The biggest reasons for this seem to be the extra time taken for realistic real time animations for turning corners, waiting for a clear path through intersections, waiting at traffic lights and passenger embarking/disembarking.
Because there are a number of parameters that affect the game time taken for a vehicle to complete a route, altering them may conjure a considerable improvement.Īs it stands trams and buses take on average 50% longer to complete their routes than the automatically generated timetables say they should, so a fairly standard route that should take 4 hours takes about 6. You are also right that timetabling is core part of this game, so IMO it's worth discussing any way forward that might make it workable and playable. You are right that this is very hard, and you are also right that the there is a fundamental inconsistency between the requirement for the animation to look realistic on the screen and the requirement to compress game time by a large factor. This issue cannot be fixed with a simple patch (unless there are players out there who would be prepared for an in-game day to last a real life day on the slowest speed, and perhaps six hours on fast forward, which could probably be achieved with some tinkering in the code, although this would have to be made optional), but players seem to have found a workaround to this that sort of works by simply using the "custom" timetable and having a standardised service throughout the day. I suspect that the only sensible way out is to avoid time of day timetabling all together (as was the case in CIM 1), or have some sort of more approximate abstracted representation of peaks and troughs of demand. The difficulty with which the developer was faced was the clash between compressing a day into a sensible amount of real time and having an acceptable level of performance (it would in theory be possible to have a day pass in real time at the lowest simulation speed, and solve the boredom issue by having a much faster fast forward, but that would then be too demanding on performance). A simulation game will not work if there are fundamental internal inconsistencies, as there are here with the speeds of the vehicles as against the time of day: once the simulation deviates significantly from the thing being simulated, distortions are introduced which result in perverse outcomes.
I should add that this is a very hard thing for the developers to get right (and I note that I have yet to see what I should consider to be a workable solution to this issue) this was rather a case of the developers letting ambition get ahead of practicality, I think. This is rather a pity given the significance of this to the game.
(1b) - the timetables/rush hour issue has been more or less universally recognised as not working in a fairly fundamental way.
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