As an aside, I did notice the creeping crap-look of terrain from successive saves was quick to set in. By about the 10th save, the map had lost almost all of the smooth, pretty features of the original with a shore line that resembled nothing more than 20th century cubist artworks.
Back on track: In January 1800, there are no housing units on the map and no industries. Cities may have no civic buildings or, if the scenario data is above 100%, may have more than one might have guessed. As far as supply and demand economy in January 1800, there is none. However, that rapidly changes within a very few months. The city growth model has always been something of a mystery to me, all those commodities that houses demand were just a blackhole into which cargoes disappeared as far as I ever noticed. But from a dry start with no economy, it became very apparent that supplying those demands has a some times striking effect on city growth. With no hacks or event effects to modify anything in the economic model, by 1810, express cargo was generating more company cash than I've ever seen before in the game.
In fact, the AI seemed to be crippled by the sort of high-risk-high-gain enterprise a human player might take, so I was without any sort of competition for a good number of years. The length of time before the AI players started a company varied depending on which city-pair I started my company. I noted in unedited version of the campaign, the AI favors a Boston-nearby city link and a New York-Edison or Allentown link. In the New York pairs, always building a wreck of a bridge over the Hudson in the process which I always have to knock down and replace when I take over the AI company.
In the Go West! strategy thread, I had remarked that I'd always found the absence of oil in the scenario perplexing (early 19th Century New England = Whaling, after all). So I set about running several versions of the map with modified economies including oil from ports from 1800. The first and immediate surprise was that the game has no cargo wagon for oil in the A series and uses the automobile carrier as a placeholder. This drove home the fact that if I was serious about making a pre-steam (i.e. wagonways and gravity rail) or early steam (there were several pre-1829 attempts to use steam power) map, there would be considerable work ahead of me for both power (locomotive replacements) and cargo. There is one thoroughly derelict example of a gravity rail with stone gutter "rails" at a greenstone quarry in New England (I think in eastern Connecticut) dating to about 1810. It never became famous or had any famous people visit it for amusement, so it's mostly off the radar. Most of the system looks like a deer path these days and I found it only by accident trying to locate the ruins of an old bog iron works near Foster, Rhode Island - which I never found, but did find more than enough briars, brambles, twisted ankles, ticks and poison ivy to last me a lifetime.
Anyway, it seems to me that the easiest way to achieve this crazy idea of a 1800-1828 period setting is to use a first era mail van or passenger wagon as the "tender" and place a visible or invisible (team of) horse(s) in front of it as the "locomotive". My thinking for this pre-steam locomotive business is based on the notion that oil=horse food/changing teams, water/sand=water/hay. With most of the meta-settings for reliability and speed being the absolute worst in the choices. Also, maybe putting track-laying costs being 200-300% higher pre-industrial revolution and ideally making it so the power can haul a max of 3 cargo wagons on a 0-1%+ grade, 2 cargo wagons on 2-4%+ grade, and only 1 on anything above 4%+. No 40-mule teams in this era. To be completely honest, I have never been sure how the game handles negative grades. It always seemed to me to treat them like 0% in some instances and the same as positive grades in others. That whole part of the hex coding about power and climbing is pretty esoteric stuff, if you ask me.
Another aside: the byte at position 71 in the LCO file doesn't really seem to change the fuel economy, I copied the data from the fuel economy section of the Trans-Euro LCO ("outstanding") into the Planet LCO and the Planet remained "atrocious", so there must be something more to it.
Anyway, long story short (too late), My idea was start a cheap but profitable venture company with no outside investment, run it from 1800 to 1828 sans steam, then have enough money to start using steam, because the effort to reward ratio of horse-power vs. steam-power is a no-brainer. Then, and only then, start into the business of making fat wadges of cash, crippling competitors, hostile take-overs, etc.
Now, I must make and drink some coffee, then see how much more I can break in the game...
