full image - Repost: Differences in the Experience of Mini Metros and Mini Motorways (from Reddit.com, Differences in the Experience of Mini Metros and Mini Motorways)
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I had been interested in trying Mini Metro or Mini Motorways for a while now. Given the recent good deal on the bundle during the 10th anniversary sale, I ended up getting both at the same time, but prior to this, I had looked into which of the two I thought I would be more interested in, and I never felt like I found anything really detailing the different experience the two provided. Most articles explain how Mini Motorways differs from metro assuming you have experience with Metros or don’t go into much detail about the experiences themselves.The following are my thoughts on the key differences between the two experiences. This is from the perspective of someone who has about 5 hours of play time in each. I will be detailing the things I feel may cause someone to prefer one over the other.There’s plenty of resources detailing exactly what the games are so I am going to focus more on their differences, but for those who have not played the games I’ll give a brief description. In Mini Metros passengers appear at stations looking to get to a specific type of other station. You must choose how to connect the different types of stations so that the automated trains most efficiently deliver a continual stream of passengers to their requested destination. In Mini Motorways, locations request “people” from certain neighborhoods. You must build road networks so that people can efficiently get to the destination requesting them. Both games are real time with a loss condition of too many passengers building up and not able to get to their destination.I’m going to talk about Mini Metros’ tutorial, as I feel like it really shaped my initial experience with the game. When you first start Mini Metros, it throws you into a tutorial. It does a good job of integrating the tutorial into the normal gameplay. It primarily is just a normal game of Mini Metros with some additional indicators promoting you to build lines. It does not really tell you why you are doing anything; you simply get to see the results of your actions in real time. Text is used very lightly just to let you know what tunnels are and that you can delete an entire track. While I appreciated this tutorial quickly allowing you to “play” the game, it left me without some information that I felt made the first couple hours of my time with Mini Metros more tedious. It details how to extend lines to new stations but does not show how you can remove a station from a line (other than deleting the entire line). This led me to deleting the entire lines and redrawing them when I wanted to just make minor edits to a line. Despite the game being relatively simple, I felt like the game didn’t tell me everything I needed to know to enjoy the experience to its fullest and had to learn these things through randomly stumbling upon them or looking them up online.In contrast, Mini Motorways has a much more thorough tutorial. It felt much more like a tutorial; everything explained with text and fully scripted for the first little while. While this took longer to get into gameplay, I felt like I understood all the ways I could interact with the game after playing it, only having to look up more niche interactions.When you start an actual game of Metro/Motorways, both start you with a very simple layout of nodes to connect, and slowly increase the number of nodes that need to be connected as time goes on. This makes every game start at a very manageable state before growing in complexity. While connecting the first 3 stations in Metros is a non-decision, and there is no real threat or difficulty until plenty of more stations are added, the slow trickle of stations that starts seconds into the game gives you things to think about. You can start to plan where additional lines may be most beneficial and think about how you will allocate your bridges. In Motorways on the other hand, the start of each game always feels like there is a lot of waiting before any real decisions present themselves. I timed one game and it took 1.5 minutes before I had to do anything past connect the initial buildings. Even after that, it wasn’t until about 7.75 minutes in that there were enough various buildings on the map that I felt like I could start making meaningful decisions about how to layout my road network. When you consider the game was about 25 minutes long, that’s about a third of the game just waiting for the choices to start. There is a similar stark pacing difference at the end of the game, but I will talk in more detail about that a little later.Mini Metro is a very macro focused game. You will never have more than 8 lines, but 5-6 is a more typical amount to have at any given time (until you get good enough at the game to last into the very end game I suppose). The main decision point is choosing how to snake these lines between the stations that appear on the map. You simply choose two stations to connect, and the game automatically connects them with the shortest path possible. You also choose which lines your fleet of trains will be deployed to. Acting on your decisions is very straightforward and quick, it is making those decisions within a time constraint that is difficult.While I believe the most important decisions in Mini Motorways are still the macro decisions, Motorways presents a bunch of micro decisions on top. In Motorways, you choose the paths your roads take. Do you funnel all the driveways into a single space, or use more road to space them out (you have a limited amount of road you can use)? What angles should you connect roads at? I assume these things influence the efficiency of your network, but their effect is not great enough to clearly see with my limited experience in the game, so I find myself not caring much about these things. While I found some of these small decisions felt like busy work, being able to craft the road networks yourself can be quite satisfying as it gives you a sense of expression and personal style with your network compared to the more “perfect looking” networks that end up being created in Metros.Motorway’s micro decisions also adds time to executing a macro strategy. Sometimes I know exactly how I want to connect everything, but during the time it takes to do the connecting, new issues pop up as I am working on them. It’s also worth noting that later in the game, new houses seem to pop up every few seconds. While every single house is not necessarily vital to your network, you will have to keep connecting them to keep up with the demands of the other buildings. This creates a constant upkeep that needs to be met even if you are happy with the rest of your network. While the start of the game feels quite slow, the game can quickly feel quite frantic considering the constant upkeep and the time it takes to execute plans.It's hard to say with only 5 hours of play time, but both games feel like they have ample depth. Given all the micro decisions Motorways gives you, its easy to see many places where I could improve. It’s harder to clearly assess how my macro decisions in the games could be improved (which initially gives the impression that Motorways has more depth, given I can see steps for improvement just through the micro), but given the global scores the game shows some people achieving, I know I have much to learn in both games.As far as communicating information to the player, I feel Motorways conveys what is happening well, while Metros communicates when things are happening well.The things in Motorways you need to keep track of, are all colour coded. If you see one of your red buildings is not getting the people it needs, you can easily mentally filter out everything on the screen except the red building and cars to see where the problem lies (most likely a traffic jam or lack of red houses connected to the network), easily allowing you to decide how to address the issue. Identifying exactly how a solve an issue in Metros is often not as clear. First, everything is communicated with shapes. I have multiple times seen a bunch of passengers of one shape accumulating at a station and was unable to quickly find the station they were trying to go to (a diamond easily camouflages in a sea of squares and triangles). Even when the shapes themselves were not an issue, it often wasn’t particularly clear why build ups at stations were happening. Is the station not getting trains often enough? Are trains full when they reach the station? Are passengers transferring at the station? Checking all these things requires monitoring the entire line. Not knowing what I could have done to prevent a loss in Metros was common for me, especially early on, whereas I usually felt like I knew why I lost in Motorways.That said, Metros often does a much better job of telling you when you need to attend to something. There is less clutter on the screen with metros, and new stations appearing have a very distinct animation, making it very clear when there are new things to attend to. In Motorways, with so many colours objects moving on the screen at once and more time being spent actually laying the networks, I found I would commonly completely miss when a new subdivision or building first popped up. Often, I would lose a Motorway game due to completely missing that an issue was occurring rather than not having a solution to it.The finally point I will make is Metros feels far more forgiving than Motorways. Doing a better job of communicating up-coming issues is certainly a part of that, but 2 other major gameplay difference makes Motorways far less forgiving. In Metros, if you have a banked train (or in very dire situations, an interchange), you can immediately deploy it at a crowded station to quickly fix the issue. In many cases this is just a temporary fix, but it will buy you some time to fix the underlying issue. In Motorways, there is no way to buy yourself some time when an issue is happening. People must always travel from their homes to their destination, so there is always a lag between implementing a fix and the issue being resolved. Additionally, in Metros, you can make alterations to your lines while trains are still on them. Trains need to complete what they were doing on the old version of the line, but as soon as they are done, they will follow the alteration. This allows you address an issue and continue onto the next issue. In Motorways, you have a limited amount of road (and other features), and when you delete roads, they are not refunded to you until the cars using them have finished using them. This means that for many issues, you have to delete the old version, wait for all the cars using them to finish their journey, then create the fix (which while you are creating, you likely have a big hole in your network), then wait for cars to travel along your new network to resolve the issue (this is not even mentioning all the general upkeep you still need to do). The reality is, if you are waiting for the game to give you clear indication that there is an issue in Motorways, you often don’t have time to create the solution. You have to solve issues before they are apparent. This can cause games of Motorways to feel like they end very abruptly, as things look fine, then one issue appears, and you don’t have the means to fix it in time.
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