Sabotage the Competition!

In the cut-throat world of a would-be Transport Tycoon, one particularly thorny problem to be dealt with is your competitor. As you may have already found out, the computer competition has some built-in advantages - presumably to help make up for what they lack in route-planning skills. Some of the advantages are:

• Computer Players don't pay to raise or lower land blocks.
• Computer Players don't invoke the wrath of city councils when they level whole forests just to build one airport or train station. YOU dynamite ONE tree and your rating drops to 'Appalling'!
• Computer Players' station ratings don't fall below a certain percent, even when they don't have vehicles servicing that route. As soon as your train is 10 seconds late, your rating starts to plummet, and it'll fall well below those of the computer players.

How many times have you scratched and saved to build a route that is just starting to turn a profit, when along comes a computer player, smelling profits and wanting (more than) his fair share. He builds some meandering, idiotic train line roughly parallel to yours and sets up shop, competing for the same coal you're shipping. Goodbye profits.

Lots of hints from veteran Tycoons outline the strategy of destroying your opponents trains by crashing into them with one of yours. Yes, this does work. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, there is a better way.

Observe:

The competitor is doing business in yellow. My company is in red. After his station is in place and his train(s) are running, build a depot (A) of your own and connect it to the 'back door' of his depot (C) with several lengths of track (B). (No, there isn't really a back door there, but if there was, that's where it would be.) Once you've set this up, build the cheapest engine available and click its 'go' button (don't worry about destinations). The engine will probably just sit there in the depot refusing to leave. Just hit the 'Ignore Signal' button. Once it pokes its head out, and before it has a chance to turn around and head back for the depot, click the 'stop' button.

Voila!

(what did you just accomplish?)

With the engine stopped, the ONLY cost incurred is the depreciation of the engine and the cost of building and, later, destroying the depot. There are no running costs because the engine is stopped.

But the most important point is this: WITH YOUR ENGINE SITTING OUT THE BACK DOOR OF YOUR OPPONENT'S DEPOT, HIS TRAINS WILL NEVER LEAVE THAT DEPOT ONCE THEY ENTER! And further, as shown in the screenshot above, any trains sitting in his station won't be able to leave either! (Notice the RED signals on the exits of his station (D)?)

In 3 to 5 years, he'll be ready to sell.

Below is another example of the same idea, using a different station and from a different angle:

I've had several hints e-mailed to me. One is to prevent an opponent from connecting one station to another while he's initially building his routes by surrounding one of his stations with your signs or tracks. This does work well, with the exception of two items:

• It only works if you can catch your opponent in the act. If you're busy elsewhere, this can be very easy to miss.
• After he tries to connect his route to the blockaded station for a while, he eventually gives up and goes elsewhere. The method outlined above makes sure that his trains are not only NOT making any profit, but that they ARE wasting money on running costs.

Using this strategy, you'll have a chance to buy your bankrupt competitors one after another. Remember: It's not enough to prevent them from creating profit! You want to turn their routes into a colossal money-pit!

Another way of sabotaging

The R&D staff (that's me) just developed an extremely cheap way to sabotage the competition! Take a look at the following competitor's station:

Simply lay your tracks around his station connecting the back door of his depot to the back door(s) of his station. Like this:

You don't have to purchase an engine to make this work; the tracks are ALL YOU BUY! This will effectively ensure that the signals at the entrance to his stations will ALWAYS be red! His (her) trains will never enter this station again, and He (she) won't make a dime of profit either. Of course, his trains will keep running, wasting money on operating costs, driving him deeper and deeper toward bankruptcy, until he'll finally sell his engines.

Even better, wait until his engines ENTER the station before you connect the tracks together. If you can do this, not only will he waste all his money, but he won't be able to sell his trains once he realizes he's taking a beating.

This won't work in all situations because often the computer players lay their track in the square immediately behind their depot, or they place their station too close to an industry or other immovable object. But most of the time, it works. Try it and drop me an e-mail to let me know how it goes.

Block truck and bus routes

Bankrupt those pesky competitors with the following neat trick supplied by Fatfish. Disable his truck and bus routes by creating roadblocks his vehicles will never cross. Choose a section of his road which connects his two stations together.

Place a depot and TWO sections of track across his road as follows:

Purchase an engine and let it leave the depot, BUT DO NOT LET IT CROSS THE ROAD!!! Turn the engine around and send it back to the depot BEFORE it crosses the road.

Sell the engine for about $25 less than you paid for it, destroy the depot and one section of track and the crossing signals are still red!

With a traffic jam like this, the competition will be bankrupt in no time!