Potential Scenario.

[AdmiralHalsey]

Hey Hawk. I was wondering if I could start a journal on the forums about my adventure of making this scenario? I've never created one before so it would be interesting.

That's fine with me. I'd say start it in the RT3 General Discussion forum.

Thanks.

[Lama]

I just caught up on this discussion, and as always, I'm impressed at the level of maturity, respect, and seriousness of the contributions. This has got to be the last place on the internet where that is the case. I blame Hawk.

As long as it is not a "Go Nazis!" type of storyline, which I would consider based on a flawed reading of history, I can see how this would have potential to be engaging and even educational (yes, I teach history for a living), actually.

When I made my "German South-West Africa" map, I was dealing with a related problem - the railroad there was essential in aiding the German colonial army in their genocide of the Herero and Nama. What's more, some of the men involved in that went straight into the far-right "Free Corps" of the 1920s, and thence into the Nazi Party. I decided I'd go with a lenghty preface to the map, and with giving the player a choice of playing as the bad or good guy. But if you use your RR to support the army, the narrative never leaves any doubt that you are the bad guy in the story.

With WWII, we know that there came a point late in the war where the authorities had to make a choice about how to use the diminishing RR resources (bombing raids taking their toll). They decided to give the trains to the death camps the highest priority, over army supplies and industrial needs. That kind of says it all. So the question for anyone making a scenario based on that is how to address this.

Maybe you could place the player in the role of railroad director, and in 1943, the government comes knocking and says, hey, haul people to the ovens, or else; and you have to respond to that?

[AdmiralHalsey]

I just caught up on this discussion, and as always, I'm impressed at the level of maturity, respect, and seriousness of the contributions. This has got to be the last place on the internet where that is the case. I blame Hawk.

As long as it is not a "Go Nazis!" type of storyline, which I would consider based on a flawed reading of history, I can see how this would have potential to be engaging and even educational (yes, I teach history for a living), actually.

When I made my "German South-West Africa" map, I was dealing with a related problem - the railroad there was essential in aiding the German colonial army in their genocide of the Herero and Nama. What's more, some of the men involved in that went straight into the far-right "Free Corps" of the 1920s, and thence into the Nazi Party. I decided I'd go with a lenghty preface to the map, and with giving the player a choice of playing as the bad or good guy. But if you use your RR to support the army, the narrative never leaves any doubt that you are the bad guy in the story.

With WWII, we know that there came a point late in the war where the authorities had to make a choice about how to use the diminishing RR resources (bombing raids taking their toll). They decided to give the trains to the death camps the highest priority, over army supplies and industrial needs. That kind of says it all. So the question for anyone making a scenario based on that is how to address this.

Maybe you could place the player in the role of railroad director, and in 1943, the government comes knocking and says, hey, haul people to the ovens, or else; and you have to respond to that?

Thanks for the tip. My work on the scenario has stalled lately.(I blame RL issues.) I've been making sure I have the bombing raids working correctly at the moment and I should soon be starting on some of the story.

[Just Crazy Jim]

A good idea, if not a pleasant one. The default campaign contains at least one war map, but skirts the issue of Japanese internment camps. I see no reason to do things differently with a German map for the same period. However, the USA was not bombed back to the Stone Age during the war.

Another perspective would be to run the scenario from 1920 to 1939 with limited track (there was a hideous depression after all) and a single national railroad (Deutsche Reichsbahn), then the player loses control of the railroad for a number of years (with way things were run under the Hitler Regime, probably historically factual). Then in 1945 (+/-), the player regains control after the war (still Deutsche Reichsbahn) and has to rebuild the infrastructure, again with limited track. Then when the partition occurs (1949), the player loses all the resources on the Eastern part of the map of Germany (DDR), while retaining control of the western part of the map (BRD), with a company name change (Deutsche Bundesbahn).

My thinking about trying to run a historical scenario during a war so full of saturation bombing as WWII was, with the supply-and-demand based economic model coded into RRT3, would make it impossible to run railroad at a profit, even one meager enough to place replacement rails, so after each loss of company property, give the player an option to have additional limited track with a temporary track-laying cost reduction (we all know how that cost reduction was managed under the Hitler Regime) vs. be principled and have no track allotment increase and pay full price. Meanwhile, having some Reichsminister screaming at you for more war goods the whole time. Fail to meet quota X number of times, be removed from the chairman's job.

Realistically speaking, with industries being wiped out along with the rails, there would be no economy to make money within. Rail hubs and industry centers were targeted daily by British and American bombing runs, sometimes round the clock bombing, surely the number of events the scenario would have to carry to simulate a moving front + bombing runs would surely result in a crash to the desktop at some point.

A picture is worth a 1000 words, here are a few thousand (all from 1945 or 1946):

On the western front, that's the level of destruction/reconstruction the player is going to face in varying degrees from about 1942 until some point during the 1960s. Not what I'd call an easy set of circumstances for game-play or coding events. If you are determined to do it, I will play it without qualm.

[Hawk]

You do realize this topic is about 3 years old, right? The OP hasn't even been logged into the forums since Jan. of this year.

[Gumboots]

I did have an idea for a short WW2 scenario a while back.

The story is that near the end of the war, when the Germans were just about to lose Belgium to the Allies, a Belgian rail crew was ordered to ship some prisoners east. They refused to do this, but obviously couldn't let the Germans know if they wanted to stay alive. What they ended up doing was running all around the tracks in the Brussels area, dodging German patrols, until the Wermacht had to evacuate and the prisoners could go home.

http://www.12-ladouce.com/en/the-12004.html

But the rest were returned to service thereafter. Moreover, the 12.002 participated in an act of heroism, on the 2nd and 3rd of September 1944, during the last days of the occupation. Thanks to the intelligence and the courage of the engineer and the driver, the train—whose duty was to deliver 1,370 political prisoners to Germany—instead “goes for a ride” in a twenty or so kilometer radius around Brussels. These railroaders thus succeed in sparing the passengers of this “ghost train” the horrors of the concentration camps.

I had thought that this streamlined Atlantic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMBS/SNCB_Type_12) would be a fun loco to have, even though its usage would be limited, and a scenario based on this famous ride would be a fun way to introduce it. I never thought it through to finished scenario stage. It would probably be a difficult thing to code satisfactorily.

[Just Crazy Jim]

You do realize this topic is about 3 years old, right? The OP hasn't even been logged into the forums since Jan. of this year.

I noticed that after I posted

I did have an idea for a short WW2 scenario a while back.

The story is that near the end of the war, when the Germans were just about to lose Belgium to the Allies, a Belgian rail crew was ordered to ship some prisoners east. They refused to do this, but obviously couldn't let the Germans know if they wanted to stay alive. What they ended up doing was running all around the tracks in the Brussels area, dodging German patrols, until the Wermacht had to evacuate and the prisoners could go home.

http://www.12-ladouce.com/en/the-12004.html

But the rest were returned to service thereafter. Moreover, the 12.002 participated in an act of heroism, on the 2nd and 3rd of September 1944, during the last days of the occupation. Thanks to the intelligence and the courage of the engineer and the driver, the train—whose duty was to deliver 1,370 political prisoners to Germany—instead “goes for a ride” in a twenty or so kilometer radius around Brussels. These railroaders thus succeed in sparing the passengers of this “ghost train” the horrors of the concentration camps.

I had thought that this streamlined Atlantic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMBS/SNCB_Type_12) would be a fun loco to have, even though its usage would be limited, and a scenario based on this famous ride would be a fun way to introduce it. I never thought it through to finished scenario stage. It would probably be a difficult thing to code satisfactorily.

Both good ideas. The Type 12 is drop dead sexy in an Art Deco sort of way. You could do a sort of Agatha Christie's Poirot homage in the setting, IIRC he was obsessed with timeliness, so maybe the train has to deliver POWs (troops) to X number of stations within a limited time.

[Gumboots]

But the whole idea was that they avoided delivering them. Which really doesn't fit with how RT3 is set up, thereby making it a bear to code.

I did have some vague ideas, but never figured out how to put them together into a coherent and interesting scenario. As one example, you could have random events that confiscate your train (caught by a German patrol) from a certain area at a certain time. You would have to avoid that, but how? And what else would you be doing?

Perhaps have an average speed requirement so you can't stop moving for long, and have "safe haven" territories that you have to reach by a given time. Story being you get warned by the Resistance, and have to vamoose from where the Germans will be. Could do it just for fun train rides I suppose.

Edit: Well come to think of it they did end up delivering the prisoners home to Brussels after the Nazis had left. But up to that point it was just a lot of running around and hiding.

[Cash on Wheels]

Yes WWII game would take some serious though. Perhaps it could be a slow date scenario? Plus you need to avoid overkill with destroy / confiscate railroad thing.

I've got a ready Philippians map that has few events as of this moment, currently set in 2016 but I'm entertaining the idea of running though WW2 instead. so any ideas will be great.