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Strategy Guide

The Newbie Guide Part 1 - Buses

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The Beginners Guide - Buses

Buses are the basic building blocks of any transport empire. A good bus transport network will bring in a steady income, and encourage the growth of towns. Buses take a while to recoup their monetary value due to their usually short journeys, but are a great help in making towns expand.

In Locomotion, towns expand when passengers or cargo are taken from or brought to a city. Where the cargo is delivered from or taken to is irrelevant, and so setting up a simple internal bus route in a city will, over time, encourage the growth of the town.

Take the following town of Fishywig. It's not too large at the moment, but with time and a little attention, it could be.

his then throws up the road construction window.

Lets build our bus network here. Select road construction from the menus in the top-right of the screen.

This then throws up the road construction window. The two tabs at the top toggle between construction of road sections and station buildings: Cargo Loading Bays, Passenger Stops and Passenger Terminuses.

The yellow arrows select the direction and type of the next piece of road to be placed.

The green shapes designate the elevation angle of the next road section.

The picture of the bridge is a drop down box containing all the bridge choices.

The image of the road represents the next section to be constructed, and is a button to build the selected piece.

The red arrow is used to rotate the currently selected piece.

By selecting the second tab we are presented with this menu, from which we select Passenger Stop from the drop down menu. A graphical representation of the selected station building is shown below. Passenger Stops can be placed on any straight section of road, whereas Passenger Terminuses and Cargo Loading Bays must be placed at the end of roads, on straight sections. Each building takes up one square.

After selecting Passenger Stop, we need to build some. Looking at the shape of the town, it's pretty much a straight road, so one at each end will suffice. There's a slight bias towards the bottom end, so I decided to place one stop covering this area, and the other more in the centre of town, covering the central area and the top end of town. It's hardly ever possible to cover all the buildings in a town.

When placing station buildings, the blue haze surrounding the cursor will be the station's catchment area. All the buildings within this area will be able to provide cargo for the station. Later I'll mention how to bring this up after the station has been built. As you can see, the expansion of Fishywig has already begun, with new buildings being built. Now we need a bus.

Select 'Build Buses' from the vehicle construction menu.
This brings up the bus construction menu. At this stage in time, only one bus is available, thus making the choice an easy one. Later in the game when more different types of transport are available, you must choose your vehicle on the specifications listed to the right. This bus has a cost of $806 and a running cost of $8 each month. These will not always be the same - prices in Locomotion rise over time with inflation. This does not mean it's more expensive to buy a bus - it may cost $20,000, but it'll make a lot more profit than this $806 model as the pay rates for cargo will be higher too. The power and weight of the bus (30hp and 13t respectively) directly affect the acceleration and speed when travelling uphill, and the max speed is, well, the maximum speed of the bus. The capacity is the number of passengers the bus can carry. Click on the name 'WMC Bus' in the left hand pane to build one.
The window to the right will appear if you've bought the bus correctly. The only new information you find out now is the reliability of the bus. This represents how likely the bus is to break down. When broken down, a vehicle will not move, and clog up the road or track. Repairs are carried out automatically, but take time, and the reliability will decrease over time, forcing you to eventually replace the vehicle as time takes its toll, and the bus spends more time broken down than running.
The cursor will change to the vehicle drop tool, and placing the bus over a section of road where it can be viably placed will give a ghost image of the bus. Click to place.
Select the route tab - the last one - and the route is displayed. Simply click on the stations with the route tab active to set them into the list of stations to visit. NOTE: Any vehicle will travel without a route, and in a closed environment like this, the bus will travel between the two stops happily. However, if you then connect this town to another, the bus will become confused and drive off into the middle of nowhere. Thus I recommend always setting orders for all vehicles, whether they're on closed loops or not.
The list of stations is now added to the route in the order they're clicked, and the little numbers representing their position in the route appear beneath the station name, as shown by the inset. At this point, your bus is ready to go and start making money! While it's chugging away, I'll just go through the other tabs and buttons.
The first tab is the bus view. An image of the bus's current location is shown, which can be centred in the main view by clicking the 4 faint grey arrows in the bottom right corner of the view window. The red flag represents that the bus is stopped, and is a button to start/stop the vehicle. This becomes a green flag if the bus is started. The icon underneath it is to pick up the vehicle. Only available when the bus is stopped, the bus is lifted from the ground and placed as you do when it's new. The U icon reverses the direction of the vehicle.
The second tab is the vehicle details. The top icon (crane and bus) is to add new items to this vehicle. At the moment, though available, nothing can be added to this vehicle. This button is mainly used for adding wagons to trains. The place icon below it is used to select the drop tool if the vehicle is not on the road after using the pick up icon on the previous tab. The trash can is used to sell this vehicle. Selling a vehicle brings in less money than it cost to buy. Clicking this icon sells the bus and deletes all memory of it. Dragging the vehicle representation from the left however to the trash can sells the bus, but preserves the route so another bus can be added to the route. This is done by selling the vehicle (as just mentioned) then clicking the 'add new items to this vehicle' button. This will be covered in better detail at a later date.
The cargo tab shows the cargo currently on the vehicle.
The finance tab shows the financial details of the bus. The last income (this bus has none because it's brand new) shows the amount gained from the last journey. It also tells you how much cargo was carried, how far and how long it took. The monthly running cost and monthly profit are self explanatory, as is the sale value of the vehicle.
The route tab has 6 icons. From top to bottom they are: Unload all cargo Wait for full load Skip to next order Delete order Move up in list Move down in list The first 2 will be covered in more detail in the trains or trucks section.
Skip to next order (the green arrows) moves the current order to the next one ie. the vehicle will head for the next station in the order list. The currently active order is shown by a small white triangle. In this particular situation, the bus will head for Fishywig Central, rather than Fishywig. Delete order deletes the currently selected order (selected with a left-click). The move up and down in list buttons become active when an order is selected (again with a left-click). You can see that the top of the list of orders now says 'Express' rather than 'Local'. This is changed just by clicking that line. Express vehicles travel directly between the stations in their orders, passing straight through any stations they might drive by without stopping. 'Local' vehicles will stop at every station they pass through, whether it is in their order list or not.

After setting up the one bus route, I added 2 more stations to cover the whole town and an extra bus. After 2 years game time, the town looked like this:

The population had grown to 924 from about 840, and that's just with the use of 2 buses over 2 game years. Bringing in more passengers from other towns would have increased the growth further.