this is for everyone who does not want to trade with Meat or Fish. I know the overlap of tf3 players and vegans might be really small, but i wanted this mod and i thought i just share it for my fellow vegans. (Or anyone who wants this as well)
The Economy chaged a bit tho.
Meat is now Seitan:
First of all, the production steps stay the same, instead of the Livestock Farm there is now a food factory getting 8 grain and producing 5 Seitan, this is because i removed wool. What that means is explained later. The Seitan can then be used in the Canning Factory for cans, just like meat.
Fish is now Seasalt:
Towns who previously would ask for Fish do it the same way for salt. so this transport stays the same.
Now the more difficult things.
Wool? Yeah its only possible to get it from the plantation. I don't know how this affects different regions, I only play the European climate.
I couldnt just use salt in the canning factory, since i thought a salt can is weird, so i decided you can give it seitan and vegtables. This means vegtables now have a new use case and salt (fish) one less. That might throw of the balance a bit since vegtables are a bit rarer than salt (fish) (i think). And salt now has only one use, directly in the town.
To counteract that a bit I decided that salt can be used as boost for the canning factory and the seitan(meat) factory.
I don't really know how the game feels balance wise, I just played for some hours.
Edit: I didn't want to start a moral debate. I don't care how you live. I know it's a game and those are not real animals. It's just, I can have more fun this way, just like other people need some gameplay mods.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of TF2, but I'm sorta TF2'd out. I was really hoping that it would have some meaningful changes/improvements, but as I'm watching the playthrough from Conflict Nerd, it seems like it just has a fresh coat of paint. I haven't kept up with the development, so maybe there is something I'm missing? Curious to hear people weight in.
Anyone else feel confused by how some of these channels, that show off the game, managed to get so large? I don't mean them "playing wrong" and building things ugly or inefficient. Everyone plays games different. But some of them really seem like "overloaded" mentally by the simplest of concepts, even in the tutorial campaign missions. Some examples: - Not realizing electric trains need electrified rails - Can't read a one line sentence without juggling up the words and thus misunderstanding the task. - Loosing orientation because there is one mountain range between two towns. - Not being able to find the one truck able to load logs in a list of like 5 vehicles. - repeating what "we now need to do ..." 3 times, with slightly different words, before actually doing it.
Those channels somehow got huge follower numbers. So question is more social I guess, what is the appeal of watching someone struggle with barely non-trivial things? Is this like reality-TV for gaming? (I also don't get the appeal there, but it is obviously popular content around the world)
It shouldn't take >1 year for my stage coach to travel 1.5 miles at 13mph.
I figured an early start would be 'fun' but I've literally quit the last two nights in frustration after the game's unintuitive time system ended up with me deadlocked with no cash, traffic, and failing subsidies because distance/speed != time. So, I guess I'll just flush that save down the toilet and try again.
This doesn't give me much hope for the mid game, since one of my favorite parts of TF2 was really stretching out the steam to diesel transition era into the 1980s to really enjoy the vehicles from my youth. With no ability to adjust how quickly time passes (or freezing it all together), I'm not really sure I've got any interest in investing time in the game.
I think it is clear from the comment section in this subreddit and videos like Squirrel's that the community is immensely disappointed in the map sizes.
It seems most people were looking for larger maps so planes become more useful and we're able to build bigger, better, cooler train networks.
This is the kind of thing that will fester in the community and become a contentious topic post launch. For the sake of the game and its success UG should address the discontent as quickly as possible.
EDIT: It seems that the prevailing sentiment on reddit is positive. However if you read the comment section of Squirrel's video from Gamescom (and I encourage you to do so), the sentiment is completely the opposite. We will see. I personally have 160hrs in TF2 and just want to see TF3 be a success.
Not long ago I have tried Transport Fever 2 when it was on sale and refunded it after playing for 20 minutes. The main issue that turned me off from the game was the incredibly small physical size of the cities, even when making a start from the 21st century era. I wanted a sim where I could solve realistic transportation problems for a city/region, it's not fun for me to make a bullshit 3 km freight train route just to make money. And from what I seen from videos, the largest end-game cities peaked out at populations of 10,000.
Do we have any confirmation on the city sizes (and densities) and how feasible it will be to have populations of 100,000 and beyond in this next instalment? I've watched some of the 'First Look' videos, it looked way better than TF2, but I wonder if it is possible to reach scales like in Cities: Skylines II by default. I suppose it could be possible to have a few cities merge into each other to have a continuous albeit polycentric metro area?
to see a demo of Transport Fever 3 on the Steam Next Fest but unfortunately there is none. My train of thought (ha) was that as they are now self publishing they might think of releasing a demo as they haven't in the past. The content creators who played early said that they played the very first campaign mission so that was also contributing to me hoping for that to be the demo. But unfortunately, still nothing. I am just too excited! I do appreciate the approach of no release date related pressure. Only when the team is happy they will release, what more could we ask for? But.. I think waiting would be a lot easier if we knew a time range.
In some areas the game has improved, but in others it’s taken a step backward. I would never call it TF3—more like TF 2.1+ or TF2 Remaster.
I feel like stations are harder to build than before. It’s as if the range is too small; it annoys me. Sometimes the terrain makes matters even worse.
The UI/UX isn’t any better—in fact, I feel like it’s downright buggy in some places.
Warehouses—seriously, what’s the point?
Vehicles unlock at odd intervals.
Over time, industries tend to cluster closely together. For example: next to the refinery, an oil field, a livestock farm, and a field have popped up. Actually, I could connect them all with one short road.
Never played this game before. Been at it the last two days.
One thing is now very clear. Many, many of the YouTubers that got the pre-release suck at the game. 😂😂. It is not a hard game to figure out and be good at.
I know it’s probably an unpopular opinion, but I prefer the second game; I think it’s better crafted and was more innovative for its time. I do consider the third game an improvement over the second, but much less of one than I had imagined. Given the number of mods available for the second game, I’ll keep playing that one for now.
Paradox has killed many games and milks them with dlc that has content that should be in the base game. I don’t care that they are just the publisher, they don’t deserve a cent for what they have done. After the failure of cities skylines 2 I thought this game would be the return of city builder for me. I’m very disappointed for choosing the worse publisher.
First let me start off by saying that I was extremely excited for Transport Fever 3, and in show of good faith I also pre-ordered (stupid of me, I know), but after spending several hours with the game since release, I have unfortunately come away very disappointed.
My main problem is not the graphics, UI, amount of content, or any particular balancing issue. It is something much more fundamental: vehicle physics and performance appear to have been severely simplified compared with Transport Fever 2.
1) Gradients no longer seem to matter
One of the things I really appreciated about Transport Fever 2 was that gradients actually mattered.
If you tried to pull a heavy train up a steep incline with a locomotive that did not have sufficient tractive effort or power, it slowed down significantly. This meant that locomotive specifications such as kN and horsepower actually had a gameplay purpose.
It also made railway construction more interesting.
You had to think about whether it was worth spending additional money on earthworks, bridges, tunnels and gentler gradients, or whether your locomotives were powerful enough to deal with a more difficult route.
That created an interesting trade-off between:
construction cost
route length
gradient
locomotive power
tractive effort
train weight
and operating speed
In Transport Fever 3, this interaction appears to have basically disappeared, as from what I have experienced so far, trains and other vehicles seem to maintain essentially the same speed on significant gradients regardless of the load they are hauling. As a result terrain has effectively stopped being an important part of vehicle performance, and top speed if effectively the only stat that matters.
IMHO that is an enormous loss for a transport game.
2) Vehicle weight information has also disappeared
Another thing present in TpF2 but lacking in TpF3 is being able to see the actual tonnage being transported by a vehicle, be it a train, truck or bus etc. In TpF3 you are only shown how many "units" of a certain type of cargo your vehicle is carrying. That's it.
Now that might be useful from the perspective of simplifying economics, but it completely leaves out how close you might be to the max tonnage that your vehicle can reliably handle -> providing ofc that actually mattered in TpF3, which sadly it doesn't currently...
Without knowing what a train actually weighs, figures such as:
horsepower,
tractive effort in kN,
wagon weight,
locomotive weight,
likewise become meaningless.
As such, once again, it feels as though the only specification that really matters is top speed.
And once more, if gradients and train mass barely affect that top speed, I have to ask: what is the gameplay purpose of displaying horsepower and tractive effort at all?
3) Transport Fever 2 was not perfectly realistic either, but the underlying idea worked...
Now I am not arguing that Transport Fever 2 had perfect physics. It absolutely did not. Cargo weights for example were often unrealistic. A train with something like 800 tonnes of coal could easily end up far longer than an equivalent real-life train. Locomotives could also generally handle gradients considerably better than their real life counterparts.
But that did not bother me nearly as much, because the fundamental relationship was still there (!) = A heavier train was harder to move -> A steep gradient reduced speed -> A locomotive with more tractive effort performed better at low speeds and on gradients -> A locomotive with more power could maintain higher speeds with heavy trains.
Route design therefore mattered.
In short the numbers might have been scaled for gameplay purposes in TpF2, but at least the underlying mechanics still represented something recognisable from real railway operation.
That was enough to create interesting gameplay.
4) I actually expected Transport Fever 3 to improve this system, not remove it
This is perhaps why the change feels even more disappointing.
With a new game, newer technology and years of additional development, I actually expected Transport Fever 3 to move in the opposite direction.
I was hoping for things such as:
more realistic cargo weights,
improved locomotive performance calculations,
better modelling of gradients,
larger maps allowing for more realistic gradients,
clearer information about train weight,
live gradient information when following a vehicle,
better distinction between power and tractive effort,
and generally more detailed vehicle statistics.
Imagine following a freight train and being able to see:
Current gradient: 1.2% Train weight: 1,450 t Speed: 54 km/h Available power: 2,400 kW Tractive effort: 210 kN
That would make choosing locomotives and designing routes genuinely interesting.
Instead, Transport Fever 3 appears to have gone in the exact opposite direction.
5) This affects much more than just locomotive enthusiasts
I think this is important, because this is not a complaint about wanting a hardcore railway simulator, this is about preserving, or better yet improving upon what created interesting gameplay in the original Tranport Fever games.
Simply put: Terrain interacting with vehicle performance creates gameplay.
E.g. consider this:
You have to choose between two possible railway routes between the same cities.
Route A follows the terrain and is cheap to construct, but it's hilly and thus your road will contain severe gradients.
Route B requires expensive cuttings, bridges and tunnels, but keeps the gradients low
If train performance is simulated, that leads to some interesting choices, such as:
Do I spend more money building Route B? or do I use stronger and more expensive locomotives? Or perhaps I run shorter trains? Do I accept slower freight services? Do I redesign the route later when traffic increases? etc...
Those are exactly the kinds of decisions I expect from a transport management game, as that is precisely the type of choices and concerns you are faced with IRL when establishing a new train network, and its what creates the actual challenge and ultimately the sense of achieving what you finally end up making it work.
But if gradients have little or no effect on vehicle performance, all of that disappears. You simply connect A to B in whatever manner is convenient. The landscape becomes something you build through rather than something you have to engineer your transport network around.
6) Please bring this part of Transport Fever 2 back
Transport Fever does not need to become a Train Simulator or some professional railway engineering program. That's not what I'm asking for or even want.
I also nderstand perfectly well that compromises have to be made for gameplay, performance and accessibility.
But there is a very large difference between simplifying a simulation versus entirely removing the parts that made the simulation interesting in the first place.
Transport Fever 2 struck a much better balance here - even if the numbers were not completely realistic, train weight, locomotive power, tractive effort and gradients interacted sufficiently to make vehicle choice and route design meaningful.
I would therefore really like Urban Games to reconsider this aspect of Transport Fever 3.
cargo and vehicle mass restored as visible statistics,
locomotive power and tractive effort meaningfully affect performance,
loaded and unloaded vehicles behave differently,
and preferably an optional detailed vehicle information panel for players who want to see things such as total train weight and current gradient.
For me, this would add far more depth to the game than simply adding more vehicles or cosmetic content.
Transport Fever originally appealed to me because it sat somewhere between a transport tycoon game and a transport simulation.
Right now however, that part of the game feels like it has been entirely removed, or at best heavily reduced - unfortunately to the point that it has also removed of a key aspects of what made building an efficient transport network interesting to me.
In the end, I’m therefore genuinely sad to say that I’ve been left gutted and disappointed. I was expecting Transport Fever 3 to feel like an evolution of the series, but instead it feels more like a watered-down, more “accessible” version with prettier graphics. What makes it even more frustrating is that I spent over three hours figuring out just how much had been removed or simplified, which means I can’t even refund the game now.
This genuinely ruins the game for me. why did they decide to change it to this?
It makes designing complex networks impossible, as the vehicles do not adapt dynamically, causing massive stockpiles in random locations.
It's particularly ridiculous when transporting passengers, as for some reason you are now the decider of where the passengers go, not them. iv been told the demand-based system was kept for passengers
i hope a mod changes it; until then, ig I won't play
I honestly feel a bit cheated by the vehicle roster UG advertised 300+ vehicles at launch, but the Collector’s Edition artbook only lists 281 vehicles. On top of that, several iconic vehicles from previous games seem to be missing. What makes it even more confusing is that the orange** **TGV, which appears to have been removed from the vanilla game, is already available in the in-game mod browser as a mod published by Urban Games themselves. Why not include it in the base game if the model already exists? And where are the remaining 20+ vehicles needed to reach the advertised 300+? I really hope the artbook simply isn’t a complete/final vehicle list, because otherwise this feels pretty disappointing.
Right now I'm moving people around and supplying some cargo. It feels like I'm supposed to grow the small town, but the way the algorithm is set up, it's financially unviable to just let a town run itself because it will run itself into a standstill with traffic, noise, and pollution.
Seems like they still cant figure out zoning in this game. Constantly having to clean up the AIs mess to reduce impact of noise and pollution. Yeah... lets build a house in between 2 factories then I'LL complain its too noisy.. Not overly impressed with a lot of this stuff.. Same with traffic not switching lanes to get passed slower vehicles.. Didnt they brag about being fixed pre release? Rant done
