It's nice to have some way of managing randomness, but I think it feels weird to have to place tiny road bits to prevent the game from placing stuff in awkward locations. It's a minor concern and not worth any big changes, but I was wondering if there might be a different way to handle spawn-blocking in the game.
If I had to change it, I would either:
1. Show a fixed number of different possible spawns that might happen soon, so that the player can choose which spawns to react to, rather than covering the entire map with roads.
2. Make a separate resource for spawn-blocking, like a fixed/growing amount of signs that you can place that have no effect but to block spawns.
3. A combination of both?
Or maybe I'm the only one that's bothered by this. I get the game is a big simplification of traffic in real life, but sprinkling road bits everywhere is too unnatural.
Just curious to hear other people's thoughts on spawn-blocking.

As for where to place blocks when you don't have enough roads to cover all the possibilities:
#1. near any existing business's entrance to prevent a new business from spawning with their entrance within 2 tiles (if it were to spawn in the worst possible situation, you'd have one tile between the two buildings of different colors, and no room for a second road).
#2. near any outer-most roads to prevent a new business to spawning connected to that road.
#3. any interior void large enough to warrant #1 or #2 where an unlucky entrance placement and building color would be a problem.

All businesses are 2x3 tiles oriented either horizontally or vertically with the entrance on one of the long sides's corners, so as long as you don't have a 2x3 space adjacent to the critical zones, you're good. Diagonal roads are great for this, as they can "occupy" larger volumes, though I tend to make a second not-quite-road parallel to my exterior roads to open up more spawn locations but not allowing a direct connection to the existing road.

Remember that a single road tile occupies 2 tiles while two roads connected to each other only occupy 3 tiles, so fragment fragment fragment.

Note also that businesses may not spawn directly adjacent (unless modified by daily/weekly) except in the case of double-size businesses (I've seen this happen, they will happily spawn next to each other) so you already get a little bit of buffer (just remember that their entrance sticks out an extra tile and that tile totally CAN be next to another business).

seems almost cheaty to me. Not in some nefarious way, just in a "is that the way the game was meant to be played?" It seems like it should be part luck and part skill. Using bits of road to block spawns take away a lot of the luck. Like finding a way to make only bars drop in Tetris with a bug or making all other cars slower using some glitch in a car racing game. Or jumping through scenery in a an RPG. Sure it works - but is that how it is supposed to be played? BUT to each their own. I set a games to easy if I am too frustrated so who am I to say :D

(I know of no such bug I Tetris btw, or my other examples either )

Originally posted by LCT:

... , it's just that right now it feels like it takes me too long to figure out which places I should be spending roads to spawn block and which ones I shouldn't.

It's like I'm fighting an invisible ghost, and I wish it were just a bit less invisible. I'm sure I'll get better at it with time, but I personally think it might be more enjoyable if the RNG wasn't so hidden.

The idea of the post was to see other people's idea to make the RNG more visible without changing the balance of the game too much, but then again maybe it's not needed.

check out my minimal guide to MM
there you see where i spawn block
i will illustrate it at some point, so far too much else to do

what other players are better at than me is to know which map is spawning what in what sequence
if you have fun analysing the heck of a thing, then you can approximately predict what will spawn & where
you can optimize this game, yes
i don't do it, i am more of a RTS, not Turn-based strategy player, so my suggestions are more general & what works good enough
i am satisfied with regular place in the highscore between 50-1000, if you want regularly a higher score in the daily, then you have to be way more precise & have more patience than me

Originally posted by cosycloud:

seems almost cheaty to me. Not in some nefarious way, just in a "is that the way the game was meant to be played?" It seems like it should be part luck and part skill. Using bits of road to block spawns take away a lot of the luck. Like finding a way to make only bars drop in Tetris with a bug or making all other cars slower using some glitch in a car racing game. Or jumping through scenery in a an RPG. Sure it works - but is that how it is supposed to be played? BUT to each their own. I set a games to easy if I am too frustrated so who am I to say :D

(I know of no such bug I Tetris btw, or my other examples either :ghlol: )

this game is indeed part skill & part luck
spawn blocking gets you only so far, it's not "the" solution to every problem in MM

& well, "is this how it is supposed to work ?"
when taking into account how this game is minimalist everywhere, then i'd say the devs had the option to block spawn blocking but they chose not to directly. what they chose is to offer on every map a slightly different sequence & way of how & where things spawn & determined which weekly updates you get as help or problem. to make the game a bit spicier & quicker, you have the daily & weekly challenges, where the set of rules is always different, some are brutal, some are easy piesy, & it depends stongly on your own preferences & also skil how well you can adapt to the specific definitions of the set up

I love spawn blocking, it adds so much more depth to the puzzle, and doing it well with your limited roads is fairly challenging

Originally posted by cosycloud:

seems almost cheaty to me. Not in some nefarious way, just in a "is that the way the game was meant to be played?"

This is the kind of thing I'm trying to get my finger on. I personally think that the devs decided for this to be one of many ways to play (otherwise they would not have made spawn blocking possible): I just wish it didn't feel as complicated, "weird", "questionable" (I guess this is kind of how you feel about it as well?).
It's definitely a question of "feel", so it's hard to define precisely: but that's what this post is about, to try and figure that "bad feel" and think of a way to "fix" it without changing the game's mechanics.

Originally posted by cosycloud:

(I know of no such bug I Tetris btw, or my other examples either :ghlol: )

In that case, how about "Ultra Shortcuts" in Mario Kart Wii? Essentially, people figured out how the game tries to make sure you go around the entire lap, and abused it's flaws to only go around in "tiny loops" around the finish line. The idea is simple, but it turns out that actually doing it is vastly different for each map (sometimes easy, sometimes crazy), and opened up a completely new and unintended way of playing the game.
If you have 30 mins on your hands, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmJ_LT8bUj0 is a comfy and easy video on the subject. And if you want to waste another hour, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAh4IJysiLU by the same guy shows you how far people have gone to find these "Ultra Shortcuts".
For Mini Motorways, I think it's different because spawn blocking is likely intended: the problem is that it doesn't feel intended. So it's definitely a nice, depth-adding mechanic: I just wish it "felt" better.

Originally posted by Draco18s:

As for where to place blocks when you don't have enough roads to cover all the possibilities:
#1. near any existing business's entrance to prevent a new business from spawning with their entrance within 2 tiles (if it were to spawn in the worst possible situation, you'd have one tile between the two buildings of different colors, and no room for a second road).
#2. near any outer-most roads to prevent a new business to spawning connected to that road.
#3. any interior void large enough to warrant #1 or #2 where an unlucky entrance placement and building color would be a problem.

Thanks for the tips! I was already doing #2, and I don't think cases like #1 are as troubling, but I'll try it too some time.

Also, about this:

Originally posted by Draco18s:

Note also that businesses may not spawn directly adjacent (unless modified by daily/weekly) except in the case of double-size businesses (I've seen this happen, they will happily spawn next to each other) so you already get a little bit of buffer (just remember that their entrance sticks out an extra tile and that tile totally CAN be next to another business).

This is the kind of thing that bothers me about the randomness behind spawn blocking. It's obvious that random spawns need a lot of rules like that: I just wish the game was a bit more explicit about them, that it had some way of telling you "things can spawn like this but not like that" without having to read guides or play a bunch of rounds until that one exception finally happens to you.

Use your spare roads to force businesses into more convenient locations.

this game is not a traffic simulation or city building simulation, it's an abstract strategy puzzle with the sole look of such

in the end, the RNG is the only challenge this game has to offer, the daily/weekly challenges have often additional limitations to spawn blocking, where you get as few roads or motorways as it becomes impossible to block anything, thus increasing the RNG's power

this game is designed to work against the player, not with the player

Originally posted by spielerinchen:

this game is not a traffic simulation or city building simulation, it's an abstract strategy puzzle with the sole look of such

Hadn't thought of it like that, makes having a ton of tiny road bits look less silly.

As for

Originally posted by spielerinchen:

in the end, the RNG is the only challenge this game has to offer, the daily/weekly challenges have often additional limitations to spawn blocking, where you get as few roads or motorways as it becomes impossible to block anything, thus increasing the RNG's power
this game is designed to work against the player, not with the player

I agree, it's just that right now it feels like it takes me too long to figure out which places I should be spending roads to spawn block and which ones I shouldn't. It's like I'm fighting an invisible ghost, and I wish it were just a bit less invisible. I'm sure I'll get better at it with time, but I personally think it might be more enjoyable if the RNG wasn't so hidden.

The idea of the post was to see other people's idea to make the RNG more visible without changing the balance of the game too much, but then again maybe it's not needed.