Glossary

• Hopping a station: by this I mean deleting the whole station, then recreating it 1 .. 8 tiles away. The station keeps it's name, home town, and contents; but it's origin changes.
• Walking a station: by this I mean deleting e.g a bus stop in a mega station, then attaching a new bus stop elsewhere; the station moves or extends, while it's origin is unchanged.
• Station Element: Bus stop, Lorry stop, Dock, Rail station, Airport;
  a MEGA station may have up to 5 such elements.
  Anchor or Leg = station element 'touching' a resource. Up to 4 of the station elements can be anchors.
• Station Origin: Where it's name plate is! There is maybe no station ELEMENT there.
• 1st Anchor: The first UNDELETED station element; usually at the station ORIGIN.
• '1-less': one less than the maximum stretch; the point at which you can add one more station element, then no more.
  '1-less' is never more than 11 tiles; and is often less.
  NB this goes for TTd standard; in TTd+TTdPatch - or TTo - it's more.
• Abbreviations:
  - TTd+ means: better in TTd; TTd- means: more difficult in TTd;
  - TTd+- means: DIFFERENT in TTd

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Building blocks for MEGA stations: costs given in UK pounds; construction cost medium; Starting year (no inflation yet); cost of clearing (grass) tiles not included.

• Deleting a station element: 50£ per tile.
• Bus stop or Lorry stop: Basic cost 200£ = 1 U (1 Unit).
  These 2 are cheapest. Most of your walking should be done with them.
• Dock: Basic cost 350£ = 1.75 U. Second cheapest, but not usually available. If your alternative building block is an airport, you might dig a canal and let water in, to use docks as an anchor.
• 1-track Railway station: Basic cost 200£ / tile, +200 / station. When the bus or lorry stop is occupied, one must use rail stations for walking. NB: If building TIME is important, 1-track length 5 stations are quite useful.
• Heliport Basic cost 600£ = 3 U. Useful as anchor.
• Airport Basic cost 600£ / tile = 3 U /tile. Usually too expensive to use as building block, unless one expects to use planes sometime.
  In TTo I sometimes used small Airport as anchor! In TTo, my MEGA stations were much more spread out, and a much larger investment, than in TTd.

Max Stretch
In TTd - TT DeLuxe - Mega Stations are restricted: Max 'stretch' is somewhere between 8 and 16 tiles, depending on WHICH DIRECTION you are extending!
"North and West are best" was my old memory rule. But my old conception of N,S,E,W seems to be wrong most of the time, and depends on the map!

• Up, Left: '1-less' = 11 tiles; then you can add 5 more!
  Max stretch 16 tiles, but only if your railway station or airport is at the up-left end. 13 tiles if last addition is a dock.
• Down,Left: '1-less' = 11 tiles; but your last addition can go only 1 tile further. Max stretch 12 tiles.
• Up, Right: '1-less' = 9 tiles; you can add 1 more.
  Max stretch 10 tiles.
• Down,Right: '1-less' = 8 tiles; you can add 1 more.
  Max stretch 9 tiles if a slim stretch; 8 or 7 if fatter.
• If you are stretching in more than one direction, you tend to get even less. So always trial-build MEGA stations - check whether it works.
• If your origin is Up,Left and your railway station Down,Right: You may have to double-walk your station to get more stretch:
  Walk away from the origin; leave a station element (dock or ...) about midway; make your down-right railway station / airport; then extend back Up, Left again from that dock, back to the origin.
• Note that after adding something outside the '1-less' point, you can no longer add anything inside the station complex!
  For this reason, I often keep my stations stretched 1 less than maximum; to be allowed to move bus / lorrystop around inside, later.
  After building, I want my lorrystop at the right spot for piglet duty, and the bus stop convenient for bus traffic.

CoalVille - Now to work. This is an easy task: Make a station with passenger access to most of city Coalville; but the railway station should be well outside the city, mostly in NONE territory (imagine lots of trees around the town). Also, there's a coal mine out west ...

I started with a temporary bus stop at the origin (under the name); - then a temporary 1*1 railway station. The bus stop was erased in order to walk: Lorry, Bus, Lorry,...Bus, LORRY - at the tile marked with 2 rails.

Here I put the Bus stop back at the origin, and erased the temporary railway station. Why?
Well, extending RIGHT is more restricted than extending LEFT. - So the RIGHT anchor has to be in place before the final extensions LEFT.
The next steps must be taken with (little) Rail station; Lorry stop. Then the final LARGE railway station - getting at the coal (left of the picture - see the game save).
The "Walking route" for the station is marked with horizontal rails.

Distance from Bus to Lorry, after putting the bus back at 1st anchor place: 9,9.
Distance from Bus to final Lorry: 11,11. this is '1-less' = the maximum stretch you may have before adding the LAST element.
Distance from Bus to furthest point: 12 down-left, 15 up-left
This was a fairly easy station to design, since the main extension direction was Up,Left.

A simpler, and slightly CHEAPER way to do it: If available, use a heliport as 1st anchor at the origin! The heliport costs 3 times a 'normal' buiding block, but you save the 2 temporary little-railway stations.

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BankInSide Look at this city in the game save: How can you get a railway station in contact with that BANK, accepting gold? There's a closed road system around! All outside tiles are at least 5 away from the bank.
You could build a puny little station inside those closed roads, but that's not MEGA!

The "Bankinside" station has Bus and Heliport as 2 anchors in a 'pincer' around the bank; this means that the station will accept gold, even if none of the anchors is near enough! The line between the bus stop and the heliport is near enough; this gives gold acceptance.
If the bank had been a Temperate climate bank, or a Factory, you would need an 'inside' station to get at the output: the Valuables or Goods produced.

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Adam and Eve Suppose you want to connect 2 cities by BUS only, for the time being.
But you hate building long roads. You want the bus route to be SHORT, but to pay WELL.
So Each city has it's station origin on the OPPOSITE side, for better pay:
10 tiles (5 North + 5 South) away from the city centres (small advert distance). The station origins are empty.
(NB: now, 2001-->, I would start my station no further out than 3+3 tiles. and I would normally have a station element at the origin)
The horizontal rails mark the walking route around the cities, then onwards.

"Adam" goes in the right direction: Up,Left. Design rather like Coalville. Why did I use a 2-track, length 5 railway station? to remind you that trains will have to come soon! you don't want mail ratings to fall too low.

"Eve" is more complex, since it goes in the bad directions: Down, Right. In these cases a 'mid-stopper' is useful - in this case a dock.
After walking around the town, I first finished the Righthand end with Bus stop. Then I walked left from the dock, finishing with a Lorrystop near the city centre.

So what happens when you later need Mail, Food, Goods traffic? TRAINs! "Adam"'s lefthand end is easy to rebuild, if you want a bigger rail station.
"Eve" is more tricky. Trying to add a railway station at the righthand end gives 'too spread out'.

You will have to delete the Lorry and Rail stops; now add a railway station at the righthand end. Then delete the bus stop, and use Bus, Lorry to walk back left from the dock.

If you prefer to build for the future NOW: you might give "Eve" a shorter stretch; finish the Lefthand end first (lorry or heliport); then the Righthand end, with 'real' Railway station + bus stop. This should be OK for some years - until you want an airport.

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Hands-on training for YOU: try building "Coalville GOLD" down to the Gold mine! To send passengers + gold to "Bankinside pincer".
And build a station to accept the Coalville coal. There's one already in Terracina, but that's an UPHILL! A better solution might be to build "OpenUppolis pincer" with lots of passengers + coal acceptance.

MEGA stations cost more to build than standard ones. So they should combine several resources: Coal or Gold with passenger / mail, etc.

Tricks etc ...
More about Hopping:
Maximum 'hop' length is 8 tiles (N+W, etc). But often much less, if you are near to another station's origin! Check the distance from that other station to the point you hop FROM, and to the point you want to hop TO: your hop must be no longer than those distances.

OpenUppolis
In TTo I advised CLOSED road loops - better for road vehicles. In TTd, things are different:
Cars can turn around; but closed roads can't be cut (unless cheating via the editor).
So a new type of road structure is needed for cities: open road systems, but still with important housing tiles having street on 2 sides, for big buildings.

OpenUppolis is an example: Except for the narrow central loop, this city's inner parts are easy to get to, for MEGA builders. The city you start with won't look like this, but you can develop it like this; having started and extended a station or 2 first.
Sorry about the bad colours! I used 'buildings transparent' to emphasize the street structure. In 16-colours this looks odd.

Another method: the usual 4-tile house blocks between streets; but take care to gradually make the intersections YOURS; letting the town extend more roads from these.

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Terracina
In TTo I once designed a City rail system to replace in-town buses. It worked very well, even with only 2-tile stations.

Here I created a rather symmetrical hilly city, ideal for 4 city rail stations. Note that the 4 bus stop anchors neatly cover the 4 parts of the inner city, excluding the central roads; they are 5+5 tiles from the city centre (small advert distance).
The railway stations are pulled out a little, to make room for more houses and roads.
I haven't tried trains here - over to YOU! But I think this city should grow well with 2 .. 4 little trains running; One wishes for a 2-headed passenger engine here!
You might experiment with expanding Terracina in the editor; but watch out for road/rail crossings!

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Tortellino No picture - see the game. What is the point of this monster city? . . . NONE! . . . Just FUN! This was inspired by a dream I had many years ago:
I visited a town in Australia; the Local Authorities man was very proud of it, because "it has no car crashes!" He showed me the city plan:
From a central tile 2 roads spiralled out ... spiralled out ... spiralled out; but no road intersections! One road for driving IN, the other for driving OUT.
That city had only ONE car queue - a very long one!!
The name: Germans will see it as a cake - "Torte". Italians as pasta. Maybe someone should bring food here? Have fun with it.

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Airports in MEGA stations
Including large airport + railway station in a MEGA station can be tricky. I haven't much practical experience yet (1998); but here is an Airport which I've tried to extend with large Railway station in a number of directions - the brown tiles show where:

As you see: "Left is best, Right is worst" is even more extreme here. - at the Down,Right side, only 2 extra tiles are available.
- On the Up,Right side, 5 tiles;
- On the Down.Left side, 7 tiles.
But the Up,Left: 11 more tiles!!
Probably this is due to the fact that the UP corner of the airport is it's origin. Because the airport is 'fat' - wide in all directions - you get less maximum stretch than the main theory says.

Main strategy for MEGA station with (large) airport:
From your selected origin (should be near a city centre), walk to the rightmost point of your planned station. Then build Left from there.

It's always a good idea to save your game before starting a mega station, and at strategic spots while building. You may need several tries before you get it right. When finishing with a railway station sometimes the program will accept e.g. a 3*5 station, but not a 4*5 one, even if the 4th track is 'inside' the system! I haven't completely understood the logic behind the "Too spread out" message; just learnt what works most of the time.

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Last updated: megawork.htm 2004-0415,0201 , 2003-0105 ,(2001-1004, 990424, 0404,980323)

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