![]() A rotary, sometimes called a traffic circle or a roundabout depending on where you’re from, is an intersection wherein traffic flows around a center island, with roads connecting as “exits.” Sometimes there are stop signs, lane lines, or stoplights (technically, the more organized ones are called roundabouts, but it’s complex and I won’t get into it here), but a lot of them feel like free-for-alls - you just go, and you don’t stop. Massachusetts, apparently, has more rotaries than any other state in the United States, according to the Boston Globe. I don’t drive often, but when I do, I find myself thinking the same thing I’m imagining my Mini Motorway drivers are: Who designed this thing? None of the cities available in Mini Motorways are Boston, but I’m putting a little Boston stamp on all of them. I think this habit is because I live in Massachusetts, a state with notoriously bad drivers and absurdly designed roads. My cities are averaging around 400 to 500 cars on the road before everything goes to chaos, which feels pretty good considering I’m prone to creating chaotic scenarios. If too many cars build up on the city’s streets, the city will grind to a halt and the game will end. With these resources, you’re free to build the city however you choose, but it’s got to keep running. Road tiles refresh seven days - in-game time - plus an extra, sometimes a motorway, other times a bridge or stoplight. You’re given a limited number of resources to build with road tiles, bridges, motorways, and stoplights are all intermittently available. City planning, first, starts slow, with a house or two and a single car park. Unfortunately for the imaginary citizens of my Mini Motorways cities (Los Angeles, Beijing, Tokyo, Dar es Salaam, Moscow, and Munch), I’m all they’ve got. I’m so sorry Dinosaur Polo Club via Polygon Houses and car parks pop up, unconnected, across the game’s map. Cities in Mini Motorways have a Google Maps–esque aesthetic, except the roads are missing. The game was released on mobile with Apple Arcade, Apple’s mobile gaming subscription program Mini Motorways is exclusively available on iOS devices for now, but will eventually come to Steam, too. Mini Motorways is an iteration on that, swapping train lines for roadways. Mini Motorways is developer Dinosaur Polo Club’s follow-up to Mini Metro, a strategy simulator game where players created public transit maps. The monster is me - an evil, terrible city planner who has no idea what she’s doing. Often, I imagine, it’s this: What monster designed these roads? But rather than thinking about where they’re going or what they’re doing, I think about what they’re thinking about. And optimization with multiple factors is always a balancing act - you can only truly optimize one thing at a time, and our goal in this game is to make sure that the "longest road" (the longest distance any one car will have to make to reach a corresponding destination) is as short as possible.I like to imagine the lives of drivers that travel through my Mini Motorways cities each day. Keep in mind that this does NOT apply in every situation - The more houses you have, the more competing goals you will have in the name of optimization. Firstly, your cars will drive shorter distances on average, and you will also end up using fewer tiles for longer distances, rather than stairstepping everything. This is one of the easiest ways to step up your game, and the benefits are twofold. It might be tempting to just draw a road to the left, like this:īut the more optimal way would be diagonally, which shaves off a fraction of a second for any car pulling in: Optimizing Road TilesPretend I have to connect this light blue store to some houses that are coming in from the south. ![]() ![]() Some stores that appear may have two buildings in them (keep in mind, you can direct traffic THROUGH these! can come in handy, but don't divert a huge amount of traffic through them or the cars can't service them!).įurthermore, if you're coming from Mini Metro, you might distress when a few houses are formed way out toward the edge of your map - this is okay! Houses are just "car generation resources" and can't cause you to lose - it just means you might need shorter roads to the other houses of that color and their destinations to pick up the slack. You'll notice that, save for challenge criteria, some "square" buildings might be upgraded to "circles". It should be noted that there are several different types of buildings, each with a different "pin generation rate", so to speak. If you let that timer build all the way up, it's game over! If too many build up in a particular building, a timer begins, accompanied with a "ticking" sound. Pins are located at "destinations" (stores and other buildings). They are happy when they can travel to a pin and go home.
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