Transport Fever 3 is actually pretty bad with financial reporting tools. All reporting concentrates on the cash flow, how much money does a particular transport line earn per year. Any investment is counted as an expenditure, so you neither have any information on what your company's assets are worth, nor is there any way to find out useful data like a return on investment. A line bringing in $100,000 a year sounds nice, but if you spent $10,000,000 to build it, the return on investment is actually just 1%. I am not an accountant, but even to me it is pretty obvious that the company's books in TF3 aren't very useful. Another weird financial quirk of TF3 is that the interest rate for loans is only shown cumulatively. A 10% interest loan for 120 months is actually dirt cheap, because the annual percentage rate is less than 1% if you calculated it correctly.

So, if you don't manage the economy, what do you manage? Mostly population growth. Your progress bar, and thus the "victory condition" in as far as there even is one, simply counts the sum of all population in all of your towns. You progress fastest if you achieve the highest possible growth rate in all of your towns. And for that you need to supply all of the demanded goods, e.g. that canned food. You also need to prevent a number of possible problems: Pollution, noise, and unhappiness from waiting too long for your bus or train. That is not always fun to do. Especially pollution is annoying, as it doesn't depend on where you put what; instead it counts the pollution of all the industries in your wider town area, so random industries popping up can really mess up your pollution.

Is Transport Fever 3 a management game? Well, it is mostly a micro-management game. You aren't playing the CEO of a huge transport company. You are playing all the engineers in that company, carefully planning every single train signal, the curvature and incline of those rails, and balancing production rates with transport rates. Due to your towns growing, and new industries popping up, and due to technological advancements adding new modes of transport or just better trains, trucks, and buses, you constantly have to go back, review, and upgrade everything. The big advantage is that there is always something for you to do. But it is extremely easy to get bogged down in details and forget about your overall growth goals.

I am now nearly 30 hours into Transport Fever 3, and I plan to continue playing for some time. So, I would say the game is fun, and was worth buying. However, to like this game, you need to enjoy being constantly occupied with work on details. If you are more of a big picture person, you might enjoy this game a lot less.