Train Valley World – Starting Tips

Gameplay Tips for New Players

• Making money seems to be the most important (and maybe saving money??) because you have three 80k regions to unlock, and two or three 40k factories, not to mention all the connecting tracks and trains for each region.
• One way to do that is passengers because they are constantly refilling at each city, but that needs to be long-term income because platform plus train plus tracks will run you around 25k and that will take 13 trips with the Novelty train to pay back.
• Hopefully it is clear that a city will pay for anything in their “accepts” list even if it is not a mission objective (sending surplus deliveries is the only way to achieve the 110 ingot objective, for example); this could be a source of extra cash early game (e.g. you can just send a train of wheat to Creusot and they will pay you for it).
• Keep track of the train specs because you have many options for mixing and matching trains (example: three Novelty trains are the same price as one Trench train, and the Novelty trains will deliver 6 loads compared to the Trench’s 3 loads (albeit slightly slower; example 2: the Janus train is slower than the Trench train, so two Trench trains will deliver 6 loads faster than the Janus’ 5 loads at the same price) – except more trains means more pauses when trains stop to allow another train to pass, someone will have to do more analysis on the optimal train strategies…
• If you need to move a train across the map, sometimes selling it and rebuying it will be worth the price (selling is an option at the bottom of the train upgrade screen, you get back 50% of the purchase price); the new train will appear wherever you tell it to load.
• If you are done with a city or factory, selling the platform and tracks will also get you 50% of your cost back (just don’t accidentally delete the $5k houses in the city while you are doing this, it will cost you money you can’t get back! and the Shift key doesn’t work yet…)
• Once you have enough cash, use your Inventor and Switchman specialists for high priority items or long trains that need to go long distances.
• You need 110 ingots and 30 brass pipes and 30 glass to fulfill all the goals; so clearly you should start making ingots (Rochefort) first; i would follow that with brass pipes (Hart) second, because it has two stages in its production (copper ingot, then pipes), and also because you can’t make glass at all until you have both Hart and L’ile Feydeau.
• For new resource productions, install a platform as soon as you have the money, then install the connecting tracks and train later. This is because resources start to accumulate as soon as there is a platform; if you wait and do platform/tracks/train all at once then you will have to sit there and wait for the resources to start accumulating.
• You will have to decide if you want a second steelworks station; i used one in my 44 minute time so that ingot production would go faster, and it gave me a place to store excess ingots until i could sell them; technically it is free because the 20 loads you have to deliver to get an Industry point will earn you the $40k, but theoretically it also might slow you down because you have to spend time with extra deliveries to earn the industry point. I’m not sure which choice el cracko is making…

Oh, and get into the habit of hovering over the pause button when you start the game so you can click it immediately and not lose precious seconds/minutes! I guess they will eventually add a “pause when starting” option… (and a spacebar pause option)!