Megapolis: Planes or Trains?

The Bottom Line: Trains are Slightly Better

If you have barely or not yet started to build your Megapolis airplane fleet or train armada, then you are probably asking yourself: "Which one should I build first?"  Here, we will take a look at the cost and the rewards for both choices.  It is a close call, but I will start by giving you my one word answer: Trains.

In comparing the choice between building trains or planes first, we will overlook any costs in Megapolis coins.  You will make your coins back faster with more profitable contracts, so the only cost factor we will consider is assets.  I also don't take into account the cost of each asset in Megabucks.  Yea yea, all of these numbers might look confusing to you so I will boil it down to one number that you can look at: Assets per Max Rate (AMR henceforth).  A higher AMR means that you are paying more assets for not as good of a coin rate for your contracts.

One more thing about my data tables.  I entered data for a single plane or train's contracts on the left side with no additional multipliers (train only).  On the right side, my numbers apply to the maximum number of contract producing vehicles - so 10 planes or 7 trains with max multipliers.

Information for all of my tables are derived from pages on the Megapolis Wiki.   All of the formulas are from my own calculations.  I could be wrong, and I welcome corrections where applicable.

Airplanes

Reference Table:

Data Table:









As you can see, the AMR starts off and ends higher as you continue to invest assets into your planes.  Fully upgrading to Long-Range airliners costs 27% more assets than trains, but the max coins/minute you can earn is only 10% higher than having the best trains.

Trains

The general rule of thumb for building your trains in Megapolis is "Get Max Multipliers!"  Without multipliers, your contracts will have a very low coin rate per minute.  I'm talking pathetically low.  Underground and Surface Subway Stations only cost 3+7 and 5+10 assets to upgrade respectively.  Also, don't bother fully upgrading your Subway Stations if they will not help the multiplier of any of your current trains.  You will need to upgrade them all eventually for your higher up trains, but for now save those spots on your asset wish list for other upgrades.

Reference Table:














Data Table:








With trains, you can see that the AMR is slightly lower than planes.  One exception to note is Wide-Body Airliners compared to New Jersey Trains.  At this point, planes are better.  But in the short term and long term for asset investments in most other cases, trains will be a better investment.

I suppose I should also mention that train contracts are harder to "click" through than planes.  I find myself accidentally selecting the Service Platforms instead of the trains on accident.  My service platforms aren't fully upgraded yet though, so maybe that will get better.  I use an iPhone5 so maybe it's better on other platforms.  This annoyance still does not affect my decision to shift my asset investment to trains over planes.