While some are better at generating easy fair amounts of happiness early on others excell later on with minmaxing in mind. Here’s my assessment based on a few hours of gameplay and a couple wins in the pocket.
Tips for Strategies and Synergies
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Entertainment is great all around if: you have few cars attached or low pop (in order to maximize the population per gambling car so you can maximize chances of hitting big pays) or if you plan on doing a full run with just that set… but admitedly from the few times I tried it seemed to fall off during the last stretch because of the unstable happiness generation when you hit a few unlucky streaks in a row of cycles. So essentially it’s great early and midgame so you accumulate a buffer of happiness until polution 2 hits.
Culture follows the same pattern in that if you can get people to visit mostly or even solely culture cars you can get comfortably large amounts of happiness for a long time and you start benefiting from it as early as the second car you plop down from the same set (albeit with relativelly few gains compared to Education until you get higher tiers of that set).
Very easy to set up and rest up on the happiness it generates by the midpoint to use it as buffer later in the run.
Just like Entertainment I felt like it didn’t generate enough to stay afloat longer than needed to reach the victory point once you’re past the iron gate though but that’s what the buffer it generates previously is for.
Education seemed to me like the worst option between entertainment, culture and itself (and generally the worst balanced set in the game, in my opinion) but you have to look at how easy it is to set up -> just 3 cars to achieve max set bonus and both the first tier and baseline effect are better than anything else before you’re like lvl3 or 4 with access to better sets with the respective worthwhile tiers activated. This is most definitelly a solid starting option but the moment you start branching to other sets and having your population spread out I would immediatelly ditch it. Generally didn’t like this one but it is not without its earlygame niche.
Media pretty much allows you to go afk and win if you pair it with train engine upgrades but okayish at best without. Still, if you can get at least the second tier up earlier on it’ll give you more happiness overall than many other sets despite having to wait to hit a station in order to trigger it.
If you want the most busted build I found (I’m sure there’s others though) here it is: Prioritize engine upgrades (Trainpower set) and start preparing the Media Set and Zeal/ChildrenOfEngine set on the side together, then once you’ve got decent speed ditch the trainpower cars an run off the other two sets to the very end. Both the Media and Zeal sets are 4 piece 4 slots so by lvl8 you’re done with your train. At level 9 you can add the rainbow frontmost communications car if you want to be even more godlike. This is the only strat where I felt comfortable actually traveling backwards far into the storm, visiting every station and still make it back to the Promised Land and win… but until machinist level8 just keep running from the storm.
Explorer’s is very much the media’s poorer cousin.
Great with engine upgrades if you specifically tailor your routes to hit as many stations as possible but generally nowhere near the level of braindead that media offers with the same duo.
It also synergizes with Bureau but until you got some engine upgrades it’s best to just forget about that; By the lategame if you want to stick to it and minmax I suggest ditching engine cars for bureau cars and watch explorer’s do its thing.
By the same logic as Media+Zeal referenced earlier, you can replace engine cars with media and win with media+explorer’s combo which is easier to achieve than bureau+explorer’s or even zeal in my opinion. Just let go of the controls and come back in a few minutes to the victory screen.
It being a 3-card set given how gimmicky of a bonus it is seems balanced to me.
Academy is not as busted as some people claim but it is definitely the easiest set.
It ramps up very fast because of easy upgrades but falls off later on as every card aside from the tower at the end generates a pretty mediocre amount of happiness compared to other options and it has no +happiness condition from the set itself like many others do. Not to sleep on the amount of free cards you can get by sacrificing the extras you don’t need but once you got the tower at level5 it’s best to just ditch every other academy traincar that is not strictly necessary to fill another set’s condition.
It also has the huge downside of making your card reserves at the bottom always maxed out and you will often have to chose between keeping a great card or keeping a bunch of lower level academy cards to continue upgrading to level 4 and 5. You’re undoubtedly going to be pausing the game a lot thanks to this.
Technically you can just keep building towers but Media+Trainpower(+Zeal/Explorer’s -Trainpower later on), visiting stations every other second, remains on par if not better until you get multiple lvl5 towers up and running, and you’re unlikelly to get more than two before you start to struggle if you’re already either past the iron gate or attempting to dive into the storm.
At max trainpower you visit stations much faster than each cycle occurs, you get a lot more milleage out of Media than Ivory Towers that way. Media is still slept on it seems.
Templars is quite valuable if and only if you max it (5 cycles of waiting for its effect is just too much especially early on) but getting it maxed might take a long time depending on luck and most specifically because one of the cards (Drill Ground) for it requires two traincar slots (5 cars -> 6 slots for a full bonus)… you won’t have the space for that anytime soon without sacrificing something in turn and it leaves very little room for efficient set pairing options later on. It’s a very restricting set despite how powerful it can be and that’s how it balances itself out.
Bureau synergizes well with everything but by the time you get it maxed (6 cars with one being double slot) you’re likelly already in polution 2 and it ends up being a “win more” set rather than something you actually need. Very restrictive aswell if you go all out for the maximum set bonus.
Instead, this is more likelly to end up being a set you’ll use to fill leftover slots but having to have 3 slots free at the minimum (4 if you go with the really good double slot car, which you should) is a heavy price to pay for just shaving off 2-3 seconds off every cycle.
Personal prefference?, Pair this with trainpower early on (prioritizing trainpower) and then ditch both once trainpower is improvement level 7+; Just use it to get faster engine upgrades essentially.
Trainpower is the first and main thing that likelly comes to anyone’s mind when it comes to winning and with good reason; If you can spare the slots to get the improvement going it’s always worth getting a bit more train speed; Not strictly necessary but without some upgrades or solid strategy you’ll likelly reach the end feeling like you were a sliver away from losing… which sounds perfectly fair to me, the game is meant to be hard at the end afterall.
Comms cars by themselves aren’t amazing but if you can get that rainbow frontmost car that’s an easy recurring and permanently stacking +2 happiness (and even +4 if you upgrade it) everytime you hit a station.
Very doodoo if you get that frontmost car late in the playthrough but if you get a lucky roll earlier on it’s definitelly worth taking and placing it down even as a single car; Speaking of single car, if you have only one leftover slot in the train that is not enough to help you reach another active set’s tier, this is generally the car you’ll want to plop down for its baseline effect that is better than any other happiness-wise.
Security is one I personally saw very little use for (in terms of effect itself) outside maximizing distance for the 2set comms bonus (which doesn’t generate all that much happiness still) but hey it’s better than the Education set by far.
Someone correct me if they have more experience with that set but it felt like its effectiveness was generally on par with the Culture set.
Children of Engine Set (more commonly known as the zeal set) has the potential to be absolutelly busted but you do need to start piling zeal fairly early on for it to reach stupid levels of happiness generation and you do need to be lucky enough to roll the rainbow Propaganda Station car which gives you 3x as much happiness as the number of stacked zeal you have if only one person visits it, per cycle.
The nice thing about that car is that it is part of the Media Set aswell and if you’ve read up to this point you know just how braindead the Media-Zeal combo can be.
Ideally you do want this set at 4piece even if that specific car and its effect work based off only one person visiting it as a condition (it gets substantially better conditions if you level it up but it’s all up to luck so I’m not hyping anyone up on that). The more zeal you have the better and the 2piece set is just way too conditional to generate zeal reliably.
If anything I’d say the ones that allow you to permanently sit in the storm without a care are the ones that need to be looked at and be brought down but all things considered I’d say the game is fairly well balanced for a casual singleplayer game like this and all that matters is that it is enjoyable, which it was for me whether winning or losing.
Now if you are a completionist and you hate leaving stations unexplored behind you’re going to get wrecked by the storm attempting to do so but if you’re a… zoomer (pardon the pun)… and zoom through the map to the finish line you likelly won’t have the card levels, machinist level or good enough set pairings in order to get much further than the iron gate itself.
Also, given the roguelite nature, it’s entirelly possible to get dumpstered on by the RNG, sometimes over multiple playthroughs in a row; It’s important to understand that and keep that in mind.
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