I had not played this scenario in quite a while, so I decided to give it a run through so I could give some specific advice relating to this scenario. First off, the scenario writer was trying to thwart the "Start company/ take out bonds/ steal all the money" exploit, and ended up just making a scenario that does not resemble the operation of a real railroad company in the slightest. All major corporations rely on Bonds and Stock issue for capital, and removing these options from the game just makes it all screwed up. What he should have done was leave those options in place and limit the # of Companies a player can make to 1. When a scenario writer intentionally screws things up like this I view it as him challenging me to outsmart his attempts at monkey wrenching things.
The gauntlet is thrown and the challenge is accepted, sir! Onguard!
That being said, the scenario writer did not understand RT3 or the event scripting in the slightest, and he actually left open a way to stuff your pockets with investor's cash. Creating a company and then betting that it will make money (buying stock on margin)is hard and often you will fail, especially in a scenario that has the financial options all borked up like this one. Something that the scenario writer did not know is that something that is certain to succeed is to make sure that a company will
lose money, and bet that it will by short selling stock in it. Here is how I started out:
With difficulty level on Expert, I created a company with maximum investor input, and then sold off all of my stock. Leaving the game paused, I then proceeded to divest this company of all of it's cash and leave it with no assets. The easiest way to do this is to buy and then sell industries until you do not have enough cash to buy an industry, and then lay track, leaving enough cash so that you can then bulldoze it. I ended up with 1k in the Company coffers, and then resigned. Then I short sold as many shares as I could and hit "slow" game speed for an instant and then pause again. The stock price plummeted to
zero. I then "purchased" the short sold stock and ended up with this:
I then took that $517k and started a new company with exactly $900k , and purchased two Dairy Farms in the upper right corner of the map that were available for $450k each, and had ~90k profit per year each. I purchased the few outstanding shares of my new company on margin and had 100% ownership of this company giving me a Personal Net Worth of $871k, before 1 second had ticked off of the clock.
Then I got a little lazy as I sat here drinking some coffee and read news, and let the game run for 3 years, at which point my credit was stellar. I then sold off all of my shares in this company, and then sold off all of the industries owned by this company. I then resigned and short sold the stock of this company, hit slow for a moment and then pause, making the stock price plummet to zero, and then "purchased" all of those short sold stocks. Here is where I am at start of year 4:
Then I started a new company with maximum investor input giving me around $5,000,000 cash to work with and invested in the most profitable industries I could find, which were two Textile Mills and a couple logging company's. I lazily let that run for a year, and checking my ledger at that point I am well above the $5,000,000 PNW mark required for Gold. At this point I can make some rail and work at getting the wool haulage quota met. Something else to note is that I selected Steam , and then turned down the "advertising" option. The scripting in this scenario is completely borked and you will end up with only 1 loco, which turned out to be the $400k V200 Diesel. Makes no sense at all, but now that I have a Company that makes $1,000,000 a year I can work with this baloney. I will be surprised if it takes me more than 12 years to hit Gold. Not sure what will happen if you select Diesel, but I suspect the result will be similar.
If I were to give this a second, more serious run through knowing how quickly I can reach the $5 Million PNW I would probably start hauling Wool a bit earlier, and probably beat this scenario in less than 10 years. This attempt I just wanted to show how easy the PNW goal is to meet, and I think I did that.....
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