Overview
For players who like to focus on the planologic and scenic aspect of the game it can be quite annoying to deal with the constant AI construction of the game. Roads and buildings are automatically being built in places where the player did not have that in mind. It’s not hard to take control of the automatic construction in the game, but for players who haven’t found out how to do that yet, this guide will help you to become the master of your cities and act like a dictator who refuses to pass the city council’s expansion plans. This guide focuses both on automatic road construction and automatic building construction. Controlling automatic road construction is possible in vanilla, but one or two mods are required to control the automatic construction of buildings.
Content of this guide
The first two chapters, focusing on building and road construction, make up the original content of this guide. After some time, players commented with other options they find useful. I added them to the final chapter of this guide, so I recommend reading that first before trying the tricks from the first two chapters.
Take control of automatic road construction
Taking control of automatic road construction is rather easy. First of all, open the layer menu in the top left of the screen and then click the car icon as shown in the picture.
As you can see, there are lock icons appearing on each road section. If the locks are black, it means that roads are allowed to be automatically constructed around that section.
Clicking on the lock icon will turn the road into a ‘private road’. The AI is not allowed to automatically construct roads around that section. Fortunately, highways are automatically set to private roads.
The same method can be used to toggle traffic lights. I’m certain that all of you are smart enough to recognise the presence of a traffic light.
Take control of automatic building construction
There are some places on the map you’d rather not have buildings constructed. To take an example, in my custom map there is a narrow piece of land between a road and railway tracks in a town. The AI constructs these tiny annoying buildings there.
So, after getting rid of them for the 10th time I installed the ‘fences’ mod:
[link]
As the title may suggest, this mod lets you draw fences like they are roads. I drew a lovely fence along the road to prevent children from playing on the tracks. The controls for the fence mod pretty much speak for themselves.
After you’re done drawing the fence press the ‘finish’ button in the mod menu. Now hope the AI doesn’t construct new buildings on that side of the road.
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.
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Never mind, in some places where I used this fence buildings were constructed anyways.
I didn’t try all of the fences included in the mod, but automatic construction coccurred at this previous type of fence most of the times compared to other fences. There is only one type of fence of which I’m certain it will always prevent buildings from being constructed: the bush. I use it all over my map and there was only one building constructed on a place where I didn’t want it to be.
In order to remove the fences you can simply use the eraser tool in the tree section. Otherwise you will have to remove each individual section of the fence.
(I forgot to take a screenshot when I removed the fences, just imagine they’re of the type shown in the previous screenshot)
Now use the fence mod again to draw the bush fence along the road.
I created the following roundabout in an early stage of my current save game. No building has been constructed there ever since.
Keep in mind that you have to remove the fences or bushes whenever you decide to build a road there anyways. This method does also prevents roads from being built, both AI and player roads:
If you don’t want to draw hedges all along your roads it is also possible to download the ‘Marc’s Street and Trampack’ mod to construct roads which block the AI from building houses, although when I used these roads, in some cases buildings were constructed anyways.
[link]
Congratulations, you finished this guide and you are now the master of AI construction in Transport Fever 2!
Tips from other players
Some players left useful tips in the comments. Know another one that isn’t listed? Let me know so I can add it to this section of the guide:
– The Collision Tile mod by Relozu (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2014570720) lets you create a box so the AI can’t build there. I haven’t tried it myself but it may be worth checking out if you don’t want to place hedges all along your roads.
– If you want to create a long *country?* road, it may help to first build a city street and then upgrade it to a country road using the magic wand button. The roads are automatically locked after you’ve done this. <— *I will soon check if and how this works*