A conceptual question.
You have cities and industries to be connected and goods to be transported in between.
You execute that with your transportation network.
My question here is
1. do you mostly have interest in about answering the transportation demand
or
2. do you also have interest in how cities and industries behave(City growth speed/where it appears/appears when/where).
Your transportation is your input. Growth(Mostly its speed currently) is the output out of your input.
I tend to care about 2 more than I should do.
Also, it concerns me that the out put behavior is pretty simplistic.
My main focus is to build a well working transport network, which sometimes involves helping cities with their road networks and much more rarely doing changes to industries. I don't work hard to satisfy all transportation demands. Every town and city is connected, but not fully covered.
I always like to connect everything to everything, passengers, mail and goods, even on the remotest places on the map. But then, I always use the freeplay option... ;)
I try to do the same as Combuijs, but goods, passengers, mail in this order.
But I play normal game on small maps and freeplay on big ones.
I'd rather keep my business well working efficiently. I also know which train to carry what, from where and to where, via which route... Usually, when it reach some point where it is unlikely to bankrupt, I stop expanding my business for a while, optimize it, and gain margin. I even stop some business which is hard to manage or have low margin. I usually don't connect everything, the bigger the business, more headache to manage it.
Yes, I care so much with everything I have and I do.