Aurelia

[RayofSunshine]

I just been fitted with a new set of trifocal glasses, but am unable to find the city of
"BORDURIA", and even the "find city" useing the ctrl "F" method, it is not located.
Even scanning the map visually, I was not able to find it.
Need some help AROP. Or anyone who has played this scenario, as it wouldn't be the first time that I missed seeing some thing.

Thanks

Ray of Sunshine

[Hawk]

Actually, the briefing is a tad misleading. Non of the names mentioned in the briefing; Borduria, Montania, Lagoria, and Sargonia, are cities, They are territories.

Edit 1: There's 4 cities in each territory that you can connect to, except for Lagoria which only has 2 cities.

[arop]

Sorry! The briefing text should be: Connect Harwan (the capital) to the neighboring countries Borduria, Montania, Lagoria and Sargonia.

[RayofSunshine]

Fellas,

Glad to see that my eyes are failing me, although with double vision is gets to be some what difficult at times to read the print in books. And also to think of the moneys spent for the new glasses.

I even went to Lawonia and tried the see if such a similar map had the town. Naturally that didn't work.

But thanks for the info as it makes playing for a gold more positive.

Ray of Sunshine

[RayofSunshine]

Still plugging away Arop,

With trying to get the machinery goal to respond to my satisfaction. On hand:

oil/2.3 Plus steel/5.7 plus ingots/4.3, with 1 of each should equal 3 machinery.

However, although the oil/steel/ingots maintain a normal amount of decrease to get the machinery, the machinery seems to get maxed out at .5, and then disappears.

Now I have 2 engines, which hauled the steel just setting, "waiting for cargo", without any machinery consist being loaded. And I believe that the status shows that there should be 6 machinery per year. This has been going on for a couple of years, and at this point I have only hauled 2 machinery, and the date is 1885. Possibly an adequate amount of time to haul the 300 load by 1930, but seems a slow operation.

Any comments. Or at least a suggestion?

Ray of Sunshine.

[edbangor]

I'm currently part way through this one, but have already made the territory connections.
I started in Zhalawan, and once I'd connected to the two sizeable cities on either side, struck out for the coal/iron reserves in the middle of the map. Once there build my own steel mill/s before heading off for the location of all the other source material I'd need.
Once Oil turned up, in went the machine shops and forced them to keep building by increasing demand building anything that 'needed' machinery even if I didn't have the other source material they needed. (Munitions and Weapons factories are good for this, especially as they need steel as well!)
Anyway, when I stopped playing last night I was in game year 28 and had already passed the two thirds of the steel, and nearly half the machines that needed to be shipped with both book value and Industry profits in the mid £200mil mark. Now I'm just waiting for Electric plants to turn up (in six years!!!) so I can start on the power requirements.

ANyway, at this stage I'm enjoying the map but feel that, given it's size, more could be happening as - from this stage - the remained of the game, other than for getting the power production going, looks like it could become a bit dull. Of course, Arop may have got some surprises in store (NO, I don't look in the editor before I start a new scenario - do you?)

[Hawk]

(NO, I don't look in the editor before I start a new scenario - do you?)

I generally don't. Not until I've played it.

[edbangor]

Finished this one tonight, or rather I didn't.

As you can see from the attachment (I hope), I most of the goals, but with a heck of a lot of the game still to play which would have meant, a lot of years of sitting around waiting for the indy profits to mass up while my bank balance over flowed which, doesn't make for the best game play.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good map, but I'm not one for just watching trains going about their business, I want something to do.
Anyway, hope others have fun with this one.

[Hawk]

Actually for the Gold you've only achieved one goal. The Personal Net Worth.
The Power Production, Steel Hauled, and Machinery Hauled don't have anything to do with getting Gold.

[edbangor]

Actually for the Gold you've only achieved one goal. The Personal Net Worth.
The Power Production, Steel Hauled, and Machinery Hauled don't have anything to do with getting Gold.

Yes I was aware of that, but didn't phrase it very well.
The point I was making is that due to the length of the scenario getting these, would just be a matter of waiting while the industry profits mounted up (I owned everything that was making money), and that's what I didn't want to do as I had nothing to do.

[Hawk]

Got'cha!

Well, to quote Emily Lattella: "Never mind."

[belbincolne]

As Arop knows the type of scenario he makes aren't my favourites as they last too long and towards the end all thats left to do is search for new farms and perhaps connect to them.

However this ones different in that you hardly have to search - they just keep popping up. I rapidly achieved IP and PNW targets so just had to play on for CBV. Didn't expect that to need anything but time because money was rolling in faster than I could spend it (at the finish I had $750m in cash). Anyway at the start of 1929 I got them all but didn't get gold - hadn't looked in the editor to see how its programmed - its so long since I created a scenario I've forgotten how to but I had only achieved steel haulage. Not elec or Machinery so "played" on for another 10 years to (a) see what happened with when I achieved these targets (b) see if the crash was built in (it isn't) and (c) try to find out about the new factories.

Then I had a shock - indeed several shocks
1. IP - virtually every one of my farms/industries was immensly profitable hence this was the first target reached but at some point it changed from a huge positive figure to a huge negative one - probably about the $1bn mark. Nothing gradual it had just gone from plus to minus. I wondered if it had always been minus and I'd not noticed but the only way to find out would be to start again - I think not though. I wondered if alone of all scenarios this one didn't start calculating IP until profits were sufficient to have paid off the initial purchase price. I let the scenario run for another 10 years without buying anything and from -$1717m it dropped to minus -$462m which would support this.

2. CBV I was $1.52bn in 1929 and this had gone up $2bn in 1938 (the extra all being cash). In 1939 it was -$2.1bn. i.e. the same thing had happened as with IP.

3. New buildings - it seems from Ray that you need oil/steel and ingots to make machinery. semi logical I suppose. But that isn't how it worked according to this map and I'm left no wiser on these buildings than I was before. All you needed was ingots. And how do you get ingots - it looks as though the chain is rock/crystals to a furnace becoming ingots and on to machinery. Concrete is also equally puzzling to me - it seems that to make it you go from rock/crystals to furnace becoming ceramics and then concrete. I get to this from looking at the supply and demand that showed up for the various buildings. Totally nonsense - and whats ore for? All the quarries on the map showed as supplying both rock & crystals - why two things and what are the really for? Really I remain totally befogged by the new industries

If anyone can make me any wiser I'd be grateful. I know there's a (sort of) chart here somewhere but I didn't think that helped when I looked.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Then I had a shock - indeed several shocks
1. IP - virtually every one of my farms/industries was immensly profitable hence this was the first target reached but at some point it changed from a huge positive figure to a huge negative one - probably about the $1bn mark. Nothing gradual it had just gone from plus to minus. I wondered if it had always been minus and I'd not noticed but the only way to find out would be to start again - I think not though. I wondered if alone of all scenarios this one didn't start calculating IP until profits were sufficient to have paid off the initial purchase price. I let the scenario run for another 10 years without buying anything and from -$1717m it dropped to minus -$462m which would support this.

2. CBV I was $1.52bn in 1929 and this had gone up $2bn in 1938 (the extra all being cash). In 1939 it was -$2.1bn. i.e. the same thing had happened as with IP.

I think this issue was noted before. It may be that the game engine can't handle any number over 2 billion (or so). It may have to do with the way computers work with numbers (binary conversion) and game developers may not have left enough binary digits to handle numbers this big. They probably never imagined that values would ever get this large.

3. New buildings - it seems from Ray that you need oil/steel and ingots to make machinery. semi logical I suppose. But that isn't how it worked according to this map and I'm left no wiser on these buildings than I was before. All you needed was ingots. And how do you get ingots - it looks as though the chain is rock/crystals to a furnace becoming ingots and on to machinery. Concrete is also equally puzzling to me - it seems that to make it you go from rock/crystals to furnace becoming ceramics and then concrete. I get to this from looking at the supply and demand that showed up for the various buildings. Totally nonsense - and whats ore for? All the quarries on the map showed as supplying both rock & crystals - why two things and what are the really for? Really I remain totally befogged by the new industries.

Ingots originate from Ore (not Rock or Crystals) that has gone to the Furnace. Crystals are used for Electronics (I think) and don't get converted at a Furnace. Not sure why Machine Shop was making Machinery with only Ingots as the input. Maybe there were too few "free" loads of oil/steel to show up on the cargo overlay, but were enough to get immediately consumed by the Machine Shop to make Machinery?

As an aside relating to how computers store numbers, try the following experiment in Excel (or any other spreadsheet):

Type in a column of 6 or more "2"s (the number) in cells A1 through A6, and then in the next cell (A7) have it calculate the standard deviation of those 6 values (=STDEV(A1:A6)). The answer of course will be "0". Now in cells B1 through B6, type in the value "0.2" and copy the formula for standard deviation from cell A7 to cell B7: (=STDEV(B1:B6). The answer should of course be "0" again, but interstingly it is not!!! It is a very small number (3 x 10^-17), but is still not zero!. Now delete one of the rows and look what happens to the calculated standard deviations. Go figure If there is a column of 5, 4, 13 or 14 "0.2"s it calculates correctly.

[belbincolne]

Thanks Wolverine

Your computer knowledge is far greater than mine but I'd guessed that it was on these lines - and suspect that IP goes negative at £1bn and CBV at $2bn so (as you'd almost certainly need IP of over $1bn to get CBV of $1.5bn) you can probably never get Gold.

I ran the scenario again (cos there's lots of rock/crystals/ore on the map) for 6 years by which time I'd built a machinery plant next to the ingots furnace. After 3 years it had produced no machinery - there's no oil / steel on the map - so I guess you're right in saying all 3 needed but too small to show up as a demand feature (although logically should need a lot of steel). Anyway from this short test seems the chains are:

Quarry (produces rock and Crystals) but Rock - Furnace - Ceramics - Concrete
Quarry - Crystals - ????
Ore Mine - Furnace - Ingots - Machinery and ????

[Wolverine@MSU]

there's no oil / steel on the map

Are you sure about this? Go into the Editor and look at the cargo stats page. If indeed there is NO oil or steel on the map, then there's a bug in the Machine Shop descriptors because it shouldn't make any Machinery unless all three component cargoes are there.

[belbincolne]

I was only talking of at inception. They both appear later - steel very quickly (maybe there already on some starts) and oil a lot later.