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This page will serve as a basic how to play guide for Transit King Tycoon. While there is very little information available at this time, we urge you to check back often, as new information is being added all the time!
Feel free to edit this guide with any tips, tricks, and suggestions.
Newbie News - New to the game read this first and then you can avoid asking in chat
As you become a "regular" you will get a little irritated with the chat always having the same questions over and over and over and over..... Don't be the problem be a part of the solution. Get your answers here and keep everyone's sanity in chat. This is a place to cover the most common questions
If you are new to the game here are the main things players ask about:
How do I add friends?
Go to chat, right click, select Friend and request is sent. Players may decline. As common courtesy do not be a pest, if people decline, certainly more than once, stop trying to add them as a friend.
How do I send fuel to someone?
Click on Leaderboard (231 button), find friend by Company Value (CV), click gas pump icon.
How do bus stops work?
They are another raw material that cities will request. You pick up passengers with busses (look for people icon when buying vehicle) and deliver to cities. There is nothing to "do" that is different with bus stops but they create confusion because unlike other raw material facilities they are not unlimited, so passengers refresh at a certain rate. You can see how fast your current flow of passengers will refill and what the next option is by selecting the Upgrade arrow.
Does everyone get the same raw materials and factories in the same locations?
No. They are generated at random, so your friends may not get the same things when you do, so keep that in mind when communicating.
Basic gameplay
Now you can build your very own Transit Empire! Build a road system and transport products and commuters to cities.
Level up roads for faster traffic. Level up farms and factories for cargo loading / unloading efficiency. Level up cities for bigger product requests.
Facilities
The game starts with 1 playable area and 8 areas of the island covered by clouds. The player unlocks new areas at certain levels. The first area has 4 facilities and 2 cities. Each area brings 4 or 5 new facilities onto the player's island. The facilities on every player's island are generated randomly. Currently there are more facilities available to generate than the island's capacity.
The raw material facilities are farms (cotton farm, fishery, cattle ranch, coffee plantation, etc) and mines (gravel pit, sandpit, limestone quarry, etc). These facilities create raw materials without the need for ingredients to be delivered. The factories require the player to deliver ingredients for them to create their products. For example, Brickworks needs 2 units of limestone and 1 unit of sand to produce 1 roof tile. As the players levels up and unlocks new areas, higher tier facilities appear. These facilities require a chain of routes from raw material facilities and factories until the final product is ready for delivering to the city.
City requests
The cities begin with small requests and as they grow the request bigger deliveries. The city requests are generated randomly throughout the game. The player can choose to watch an ad to re-roll for a city request. If a route is set for a city request, this request cannot be re-rolled.
Focus on your smaller orders first
The main advantage of the smaller orders is that they can be completed quickly. That’s why you should always focus on getting these done first and often.
Of course, the larger orders give you better rewards, so you have to find a balance. And it’s all about planning, as well will discuss below. But basically, if there’s a small order for some goods that are nearby or easy to deliver, go for it!
Very large orders are for when you log off
Each city has those very large orders that require hundreds of the same product type to complete. They reward you a ton of money and XP, but also take an awful lot of time to complete.
This is why it’s best to set your trucks to focus on these orders when you’re not logged in to the game: this way, you optimize your time and can focus on the faster orders when playing and maximize revenue this way.
Details about Cities
Warehouses
The warehouses are places you can store goods in advance for later use. They are very useful for you to store high tier goods, so that when you need them, you won't need to create the long lines of production (from farm, to 1st facility, to 2nd facility, to 3rd facility until the final product is created to be send to your cities). Different warehouses store different type of goods.
By tapping on a warehouse or industrial building, you will see the available facilities that can store their goods in it. And the other way around, by tapping on a facility you will see which storage building can store its goods. They are not automated, you will need to assign trucks to transport goods to the storage building and later assign trucks to move the goods out of the warehouse.
Upgrade warehouses for bigger storage per item:
- 2 item slots, 650 pieces each
- 3 item slots, 2500 pieces each
- 3 item slots, 7000 pieces each
Gas station
The gas station can be filled up manually by you and it generates one volume of gas per hour. It automatically fills up vehicles that approach it empty. When selecting the gas station you will see its radius marked with green color. It is best to place the gas station near a central junction. When a truck is out of fuel and reaches the junction within the gas station's radius it will redirect and go to the gas station for a fill up. After filling up, the truck will continue its set route as before.
Bus Stops
The player unlocks 5 bus stops during the game. Bus stops unlock on specific levels. You can set a route to transport commuters from one bus stop to one city.
Controls
This a free to play (f2p) game for mobile devices only. The player needs to tap on the touch screen.
This game needs internet connection.
Tips and tricks
Refueling vehicles
Since fuel is limited and you need to wait for it to generate, you should be very smart when it comes to refilling the tanks. Actually, you should do it in either of these situations, ideally both at the same time:
First, when your timer is close to zero (when the trucks are about to run out of fuel) and second, before leaving the game for a longer period of time, in order to ensure that your trucks keep working for as much as possible.
You should also take advantage of all the refuel stations that you have unlocked and refill them with fuel which basically gives you extra fuel capacity. However, you can only use these on a very specific area – so make sure that you place them on a main road, somewhere where many of your trucks will pass regularly.
Optimized vehicle per route numbers
You should also do a bit of math when it comes to deciding how many vehicles to send on each order. Ideally, you could have an even number of trips made by your trucks in order to complete the order.
Is a good idea to complete small orders (4-6) in one go. Larger orders can be divided into 2-3 trips (so if you need 10 items, send 5 trucks; if you have 21 items required, send 7 vehicles and so on).
The reason why you should do this is that the game will always use the maximum number of trucks you have assigned. So if you have an order with 1 unit left, but 9 trucks assigned, they will all load up and try to deliver that final item. This is a waste of time and fuel, so take your time and do the math before sending in the cars.
Advanced Strategies
So to really be able to compete, as with any sim, you need to take your strategy up a notch. Let's be real. Not everything in a game is worth doing and many times you cause yourself more harm than good by not understanding. So if you want to take your game up to the next level, understand one thing; most things in the game are a waste of time and may drive you to spend real cash to compensate for the problems. If you want to avoid that, check these things out.
Time study your loads
Just as if you owned a real trucking company some lanes (commodities you haul repeatedly) are just not profitable. Those are for the suckers who just haul anything a customer puts in front of them. You're not a sucker, right? Right?! So that's why you want to know this. Your goal is to find the gems that make sense to haul and dump the rest. This is crucial when selecting what to haul for events. If you want the max value you need to calculate your max points per minute (MPPM).
To do this use hauling raw items as your base. You must realize your MPPM changes with your truck mix. Just as manufacturer's understand that they can make more money by taking the best advantage of the equipment they have, your goal in this game is the same if you want to dominate. To dominate you need to always be optimizing which means over time you need to do this work again as things will change. In the beginning levels you will not have premium trucks so your capacity per truck (CPT) will be low, in the single digits. Later as you get Bobs, Dogs, Berthas and other higher CPT vehicles, you can haul more with less trucks, but you also get more drivers, so you can run more trucks. Basic math tells you your MPPM will rise over time, so you need to do this process repeatedly. As such, if you are a hard core data geek like me you will use a spreadsheet so that you can then just replace your numbers and this can be done quickly.
So let's begin calculating your best MPPM. First, you need to realize that the game gives you nothing except for final delivery of the request. This makes sense. If I buy a box of cereal, I do not care how many trucks it took to get the grain, sugar and additives to the cereal factory. I care that I got my cereal. I only pay for my cereal. Similarly, while lasagna is arguably the most delicious food on earth, if the residents of a city in Transit King Tycoon want lasagna they do not care that you had to haul milk to the dairy along with bottles from the glassworks. And of the fact you had to haul limestone and sand to the glassworks to make bottles? They don't care/. They want the lasagna. The rest is your problem. Wheat and eggs to the bakery to make pasta? Don't care. Eggs and meat from the farms? Again, don't care. They just care about that ooey, gooey lasagna they want to shove in their mouth that that is all they reward you for. So the first rule you need to learn is: Supply trucks are a drain on your MPPM. Anything that requires a complex supply chain invariably has a terrible MPPM because the trucks used to deliver the final good are the only ones that matter. That leads to the next rule. Your base MPPM is things that need no supply, meaning raw materials.
So you figure out how fast you can get paid. In this game MPPM is how you are paid best. Run every driver and every truck you can to haul something. Notice what time you started. Notice what time you ended and got paid. Subtract the time you started from the time you ended to get your total elapsed time. For example let's say you started hauling 500 apples at 1:52. You put 10 drivers on this with Haicee's the each haul 2 apples a time. This took a while, lets say it finished at 2:15. It took you 23 minutes to haul those 500 apples, and you got 1 point per apple in either the event that was running or in your XP, so your MPPM for either event points (EPs) or experience (XP) is the same, 21.74 MPPM. This is you base. But now you begin to see how this can change. In the beginning it changes rapidly, but once you get past level 10-15 it changes much more slowly. So let's fast forward a bit. You now have Bobs, let's say 5 maxed out Bobs that carry 45 apples each time, and your base trucks are Haicee GTI's in the middle of the pack with 8-9 CPT. You now have an order for 4900 apples and you get it done in 7 minutes. Your MPPM for apples is 700. Anything you can haul with a lot of high CPT trucks will be great. So if you get Bobs and Dogs early on and max them out, this will help. Hauling coffee beans which you cannot use these for might only return 400 MPPM. MPPM is points earned in EPs or XP divided by the minutes it took to complete that order. You want to get an MPPM for everything you think is worth it, to find out if it is.
Now as you level up, you will start getting things that are worth 4 points, then 16, then 57, then even more. Clearly these items are better, right? WRONG!!!!!! This is the biggest trick in the game. They tell you in the event and show you "Here are some high value delivery suggestions:" They would not lie to you, would they? Yes they would! Most of these items have a terrible MPPM. Let's take our friend, lasagna again. While it tastes good, that complex supply chain means you might have two trucks actually delivering lasagna and 30 delivering supplies. You run an order for hours and find while you earned 57 points for every one you delivered, you could only get an MPPM of 200, versus 700 for delivering apples. What!? Apples are better in an event than lasagna. But lasagna is 57 points and apples are 1? If your MPPM says so, then there is no doubt the answer is yes. MPPM is your standard of what to deliver. Like any business owner you will eventually get good at guessing which lanes are most profitable. The answer is simple: The least complex supple chain usually has the highest MPPM.
So typically in the 16 EP point items, 0 are worth it. in the 57s? Burritos are good but I have not found anything else worth it. So when you get these, watch ads and cycle to better loads. Leave the dogs to the suckers. You are a winner.
Here are the items so far that appear to provide a workable MPPM that you should consider them in events. List will be updated as new items are found:
Apple juice - 4 EP - typically between 500-700 MPPM using Bobs for supply
Canned tomatoes - 16 EP - About 1200 MPPM with vehicles you'd have available above lvl 80
Burritos - 57 EP - About 500 MPPM using Bobs for supply
Warehouses may not be helpful to you
Just because something exists in the game does not mean you should use it. Just as the previous advanced tip, if you want to excel at the game you need to use the things that help and ignore the ones that don't. Warehouses cost a LOT of money not just to buy, but to upgrade, You can do a lot with trucks, which you use a lot more, for that same money, than you can with a warehouse that you use for a bit. Typical advice is to not even consider a warehouse before level 50 even though you can buy them much earlier.
You can earn a lot of notes every day
While this should not be advanced it is because it seems so few people know about it. You can get 20-30 notes a day from the film icon on the left and watching the 6 ads. You also get them from the Calendar icon on the left. 70 are available in the current month as this is written. With the workhorse premiums like Bobs and Dogs costing 159 notes to purchase you can basically earn enough notes in a week just from these two items to get a new premium each week. Yes to upgrade you need additional notes, but a patient player can get what is needed. Add contracts to this and get them to the third level and get 5 notes each time and you can get another 20-40 every day, so they can add up quick if you play well. The free reward will give notes at least once a day. If you have patience and realize that it will take you months to get to high levels no matter what you do, over that time you have no reason to purchase notes.
You can pause upgrades and hold them for events or stop to fill contracts
Players may not realize, sometimes for a VERY long time, that you can pause upgrades and use the site to fill orders as needed, so do not feel that once you start an upgrade that resource location for factory is out of service until you run all the items to it that need to be delivered. Pause the upgrade and use it as needed, then restart when you can. This also can be used to begin upgrades and then hold them for completion until an upgrade event happens and then you can quickly get EPs.
Learn the event types and do normal things for bigger rewards
Expert players who hit Diamond rewards all the time will tell you that waiting to upgrade premium trucks, holding upgrades as above, keeping a few cities slow on the leveling up, can pay off when the right event comes up. You will do all those things over the course of the game, but if you wait to perform actions until you get rewarded for them in an event, you get event rewards too. Games count on lack of patience but if you can think like a business person and wait rather than act on impulse you can do well without spending any money.