How to CONTROL THE SPAWN in Mini Motorways (Blocking strategy) 

Congrats on the channel success. Keep up the good work.

Congrats! That's the way to go! 1-2 series that people love and off you gooooooo!

Congrats! You definitely deserve the 5k and beyond! Your videos have already helped me to reach new high scores and this one helps even more! Thank you for the awesome content!

One day I see that you only have 1k subs, and I’m a blink of an eye you are already trying to go up to 5k subs!

Thanks :) Well the way is long. Took me forever to get to 500 for example 😅

Nice one! :)

Pretty late in the game here, but this is definitely true. The developers could easily ban this strategy by allowing spawns on road tiles if no car can access the tile.

Thanks! I don't know if I'm the right person to teach that since neighbourhoods are the weakest link in my games (:

I think the tips on how to protect through lines in your neighbourhood are a good start for that. Because they can spawn pretty much anywhere you would probably have to do fairly in-depth analysis to figure out any patterns. You can pretty much assume that the first few houses that spawn will form larger neighbourhoods as the game progresses so securing multiple lines out of that area for all the malls that might spawn later is good. I also like to hug mall walls with my roads so that different colour houses can't spawn on the wrong side of the road.

So multiple houses can link to one road, because they start from standstill, try to preserve an expansion route, though that can be tricky in Challenges like the recent Zürich without bridges. Try and have a collector road leading out of estate, linking roads with Y or T junctions, avoid X/+ and more roads meeting. Remember you may need to supply two dests in different directions. If your houses are a small group 1 spur road joining main road in 1 place keeps main traffic moving better, try Y junctions and consider lights late game to bunch traffic with gaps on mixed roads. Large estates may justify a link with a roundabout, but watching video of this, often the space can be claimed fine with 2 exit roads. You want the space so you can utilise idle cars with motorways in emergencies. Remember 1 house on private road near to a dest suffices for square dests, the standard 2 adds headroom for upgrades. If you add roads, ask where the capacity is coming from, fixing 1 issue may cause another if a dest is robbed of all the nearby cars causing city failure. Disconnecting houses that spawn in bad places may help traffic flow. As local housing traffic rarely clogs, you don't need perfect optimal, it's the roads near dests with junctions close together that will back up. Without the space around dests, you may be forced ro try adding roads but find the cars just jam and fail to arrive in time

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS People would point out errors, good enough supplies the cars! But really your experience is key, to lay a foundation for max demand. I try putting your ideas into practice, had decent Challenge scores, but then struggle multiple times with Bogey Beijing, as it insists on distant spawns and tangles, so my journeys are longer than LA and it's hard to have enough motorway

It's not blocking It's right of way managent.

This! Lol exactly. Those people just don’t understand those game mechanics or how to utilize them

I mean I think blocking is kind of cheap and ruins the game to some degree, but you gotta do what you gotta do to get highscores🤷‍♂️

- game journalists

They even make challenges where blocking is essential and have examples of peoples cities that use blocking posted on their Instagram. I watched one channel from someone trained in real life road management and he failed to manage any roads - It was his first time playing though so it was more just naivety or clickbait. In real life they would predict where the roads might be needed and how the neighbourhoods should grow so they essentially block out those roads from having buildings put on them. They could easily implement an update to the game that allowed “malls” to spawn on unattached roads. They could even make the roads glow like houses do when they are unattached - you’d just get the roads back if a Mall spawned on them.

I did the same. Ended up with 6 buildings, but insane demand that I eventually couldn't keep up with.

There is something I want to test really badly. The difference between 2 of the same color on a road or 2 different. Because the houses get calls if they are the same color you can get a far call from a house you don't want called from. Where if it's a different color you control which houses get calls.

this was exactly what I started wondering after the video. Thanks!

@@theAV8R Yea, but often times a house will still spawn on the end of a section of road overtaking any possible open space. So if you do it this way, you gotta completely fill the spot you're looking at. Single open spots can't be covered by other houses driveways(the one that comes attached) since a new house will just pop right onto it and join up if it's the same color (I think).

@@rrteppo Not following what ur saying. Wut? How do you mean that you control the call from houses if the color is different?

@@nicholaswhorley8343 if you have 3 close houses and 3 far houses. If they are all the same color they can call for the far houses and cause traffic, but if they are different colors they can only call the close houses.

I can get behind that! But there's definitely terms out there like 'cheating', 'should be banned' or 'illegal' in this context :D

Thanks! Well you'll never have enough roads to control the spawn of houses. That's the main reason.

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS There are some tricks to manage house spawns a bit though. One use is when houses are spawning in a small area (an island for example) pre-placing some roads could a) make sure all houses that spawn in that area can be connected b) maximize the number of houses that can spawn in that area (or minimize the needed roads) and c) connect the neighbourhood efficiently (ie. less sharp turns, better intersections, etc.) Also see my other comment for some more thoughts on house blocking in early game

Thanks! I can't really tell. I usually just let them happen since they offer a lot of parking space as well.

Pleasure :)

You're welcome :)

Thanks for the love!

Pleasure :)

It's nice simply because it is so simple 😊

I would assume so. It is a nice soft nudge by the game mechanics without prohibiting to block with roads. It doesn't tell you how to play the game but it doesn't let you get it stale with one factory and a few houses. Good game design in my book. Considering there is no direct choice for zoning suburbs and factories, like choosing for roundabouts or bridges, I consider it an indirect choice combined from all choices you got. And still managing/zoning with roads is not easy, you still have to balance between managing/zoning and building your infrastructure. In my opinion zoning/managing with street tiles is an inherent part of the tools of this game. Just because it isn't a blatant choice in a menu doesn't mean it isn't a tool.

I suspect it is not explicit penalizing, but rather that the demand of a mall that has yet to spawn is split across all the existing malls.

On the Reddit they have said it was an intentional “bug fix”

I think it's on purpose to prevent what I did in the video with blocking the entire map. Otherwise you couldn't score infinitw points in every round.

The way the game works is that each color slowly ramps up in demand. At firsts each color will get a pin once every few seconds Then every second Then multiple every second But eventually with a single building the demand will be so great that the parking lot of a single building will not suffice If you have multiple malls, the demand is spread across each of them so instead of one mall asking for 2 cars a second, 2 malls are each asking for one car a second

You're welcome :)

Thanks, I can absolutely agree on that!

Thanks a lot!

Yeah I saw that they didn't think of this happening when releasing the challenge :D

Thanks for the love!

Yeah most important thing is they're stopping blocking everything and cheesing your way to a highscore. With that it's 100% fine imo

You're welcome, go for it!

Yeah you definitely wanna have some free space as well to work with and to not be overcome by increasing demand.

Yeah you don't necessarily have to keep everything clear, but a less crowded centre definitely helps imo.

There's no such thing as newb questions ✌🏼 It's simply the delete mouse button without moving 😊

Not sure if that's a thing by now? Back then it didn't spawn just to spawn. It had somewhat of an area where it could spawn but not more.

It's so random! Feels like a tree diagram that gets more complex with every week passing by.

I think there are some challenges where everyone starts with the same RNG seed meaning you can get the same sequence of pseudo random numbers every time you play the map. On those you could _probably_ get a lot of control over the spawning by playing the map _several_ times and just restarting to change something every time something goes wrong. I'm not completely sure, depends on what the RNG is controlling, if it is just spawns and weekly bonuses it can work but if it includes car movements it would be just too difficult to pull off.

There’s a static probability map which determines: A) whether houses or malls spawn in a certain tile B) the probability of them spawning as a weighted value C) the density or modifier to chance to spawn based on how many buildings are close to the given tile. So spawns are semi random each map, but the parameters governing spawns are static having been handcrafted for each map.

Houses can spawn right next to malls though right

@@Henry-qt3py Really? Never seen that happen, unless you mean right next to the exit.

That was changed in an update. Still got it in my way of playing from the old days.

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS Yeah, I guess there's no harm in it as long as you got enough roads.

Back then it would spawn directly next to each other. Didn't happen to me since then so I thought the community might be right...

There's hardly a way of controlling the houses since they only need one space. I try to put the roads together so no houses spawn in between. But you can't tell 100%

Well it's not really in your own hands since a space for a double destination could still be used for a single destination spawn.

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS do you reckon it' s worth it to block double spawns?

On the right side: Yes. But not in the middle or on the left.

Roundabout is road, so a building will not spawn over it.

Yes

Hah that's great, I did that one for today :D

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS thanks i just saw it now

Desktop. The older videos were on iPad tho :)

It would. Still have this in my way of playing since malls could spawn right next to each other back then.

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS Awesome, love your content.

Nice, go for it! 🙌🏼

Oh no, that's the worst thing to happen :( Keep going!

Nice one! :)

They can and they will. At some point the leaderboard will have a reset I'm sure.

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS but as you say it has been two years, I think you are right and they won't address it/it isn't cheating.

it adds extra skill and strategy in a non-intrusive way

Gotta say this until the same old comments under every new video are gone (:

I guess it won't since this has been a thing for two years of the game existing.

You didn't miss anything in that corner tho :)

@@HYDROPHILPLAYS but my inner monk is screaming