Build a three-layer city route
Choose between street traffic, transit and rooftops instead of forcing one movement tool everywhere.
Operational objective
Nova City gives you three ways to cross it — street traffic, the transit network and the rooftops — and the mistake is picking one and forcing it everywhere. The goal of this page is a habit: before moving, name the constraint that actually governs the trip, then pick the layer that answers it.
Decision route
- Name the constraint first: is this trip limited by time, by being seen, or by where you need to arrive standing?
- Street level answers time and cargo, and costs you visibility — you are inside the traffic model, and so is everyone watching it.
- Transit answers predictability. Fixed lines and stops mean the arrival point is known in advance, which is what you want when the plan depends on being somewhere exact rather than somewhere fast.
- Rooftops answer approach angle. You give up cargo and straight-line speed and buy an arrival the street cannot see coming — treat height as the resource being spent, not as a shortcut.
- Plan the switch points, not just the layers. A route is only as good as the two or three places where you can change layer without stopping — bridges, stations, low roofs beside an exit.
- Keep one fallback that works from where you already are. A route with no ground-level answer becomes a dead end the moment the roof line stops.
Failure review
- Committing to the rooftop layer for a trip whose real constraint was time — height costs setup, and setup is time.
- Treating transit as slow by default. A fixed line that puts you at the right door beats a fast vehicle that puts you two blocks away.
- Learning nothing from a bad route because two things changed at once — the layer and the destination.
!
Unreleased: traversal speeds, stamina or resource costs for climbing and swinging, transit schedules and whether rooftop routes are gated by district. Everything above is a way of choosing between layers, not a claim about their numbers.