A-Train All Aboard Tourism!: integrating freight trains into your lines

Описание: Note: pause the video if the text boxes are too fast. Unfortunately I can't speak English and so the video exposition is quite precarious. But given the total lack of English tutorials for this game, I guess this video is better than nothing.

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About the video:

The lack of signals in A-Train makes some players used to Western games frustrated. The difficulty of creating timelines is quite disappointing initially, but as you begin to adapt to the new system you'll notice that it's not so complicated and is even fun because of the "puzzle" aspect it has.

In my opinion, an important factor in beginning to understand timelines in a more intuitive way is to think in stations rather than individual trains. In games like A-Train 9, by the way, all the more complex timeline scheduling is done directly from the stations where you have access to all the platforms and trains, which makes everything more intuitive. In A-Train All Aboard Tourism, however, you need to acess the individual menu of each train, and for people who have no experience with the series this can lead to the mistaken idea that they need to micromanage each train individually to be able to do anything even remotely complex.

In fact, the most important is to think in terms of stations. After determining a generic departure time for the first station, all trains leaving that station at the same speed will arrive at the "critical point" (the place where a collision can occur) in a predictable time. All you have to do now is to set another generic departure time for the second station, so that trains leaving this station arrive at the "critical point" at a safe time. With just two different departure times you solve the problem that may involve dozens of trains (as long as they're all traveling at the same speed).

From there, you already have what is necessary to transport passengers and goods, which is all you need to overcome the game's scenarios. But nothing stops you from starting to refine the system to make it more complex without losing functionality. Obviously there's a limit; depending on how complex your lines are, you'll necessarily need to start using spreadsheets or dedicated programs like jTrain. But thinking in terms of stations you will at least have the capability to integrate trains from different lines in a successful way which is a huge step.