Introduction
So you figured out the basics, segregate your roads, don't let traffic cross wherever you can, and use diagonals roads as much as you can. Now with a bit of practice you're easily getting 2.5k+ every game as you're able to smash through the early and mid game. Now you want to know how to start pushing for higher scores to get into the top 200. All of those tiny efficient changes you can make and obscure mechanics. Well that's what this guide is for, I hope you learn something helpful.
Terminology
Shops: the destinations.
Skyscrapers: circular shops.
Neighbourhoods: houses of the same colour spawn in clusters, future houses of these neighbourhoods spawn within two blocks of another house in the neighbourhood.
Blocking: placing short sections of disconnected roads to prevent house or shop spawns on the covered tiles.
Early game: From the start of the game up until roughly 1000 points, in this phase of the game you can frankly make all of the wrong choices and you'll be fine. At this stage of the game, you could completely delete everything off of the map and start fresh with no real consequences. The main focus is simply trying to set up good spawns by using blocking. You can get away with not segregating if you want to conserve some roads, but it should still be avoided.
Mid game: You need to start segregating here as traffic jams are now possible, this is where you're setting up the major paths you're going to be carrying through into late game. This phase ends when all of the shops have spawned and house spawns start being irratic with seemingly random colours being dotted into gaps.
Late game: The map is close to full, re-routing is basically limited to already established roads and areas you blocked off. Now it's all about keeping throughput as high as possible and blocking for the purpose of ensuring predictable future house spawns are able to access destinations. Re-arranging major roads or motorways at this point in the game is a death sentance unless you have a spare motorway you can use to maintain traffic while you rebuild.
Driveways
Note, since the most recent patch intersections now don't slow cars down very much at all, you now don't need to know any of the below and it has indirectly nerfed traffic lights into the ground. The devs have also effectively removed the driveway mechanics by doing this, it's a real shame as the game is now a lot simpler and the skill cap is far lower.
Driveways aren't junctions: Yes driveways do slow down your cars compared to max speed, however they don't slow your car down anywhere near as much a junction. Taking visible estimations I'd estimate the ratios as: max speed: 1, driveway speed: 0.95, junction speed 0.5. I'll correct those values if anyone in the comments has quantified the difference in speed by counting frames for a full speed car (5 uninterrupted blocks of space to speed up), driveway slowdown, and junction slowdown. The practical result of this is that assuming you have no roundabouts or traffic lights to spare, when hooking up houses to a shop you should path the road so that all of the houses connect directly to the road with their driveway to avoid creating junctions.
Bad: Good:
Shop entrances and house entrances are both driveways: So if you're connecting a neighbourhood to two or more shops (which I recommend you always avoid if feasible), if you don't have a traffic light for an efficient junction, then don't create a junction at all and instead just connect from one shop driveway to the other.
Or if you're going from two groups of houses to a shop and you have no roundabout or traffic light, have the two roads meet at the shop driveway, and not at an intersection.
Bad: Good:
Don't cluster your driveways: Yes clustering your driveways will give cars one or two extra blocks to speed up, this is a worthwhile reason to do it if they're directly next to a junction. However, you're screwing your throughput as clustering will cause small traffic jams as cars fight to all turn in different directions in that one block, cars also have a slightly longer distance to drive if you're pulling driveways back away from the shop to cluster them.
Bad: Good:
Traffic Lights, Roundabouts, And Junctions
So there seems to be a general consensus across youtube, steam, reddit, discord and so on that traffic lights are useless compared to roundabouts or that even regular junctions are better (they aren't). The reality is that both have different use cases, advantages and disadvantages:
Use traffic lights for Y junctions: Traffic lights significantly help with throughput at three way junctions. At four way junctions they're barely worth using if the vast majority of traffic is taking one path and on a rare occasion a car needs to cross over. For example if you needed to get a single red house over a green highway.
Use roundabouts for mixed traffic and four way junctions: Roundabouts are significantly better than traffic lights for any junctions with more than three intersecting roads. For T junctions however (three way) I'd argue they're equally as effective or slightly worse than traffic lights since the last update which buffed traffic lights. This is mainly due to how roundabouts currently don't work like they do in real life, in game cars on the roundabout give way and stop for cars entering it. This causes minor traffic jams under high traffic where a simple traffic light doesn't have this issue. On a couple of occasions I've seen extreme traffic on a roundabout cause a blockage where the cars are completely stuck.
Traffic lights are superior late game: You get two traffic lights compared to one roundabout when choosing options on Sunday, and roundabouts require a three by three space to be placed. As a result, unless you need a roundabout for a junction with more than three entrances, and as long as you have a roundabout in reserve for the early and mid game, traffic lights are the superior choice. Late game the map is packed full, your roads should all be segregated with no new four way intersections, old four way intersections ideally removed. At this point of the game new roundabouts are close to useless and the value of traffic lights will rise as throughput becomes more and more critical to avoid losing the game.
Spooky ghost cars: You can cross traffic with an X junction, and cars will pass through each other rather than bothering to wait. Presumably this is a bug, but it's actually better than roundabouts in a lot of scenarios. This has been patched.
In summary, you'll probably never need more than two roundabouts for a game, but they're invaluable for solving issues where roads need to cross early and mid game and can massively help with conserving how many roads you use. Late game where you'll struggle to fit in a roundabout, you get less of them than traffic lights, and their niche for more than three entrance junctions being no longer needed, traffic lights are the better choice. If you're able to safely avoid needing roundabouts in early and mid game then you're setting yourself up better for late game.
Efficacy Of Merge Methods
Ordered by highest to lowest throughput:
Roundabout to shop:
Traffic light Y junction to shop:
No merging of traffic, a single main road is fed directly by driveways:
Shop driveway motorway merge:
Shop driveway merge:
A regular junction:
Update, since the most recent challenger update regular junctions are no longer slow and are better than both shop driveway merges :(
This screenshot needs context, because so many people misuse regular junctions and use them where they should instead be using no merge roads feeding into driveway merges.
Regular junctions are only acceptable towards the very back of a road feeding into a shop, where the junction can only slow down the inputs of around three houses. I'll call them feeder junctions. It's up to you to judge where you can and can't get away with a regular junction, to avoid causing a bottleneck or significantly impacting throughput. Here's a screenshot of a feeder junction, in this situation, getting that extra white house in the top is worth causing the junction slowdown since these cars have to travel across almost the whole map anyway:
Obscure Mechanics
Demand weirdness: Ever wondered why very late game box shops which should demand half of the traffic that skyscrapers do can end up demanding far more than half and often end your games? If a pin can't be added onto a shop because it already has full pins on the timer then it'll add the pin to another store of the same colour instead. As a result, a busy late game skyscraper on one side of the map can result in a shop on the other side of the map demanding more traffic than it otherwise would. Knowing this though, you can also potentially mitigate traffic needs to a shop by improving the throughput of completely different shop of the same colour.
Slingshotting cars:Extremely long motorways correctly cause cars to move at very high speeds, however for some reason the cars from the motorway don't decelerate until after they leave the motorway allowing them to maintain extreme speed for an extra 10 blocks or so. This is especially helpful for getting cars through junctions at high speed. This mechanic has been altered, cars now seem to slow down by the end of the destination tile the motorway connects to. While not as good as the old slingshotting that's now patched out, this is still abusable. I've noticed that if you connect motorways directly to a shop driveway junction with a road they perform significantly better than if you had made a shop driveway junction with two roads instead. While a regular shop driveway junction (two roads) can't be used past 4k on a skyscraper, with a motorway shop driveway junction (one motorway, one road) you can still use it up to about 6k. I've added an example of a motorway shop driveway junction to the merge efficacy section of this guide.
Natures Purpose:Trees block shop and house spawns, remove them with a road if you want a spawn in the same location as a tree.
Rooks not Queens: Houses always spawn with driveways in cardinal directions, they cannot spawn with diagonal driveways, this can be important to know when blocking and planning house spawns.
Demand scaling: Shop demand scales over time, it doesn't scale with your score. This means that blocking the whole map and having just one shop isn't feasible, you want to have as many shops as you're able to handle to maximise your score. Demand also seems to spike when the game wants to spawn a shop and isn't able to, presumably the demand from the shop that wasn't able to spawn is instead transferred to one of your existing shops. Eventually shop demand will be higher than the number of houses you have available or higher than the maximum possible throughput, this is the cap on your maximum possible score late game.
Rapid expansion: If you've blocked all locations where the game wants to spawn a shop, the borders of the map will expand faster. This is typically a bad thing as it means you have fewer roads for longer distances early game and you'll run out of roads faster.
Need To Know Bugs
The bugs that used to be here have now been fixed! Awesome! Thanks devs. Now we no longer have to play a specific way to avoid causing the game to break.
Blocking & Spawn Mechanics
There are plenty of very undesirable spawns you can get in this game, blocking allows you to avoid these and there are very obvious advantages to that, blocking keeps you alive by preventing spawns that screw current and future paths, keeping critical pathways available. It does come with a key disadvantage which I'll cover first:
The more shop spawns you block and the more you space them out the fewer total shops you'll have spawn, and you may be delaying a shop spawn that could've been giving you points during that time. Someone who doesn't block at all may manage to fit in lets say 23 shops, compared to blocking giving you only 20. Of course with more shops squeezed in, finding efficient paths will be more difficult for them and it will probably kill those players. However having more shops comes with the advantage that your maximum possible score will be higher and your score will rise faster. As weeks go by, the rate at which pins spawn on shops will increase until it's impossible for your throughput to meet the demand. As a result you want to have as many points coming in as possible before you hit that point in time, more shops means more traffic and more points. Overzealous blocking is detrimental for this reason, and you should always consider if any of your blocks may be ruining a perfectly good shop spawn.
Now then, here are some scenarios where blocking should be considered:
Blocking tight or important pathways you are likely to need in the future
This is simply a tight space where a house spawn could prevent access that will be important later on.
Houses often spawn along cliffs meaning you can't run roads behind them which is often helpful, so I reserve that path. I also ensure that no shops spawn in this canyon between the cliffs.
Keeping spawns off of the cliff and waters edge
Ensuring future house access by preventing house spawns which would prevent access to the rest of the same neighbourhood
I want to avoid a red house spawn between the existing houses and the yellow shop which would mean any future red house spawns below would have no access to the road they need to be on.
Here there are no yellow house spawns that would completely block me, however a spawn in either of the blocked locations would result in needing a road to loop around to future houses spawning on the high right side of the neighbourhood.
Penning in neighbourhoods to control which direction it should expand in
Here I can force house spawns to be closer to the shop they're going to as well as avoiding having houses spawn where they'd need go around several blocks to hook up to the preexisting houses.
Here I'm forcing future blue houses to spawn into two specific spots and then the game will be forced into creating a new blue neighbourhood if it wants more blue houses. I'm also maintaining access to the blue road out of the bottom as I know that's a common area for blue neighbourhood spawns and I'll likely need it.
Here's the same spot as the previous image, yet I'm penning on one side and blocking for future house access on the other to control the spawns.
Ensuring shops won't spawn with their driveway touching existing critical roads or within one tile of existing shops
Keeping roads segregated is incredibly important. So at all costs we want to avoid shop spawns that prevent us from running roads around this red shop or force us to have a road providing access to multiple shops with a bad driveway placement.
A simple go to strategy is providing a two block border around existing shops to help ensure you can route effectively in the future without a shop dropping itself in the way.
Thanks For Reading
All feedback is appreciated. Especially if you have any additional information I can add to this guide. Patches are prone to changing game mechanics, especially mechanics around driveways and junctions, so if something changes or needs correcting, please leave a comment.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2656996658
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