This one amazing game in Hong Kong

Overview

I had an interesting game on the Hong Kong map in early beta. I didn’t get any new stations nor did the map zoom out, but the rate of people spawning on the stations was accelerating at a phenomenal pace. As a result, I got the world number one high score for a short while. Hong Kong had been a really tough map for me before this game. The game has evolved quite a lot since then, and this guide is not relevant to the game as it is now. I’ve decided to leave the guide hanging around in case it is an interesting or inspiring read for a game player or developer.

The Beginning

I didn’t realize that this game was going to be different from all my other games until I had already played for a while. That’s why I didn’t think to take pictures near the beginning of the game. When I finally realized that something special was happening, I had already transported 811 people! As it happens I had one of my first station crises captured in the picture. The bottom left station has way more people waiting than fit into one car.

I think what made this game special was that the initial stations were all near each other and they alternated types in an efficient fashion. I created the green line first and expanded it to encompass the whole area. Circles and triangles alternate through the whole line, except for the one square on the right.

Then I created the red line to serve the central circle station on the mainland. For efficiency I made it serve all the other stations on the mainland as well. And initially it went around in the opposite direction compared to the green line.

The third line I created was the blue line along the bottom. I figured that would help with the bottom left station that kept getting a lot of people. Instead, the blue line just kept moving squares around. Often the blue train moved the people away right in front of the next green train and the people kept piling up at the bottom.

So I turned the blue line upwards to cross the river. Eventually I extended it to the square station. At this stage the game was already in a state of constant crisis with a dozen people waiting at one or two stations at all times.

I had been using my weekly allowances solely for carriages. But when I didn’t get the option to select a carriage, I chose and created the fourth line. The fourth line was yellow and I created it to do the same thing I originally created the blue line to do: Keep the squares on the southern island on the move.

Growing Pains

So I began to wonder why I wasn’t getting any new stations. I didn’t have a lot of time to wonder tho, because of the rate I was getting spawns. At this stage, all I was doing was adding trains and carriages on the lines going both ways. I made a couple of important discoveries:

Many times an empty train will just go past a station

…if the station already has another train on the same line going the same way. This frustrated me a lot, when I could clearly see that the people waiting at the station wouldn’t all fit into the train or even the other train that went straight past the station.

As long as there’s a train on a station, the timer doesn’t grow.

So as I already had more trains than stations, it was pretty easy to make sure that every station had a train waiting at all times. Thus, the timers seldom had a chance to tick forward.
If I managed to take enough people away from a station, the timer would shrink even when there were trains there.

So the asymmetry worked in my favour.

I kept adding trains and carriages.

At times I managed to almost clear the whole table!

Where I Went Wrong

Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures anymore, until I realized that the game was about to end. Below is the last screenshot that I took while the game was still underway:

I had a nice balance on the green line with four trains and an extra carriage on two of them. The blue line on the other hand had one train with two extra carriages and one train with just one extra carriage. It seemed to me that the blue line needed more capacity. I also had plans to complete the blue line as a loop to make it more efficient.

This is where I got greedy and moved the carriages from the green line to the blue line to make both of those trains beefy. However, as I moved capacity away from the green line, the station at the top overflowed in seconds and before I knew it, the game was over.

What I think I should have done was to keep the green line as it was and just loop up the blue line.

Cherry on Top

On the instant that the game ended, a new station popped up, and it already had six visitors. Count them: 1..2..3..4..5..6! Worth a full car load.

So the final score was 5004. That’s nice. As I said, my top score on Hong Kong was under 2000 before this. I usually kept getting all circles on the islands and all triangles clumped on the mainland.

I don’t know what triggered the situation that the map no longer zoomed out and no more stations spawned, but clearly that was the biggest thing in this game. Maybe it was a bug in that particular Beta release. If you know, please leave a comment!

After this gaming experience, I tried another map that had been rough for me. If the Hong Kong game had a dream start, this Osaka game got off to a nightmare start. And almost every new station spawned on a different islet.

All the circles spawned on the mainland and all the rare stations spawned on islands. To add insult to injury, the first weekend didn’t even bring any new tunnels:

I couldn’t bear to play the game much further, but it’s a good counter point to the previous game. To this date I still hate the Osaka map.

Cheers!