Visualize how branches on a tree join together from twig, to tip, to trunk. In other words, we want the shortest 'longest road'!ĭon't Go CrazyIf you were to draw straight point-A-to-point-B roads for every house and its destination, you'd run out of roads incredibly quickly. And optimization with multiple factors is always a balancing act - you can only truly optimize one thing at a time, and our goal in this game is to make sure that the 'longest road' (the longest distance any one car will have to make to reach a corresponding destination) is as short as possible.

Keep in mind that this does NOT apply in every situation - The more houses you have, the more competing goals you will have in the name of optimization. Firstly, your cars will drive shorter distances on average, and you will also end up using fewer tiles for longer distances, rather than stairstepping everything. This is one of the easiest ways to step up your game, and the benefits are twofold. It might be tempting to just draw a road to the left, like this:īut the more optimal way would be diagonally, which shaves off a fraction of a second for any car pulling in:

Optimizing Road TilesPretend I have to connect this light blue store to some houses that are coming in from the south. After all, just connecting the roads is the easy part! Much like its successor, Mini Metro, Mini Motorways is a game of optimization - making the most of what you're given. This seems inconsequential, but combined with the previous rule makes long 'shortest distances' a double-whammy.Įach car will travel the shortest possible route to a destination, and they will tend to prefer stores that are closer.Ĭars will not 'compete' for a pin, meaning that each pin is reserved by a car as soon as it leaves the house. This means that no cars will leave 'early' to get to a pin before it exists.Įach car will return to the house it left from. Laws of the Road in Mini Motorways Each car will only depart from a house if there is a destination pin for it to go to. Having too few bridges can really constrict the flow of traffic and lead to your untimely loss. Depending on the map, you'll really want to plan these based on how lucky or unlucky your map layout is. Making a return from Mini Metro are the all-important bridges. If you have a bunch of green houses and a green store separated by red and yellow traffic, use a motorway to improve their commute.Īlternatively, you can observe which stores are building up pins, and use your motorway to ease the pressure off of that store by connecting it to a cluster of houses of that color. You want to use this on your weakest links of your entire map.

Hops over everything, from point A to point B, and allows cars to travel quickly. Reserve Traffic lights for small, clustered intersections, and reserve roundabouts for high-traffic single intersections. Generally better than traffic lights, but the downside is that you get fewer of them, and they take up far more space in congested areas. These allow cars to not slow down much at intersections. These seem underwhelming at first (and often are!), but what they do is allow for one direction of traffic at a time to NOT have to slow down, providing a small efficiency boost in some situations. It should be noted that there are several different types of buildings, each with a different 'pin generation rate', so to speak.įurthermore, if you're coming from Mini Metro, you might distress when a few houses are formed way out toward the edge of your map - this is okay! Houses are just 'car generation resources' and can't cause you to lose - it just means you might need shorter roads to the other houses of that color and their destinations to pick up the slack.Īlternate the flow of traffic like a real-life traffic light.

Mini metro strategy guide