti networks and still be fine, as long as you're solving the "allocate capacity to flows" problem well. In fact, since extreme optimization tends to look pretty weird, the most efficient networks will probably be found in the spaghetti end of the spectrum.
You can run emergency service. All of the above assumes that your network is pretty stable, which is true of real trains since tracks are expensive to construct and reroute. However, Mini Metro lets you rearrange stuff on a whim! It feels a little cheaty, but you can keep a line+locomotive in reserve, and instantly solve an overcrowded station by building a direct line from that station to wherever most of its passengers want to go. This is a common tactic among experienced players. Remember how I said "your trains can't teleport" earlier? Well, with enough micromanagement by you, they can teleport (albeit without passengers aboard), and you can move much higher volumes of passengers on the same capacity budget. This facet of Mini Metro actually isn't completely fictional; you can almost do this kind of thing in the real world with busses, and this is, in fact, how real-world transit agencies often resolve transient network hotspots.
The above is a mix of original and ruthlessly stolen ideas from
Me
@a-point-in-tumblspace
@toasterabyte
@existentialterror
Jarrett Walker, an actual person with an actual job:
https://humantransit.org/2014/12/learning-how-transit-works-from-mini-metro.html
https://humantransit.org/2014/03/the-lessons-of-mini-metro.html
