A transit planner looks at Mini Metro

January 12, 2017 1:44 AM

Mini Metro (previously) is a transit planning game, simplified to the point of abstraction. On Waypoint, Robert Rath speaks to the developers and a real transit planner about how the game has been received in the transit planning community.
posted by Harald74 (43 comments total)

Mini Metro is a paragon of elegant user interface design.
posted by fairmettle at 1:53 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

It was on sale over New Years through iTunes. I played it (followed the previously post when it came out). It's fantastic on both the iPhone and iPad. It's really, really well put together, and the various regional touches they've put in the different levels/cities does just the right amount to vary the levels. Good game, great design.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:29 AM on January 12, 2017

This is really interesting, thanks.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:03 AM on January 12, 2017

Mini Metro is a paragon of elegant user interface design.

I don't know. I'm struggling to move lines, especially when they run parallel. I also seem to grab a locomotive when I want a line.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 4:01 AM on January 12, 2017 [10 favorites]

It's a beautiful game, but damn it, it would be so much easier to play on an iPad!
So hard for me to get trains to switch directions on a little screen.
posted by oceanjesse at 4:17 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've bought this now on Mac, iPhone and iPad. I'm completely hooked.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:55 AM on January 12, 2017

I've been playing the PC version through Steam. I can't imagine playing it on a small phone screen, but with a mouse it's buttery-smooth. Playing Mini Metro in fullscreen in a darkened room is a perfectly Zen way to relax in the evening.
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:28 AM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Curry also notes that many players still haven't discovered the game's less-explicitly explained features, like the fact that you can stop time by clicking on the clock, then edit lines while paused.

WHAT

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:34 AM on January 12, 2017 [22 favorites]

Yeah, I have often found myself pausing the game, ripping out all my lines, and reconstructing them in a dramatically new arrangement. It's not very realistic that way, but I consider it a very reasonable MBTA simulator. I like the suggestion to envision it as bus lines rather than subway lines.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:37 AM on January 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

Cities In Motion is kind of a hard-core version of this game. There are actual people with different destinations, and you have to design actual routes and schedules. It's... not that much fun.
posted by miyabo at 5:46 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Been playing it a bit. A few tips for people trying it:
1. yeah, hit the clock to get pause/fast forward
2. you can remove line segments by grabbing the T at the end of the line and "backing it out" through each station.
3. I think you can delete a whole line on the PC version but I don't seem to have that on my android phone.
posted by thefool at 6:01 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

3. I think you can delete a whole line on the PC version but I don't seem to have that on my android phone.

On iOS you do this by 'backing out' as you described through each station in turn, then dragging the end of the line back to the originating station.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:28 AM on January 12, 2017

I literally just paused my game to check Metafilter, saw this post, and let out an audible squee of surprise and delight ... causing a perceptibly uncomfortable shift in the bus rider to my right. Hmph. She's probably a circle whereas I am a proud triangle. Now to RTFA.
posted by majorsteel at 6:32 AM on January 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

The 'deep dive' analysis blog post by an actual transit planner linked in TFA is worth reading.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:36 AM on January 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

I wish more game developers would consider adding a 'zen' mode like Mini Metro. Sometimes a failure mechanic or being able to lose is unnecessary for a game to be fun.
posted by Eleven at 6:47 AM on January 12, 2017

I wish more game developers would consider adding a 'zen' mode like Mini Metro. Sometimes a failure mechanic or being able to lose is unnecessary for a game to be fun.

Alto's Adventure has a lovely 'zen' mode. Although when I pull off some insane flip trick thing, I then wish I was getting the points for it.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:50 AM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

but what kind of people queue at a station with no lines leading to it

also they should make it more obvious when a new station needs to be connected
posted by logicpunk at 6:54 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

also they should make it more obvious when a new station needs to be connected

Yeah those triangles and circles only start squealing when they're packed in so tight that you probably can't clear the station quick enough to avoid losing.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:00 AM on January 12, 2017

My two-year-old, who loves anything even remotely/abstractly/conceptually related to any sort of vehicles, is totally into this game. (In addition to being train-y, it has shapes and colors!) He doesn't exactly know how to play it himself, but he likes looking at it, watching me play it, and complaining "that one's not connected!" when a new station pops up.
posted by Metroid Baby at 7:50 AM on January 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

I love love love how stripped-down this game is, simple in exactly the way Vignelli’s & Beck’s maps are. I have been playing the hell out of it over the last month, toggling between the maps & working on whichever has my lowest best score. (Shakes fist at Berlin, where I can’t crack 1,000--seriously, Berliners, don’t you have a long and proud history of digging more tunnels??)

The only map I haven’t played yet is Auckland, because the description (“Plan the *hypothetical* Auckland metro”) confirms for me the agreeable idea that Mini Metro is in fact an Ender’s Game-type program run by shadowy NZ civil servants to train up a cadre of crack urban planners and I want to get really good before I start actually laying track.
posted by miles per flower at 7:55 AM on January 12, 2017 [19 favorites]

Woo, Mini Metro! I'm really interested to see what's in the links here because the intersection of game setting and real-world domain specialists tends always to be a good time, but just in general it's such a lovely little game and very much worth picking up.
posted by cortex at 8:04 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

But can you make Sierpinksi Carpet out of subways?
posted by tobascodagama at 9:38 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

hmmmmmm
posted by cortex at 9:48 AM on January 12, 2017

but what kind of people queue at a station with no lines leading to it


Suburban drunks who don't know how to use the city's public transportation if Chicago is any example.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:49 AM on January 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

From the article: the South Island Line also promises to feed nearly 170,000 passengers a day into Admiralty Station—a major interchange already known for rush hour congestion.

Well, that's your stupid fault for only having one, maybe 2 interchange stations per game. (Or do you get more in cities that aren't London? I only play London.)
posted by ambrosen at 10:52 AM on January 12, 2017

"Visualize a simple x-shaped network," he says, "two lines crossing with one junction station. This means that each line is useful for going anywhere on either of the two lines.

Wait, they've added Pyongyang to the game now?
posted by ambrosen at 10:55 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

So what's our opinion on circular lines (in Mini Metro; they're normally a bad idea in real life)? I haven't really figured out if they're helping or not or when they make sense.
posted by zachlipton at 11:30 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Circular lines are only stupid in real life if they have junctions (i.e. they have to literally cross shared tracks, not just interchanging passengers at stations) with other lines. Independent circular lines are fine as a concept. I can't work out how well they work in a MiniMetro context, though.

I'm currently trialling a grid in London where I have the whole area covered by lines snaking either left-right and back or up or down and back, not running a new line until the current ones are full, and leaving about 2 stations between lines meeting. I think it may work in a high capacity fashion. I don't take much notice of the station types doing that, as long as the unusual destinations have a horizontal and a vertical train feeding them, and all the lines do meet up at the interchange stations.
posted by ambrosen at 11:55 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

This article made me happy to read. Mini Metro is one of my very favorite games from the past couple years and I play it often via Steam. It's so easy to just play and relax to it. Thanks for sharing this article. I was hoping eventually transit folks would play this game and provide their input, so this was definitely interesting.
posted by FireFountain at 12:08 PM on January 12, 2017

It'd be really interesting to see a mode where the pressure hews more towards what an actual city planner is trying to achieve. Maybe have a layer of simulation for location demand and let you place the stations instead, with the aim of building a thriving city.
posted by lucidium at 12:14 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I will be downloading this game this evening for several reasons:
1. I am a simulation game junkie.
2. It's something I enjoyed playing with in SIM City, where the transit system's only goal was to alleviate traffic from your roads. I always wanted one where I could just focus on the system itself. Very cool.
posted by prepmonkey at 12:21 PM on January 12, 2017

Somebody in the documentary Gaming In Color described video games as the "art of systems" which I really really loved. Mini Metro is pretty much the platonic ideal of this to me!

AND I LOVED THE CITIES IN MOTION GAMES, even though miyabo does not. lucidium and prepmonkey, Cities In Motion (either version) are going to be what you want for more simulationistic city planning public transportation goodness without the rest of the city management to deal with. Cities in Motion 1 is more static city with route loops, Cities in Motion 2 is more complicated and dynamic growing city with timetables and depots. Bonus: they're older games at this point and cheaper than Cities: Skylines, which is more of a complete city simulator.
posted by foxfirefey at 12:34 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

prepmonkey, OpenTTD might scratch that itch if you can live with the retro graphics. I certainly put down an enormous amount of time on the closed-source original back in the day.
posted by Harald74 at 12:44 PM on January 12, 2017

Independent circular lines are fine as a concept. I can't work out how well they work in a MiniMetro context, though.

They're really important. Passengers show up at stations on a poisson like distribution, and the trains model acceleration, unload and pickup times. The end game trigger is essentially when the arrival integral over interrarrival time is greater than 12 or so. Below, lets imagine a linear line Blue with stations in order ○ - □ - ○ - △ - ○, and a travel time of X from west terminal to east terminal. As a player, you can't do anything about unload or pickup times, but how you arrange lines can affect interarrival and accelleration times.

The best case scenario is the exact middle station. With X minutes to traverse blue line, the middle station is X/2 away from either terminal. So the interarrival time is X. As we'll see, this is the best you can hope for.

The linear line terminals are worst at interrarival time: trains have to travel 2X before train arrivals at the terminals.

Stations in between the terminals and the middle have less direct impact on game loss, and but a huge impact overall. When traveling east on blue from △ to ○, you'll unload all ○ passengers, and pick those heading for △ or □. Then you head back around, and make a stop to unload any △ you just picked up at ○, and any passengers that showed up since your last visit, a mere two stops ago. You end up stopping all the people who have been waiting for 2X at △ for one or two passengers, because the time between train arrivals is too short near the ends. That inefficiency harms blue line's max throughput.

A circular route pretty much reduces the variance in inter arrival times. The interarrival time is roughly X. In a circular route, all stations are middle stations! Additionally, every stop you make has is the station that's always been waiting the longest for a train, you rarely stop a 20 person train for 1 or 2 passengers.

tl;dr: circle routes are awesome

Overtime, more stations are added, and if we keep blue circular but evergrowing, it will eventually hit the failure criterion. Both because the line is too long and because there's more chances for tail ends of the poisson distribution. You're given a number of lines beyond blue. So you break up into multiple independent circular routes. And if all you ever had was □ - ○ - △ stations and passengers, you'd be fine.

However, over time the game adds unique stations. Football stadiums, hospitals, diamonds(?) etc. I've less though about the math here, but since there's pickup and unload times, you want to reduce transfers. If you have a set of east-west circle lines, you probably want at least one north-south line connecting them all -- any passenger's max transfers would be 2. I'm thinking ideally, you'd have intersecting north-south, east-west circle patterns, and any passenger could get anywhere with 1 transfer. At least, that's how I've been playing semi-successfully.
posted by pwnguin at 3:09 PM on January 12, 2017 [14 favorites]

"My two-year-old, who loves anything even remotely/abstractly/conceptually related to any sort of vehicles, is totally into this game. (In addition to being train-y, it has shapes and colors!) "

My train-crazy children (7 and 5) also love this game SO FRIGGIN MUCH. I was SO RELIEVED when it came out on iOS and Android so they could have it on their touchscreens and I wasn't having to constantly play it for their amusement on my laptop.

PS, your two-year-old needs to own this book

PPS, most big subway/metro systems make wooden-train compatible trains cars with their livery and of various lines, my kids love their CTA train cars above all things
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:33 PM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've been playing this for a few months. Here are my tips:

1. Basic strategy. Circle Stations are most common, Triangles a bit rarer, Squares you might not get more than one on a map (but will usually get a few), and all the other shapes are unique, only appearing once. An "ideal" route will find a way to alternate circles and triangles, with one square along the line and maybe a unique, but you don't get to construct ideal routes often. By alternating circles and triangles, you get the most numerous passengers off your trains as soon as possible.
2. Lots of games have led me to conclude that the optimal number of stations on a line with a single train car is six or seven. You can (and often will) go over, but if you have that many on a line (and there are no overt problems) they usually won't overcrowd. It can be worth it to add a couple of extra stations to a route if it means you can break up a string of circles or triangles with the other.
3. Did you know you know you can make looped routes? You can connect a line's end to its beginning, and trains will go around in a circle in either direction! This is often a good thing to do: usually, passengers won't board a train if its destination lies nowhere ahead of it, but instead is behind it; if a line is a loop, however, it'll get on no matter where in the loop its destination lies. The biggest problem with loops, however, is that it'll take at least two tunnels to complete a loop that goes over water.
4. When two different routes cross (not run parallel!) at a place other than a station, trains on either route will slow down when they approach the crossing.
5. Sometimes you'll see passengers refuse to get on a train even if it does have a destination ahead of it on the line. This usually happens because there's a shorter ride available to that passenger if he waited for another train. This behavior can be infuriating sometimes (I would not doubt there is a bug at work here); I've dropped a train from inventory right before a dangerously overcrowded station, and watched it sail through picking up no one.
6. You can drag a route to the side (provided you're not in Extreme mode) directly to connect it to a station lying by the line.
7. You can move trains from one route to another (if not in Extreme mode), but they won't actually be moved until they first arrive at their next station, then unload all their passengers.
8. You can erase an entire line (if not in Extreme) by clicking on its colored circle in your inventory, then clicking the X. All its trains will still travel to their destinations and unload their passengers before being returned to inventory. In a complex map where you want to start over with your lines, it can be useful to pause, erase all your lines like this, then redraw, but note that this might produce some overcrowding from heavily-loaded trains emptying.
9. My early game strategy at week end is to go for some extra lines, then carriages. But every carriage you get is ultimately advantageous, since you're likely to hit the line limit earlier than end up with carriages you can't place. Many maps can be done without getting extra tunnels. BTW, a single tunnel can cross multiple rivers so long as it doesn't visit a station along the way.
10. Try to draw your routes so that the route passing through a station has a rounded edge, as opposed to a sharp corner. Corners means the train will have to slow down when passing through the station, even if no passengers are there.
11. A line can have at most four trains on it. This, combined with the line limit of the map and the carriage limit (three, I think), is the ultimate limiting factor of the game.
12. The end of many games, for me, comes from losing track of one particular overcrowded station, which gets beyond hope before you can do anything about it. This sometimes happens when I get tired of juggling stations. If you really care about getting a good score, you must not only play good routes but be hyper alert to developing problems. If you begin to tire while playing, pausing for a while and doing something else might refresh the ol' synapses. Your score (and troubles) tends to increase exponentially over time, so lasting even one more week can be worth a large reward in score.
posted by JHarris at 4:54 AM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]

PS, your two-year-old needs to own this book

Ooh, thank you! That might get added to our already-extensive train library.

(We also have the toy version of the MBTA commuter rail train that we can see from the playground. If I had infinite money I'd get toy versions of every metro line they make.)
posted by Metroid Baby at 7:21 AM on January 13, 2017

It seems there is an error in my comment above... there are times when the game will demand you use two tunnels to cross two rivers, even if there is no station between the tunnels. I guess it's when the rivers are too far apart.
posted by JHarris at 12:09 AM on January 15, 2017

Actually, how about this? I just had my best game on London (the first map) by a wide margin, going from a best score of about 1,670 to over 2,400, putting me in the top 5% of players (rank 4,104 out of 114,146)! I continued in Endless and then took a screenshot of how it looks right at the point of failure. Here is my map (don't mind the extra resources in inventory, those were awarded when I resumed): screenshot.

Part of the game's success is due to a relatively nice layout of stations, part of it is some work done mid-game to try to keep lines down to one square and a unique each route, part of it is the use of loops (and trains travelling in both directions around the loop!), but the big breakthrough was the use of what I've seen described in guides as a "phantom route."

A phantom route is a spare line and train you keep in reserve to run in case of emergencies. You see a station starting to overflow (or, ideally, just before it does), and you run the phantom route from it to a destination or two that the majority of its passengers want to go to. When it arrives there, you either leave it for a little bit to ease the pressure (which may be bidirectional), or you erase it as soon as it gets underway on the last leg of its route.

Towards the end of the game, the use of a phantom route can extend your play, and thus your score, greatly, if you keep its routes short and use it between the most-filled stations repeatedly. Well, give it a shot, why not?
posted by JHarris at 12:39 AM on January 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

Guys! I got into the top ten on a daily challenge!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:57 AM on January 15, 2017 [5 favorites]

Wow, go Eyebrows McGee! I've not done that yet!
posted by JHarris at 11:52 PM on January 15, 2017

I was in an ultra Zen zone, I was like the Michael Jordan of drawing little transit lines to connect abstarct shapes! Normally I come in like 8,000th.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:36 AM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Ah! I managed to get 4th place on the Wednesday challenge! Scoreboard.

One thing I've noticed is around week 10 the game has a tendency to say "Okay, I've had enough of this," and really poor on the passengers (the Population graph at the end of the game reveals a sharp spike upward), often sending a dozen of your stations into overload at once. I really had to phantom line all over the place, but I managed to survive to week 11 before succumbing, which is what put my score so high. Just surviving a few extra seconds at that phase can be worth good points.

I did manage to earn the 10 Weeks In Osaka achievement for it!
posted by JHarris at 6:09 AM on January 18, 2017