Hello There

[Krouton]

Been awhile since I've seen a forum.

I've been playing a lot of RRT3 lately. Great game I played as a kid. Must've been 15 years ago I first picked up this game. Anyways, although I adore the economic system I'm running into a number of clunky mechanics. Hoping to find something here that will bring new life into the game.

[Gumboots]

Hiya. Welcome to the forum.

[sbaros]

Yes, I would agree with Krouton that some shortcomings in the built-in demand/production/supply algorithms and consequently in the origin/destination combinations pose a massive challenge for us to determine a set of commodities (within the imposed quantitative limitations) and relevant processing industries that will produce plausible cargo flows satisfactorily serving the overall requirements of our "virtual worlds", at the same time keeping a resource distribution not very different from the real world one. User-elaborated Versions "1.06" and "Trainmaster" are monumental steps toward this direction, but we are still far from a satisfactory cargo setup. It would be nice to have your detailed thoughts on these "clunky mechanics" and your contribution to this years-lasting brainstorming because answers are not as easy as they may seem and certainly not the product of a single person.

[Krouton]

Yes, I would agree with Krouton that some shortcomings in the built-in demand/production/supply algorithms and consequently in the origin/destination combinations pose a massive challenge for us to determine a set of commodities (within the imposed quantitative limitations) and relevant processing industries that will produce plausible cargo flows satisfactorily serving the overall requirements of our "virtual worlds", at the same time keeping a resource distribution not very different from the real world one. User-elaborated Versions "1.06" and "Trainmaster" are monumental steps toward this direction, but we are still far from a satisfactory cargo setup. It would be nice to have your detailed thoughts on these "clunky mechanics" and your contribution to this years-lasting brainstorming because answers are not as easy as they may seem and certainly not the product of a single person.

An obvious example are double input industries (like steel mills) that hog one resource throughout the entire scenario (there are workarounds in vanilla, but again, it's really clunky, and sometimes simply unviable). Industries in general can be lucrative but are unreliable. Rouge industries will kamikaze spawn on you in areas that couldn't possibly support the demand, "taking out" both of you in the process (if it weren't for the fact that failing industries rarely despawn) and can warrant a restart. I'm not saying this is entirely unrealistic. Industries in the real world cannibalize each others' profits. However, in-game there are few ways play around it, and it general the state of industry just encourages the player to stay away from it entirely (which is a tall order considering how lucrative it can be).

I could go on, but I want to see this unofficial patch and "trainmaster" before I say what's already been said 100 times. That is what I came here for. Are these independent mods or are they designed to compliment one another (i.e. one is built on the other)? Also, I can't seem to find a list of contents for "trainmaster" or "1.06". Where would I find them?

[Gumboots]

TBH I find that 1.06 isn't a huge improvement on 1.05. It has some aspects that can be handy, but introduces other quirks of its own. I'd think of it as something a bit different, rather than a panacea for 1.05's quirks. IMO the main advantage of 1.06 is the improved mathematics it allows in the editor, which gives scenario authors more scope (if they choose to use it).

I haven't tried Trainmaster myself, but everyone says it requires a lot of micromanagement to make industries work. That's not my cup of tea. In general I find RT3 industries fairly easy to deal with, but it does depend on the scenario. There's no point running an industry you can't supply, so map economy and seeding have to be considered, and generally long supply chains are bad (because they can be intercepted) unless the resource in question is plentiful.

[Krouton]

In general I find RT3 industries fairly easy to deal with, but it does depend on the scenario. There's no point running an industry you can't supply, so map economy and seeding have to be considered, and generally long supply chains are bad (because they can be intercepted) unless the resource in question is plentiful.

Certainly, and in a good number of scenarios industry will carry you to victory. It's just irritating how rng dependent it can be (the seeding of raws and rogue industries spawning).

It's double input industries like steel that are the most problematic. 2 steel mills will hog either resource, refusing to "trade" with the other. Sometimes you just have to forget that coal, iron, steel, and even goods exists (after workshops stop taking iron), although ports are sometimes a saving grace. Otherwise it's a massive hassle to get these industries online, and I'll only do it for the fun of it (or when the scenario calls for it).

[Gumboots]

There are tricks you can do with station placement. If you put a large station so that its capture area just reaches one mill's stockpile, then put a small station right next to the other mill, the small station will generally have a higher price for iron and coal than the large station. This allows you to nick stuff from the first mill and haul it to the second mill. You can do the same trick with other industries too. The general principle holds for all of them, because the large station price is determined by the cell on which it sits, which is further from the demand than the small station.

This works well if prices are the same, or very close, at each mill. It can fall down if your mill is very well supplied (because you've been stealing the other mill's stash) so prices drop at your mill.

[Krouton]

Interesting I'll give that a shot.

[RulerofRails]

Hi Krouton, Welcome!

The scenario author can actually do a lot via the seeding settings of cities and regions when setting up the map. RT3 allows quite a lot of freedom here. But contrary to other games, for example RTII, the non-rail simulation in RT3 is increasing the importance of avoiding excess/superfluous items. Different authors have different styles. In my opinion the map makers who went for a simplified approach to city/region have side-stepped some of the bad RNG aspects. For me these maps feel the best to play, especially over the medium to long term, than even many of the original PopTop maps. One author I will recommend for this is Oilcan. He made quite a lot in this style. There are others, of course, for example Colonial India and Great Northern.

As far as 1.06, and TM. 1.06 has a feature disabled that normally reigns in endless spot price hauls. TM is based on the 1.06 exe. This change can be undone. viewtopic.php?p=44854#p44854

I always play 1.06 and TM with this feature re-instated. Keep your 1.05 install, then make two new installs, one for each.

For me, who probably notices more about this game than most, I would highly recommend to play 1.05 maps in 1.05, even though they are compatible with 1.06. This will most accurately generate the experience the author intended. Try it as the author saw it, then later you can mod it (1.06 has new engines and buildings, actually 1.06 renamed a couple locos in the 20th century which messes up loco selection in some maps for example in Tex-Mex).

PS. On the subject of RNG, it's a little known fact that the game-start RNG is actually broken. According to some testing I did there are only two possible seeds if you start the game then start a new map. You must load a savegame or start a map then return to main menu before RNG will work for the second, and subsequent, scenario starts. See some info about that here: viewtopic.php?p=43753#p43753 Gumboots, I wonder if this should be mentioned somewhere on the main site?

[Gumboots]

Probably should be, although I admit I've never tested it myself for confirmation.

[RulerofRails]

Hawk ran some testing for this and posted up the screenshot results over in that thread which agreed with what I was seeing. When writing about it here, I realized that I forgot to tell some newcomers about this. I don't know how much this affects the typical player. I guess in a way it wont matter if they only play a map once, and if twice, there is a reasonable chance they would see the other seed. I would presume it's typical not to play more than one attempt in one sitting, unless attempts are abandoned not too far into the game. . . . and the map is just restarted.

Seems to be about 140 downloads of the test data there, and 3,000 views of the images. Hmm, I wonder if some bots have downloaded those zips, or were they all real people?

[Gumboots]

Probably quite a bit of those stats is due to bots. Bots tend to index the same stuff several times over, particularly some of the badly-behaved bots. Those have mostly been banned now, for wasting too much bandwidth.

[sbaros]

I think we have overlooked this question

I can't seem to find a list of contents for "trainmaster" or "1.06". Where would I find them?

I suppose that's what is asked for:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/h2bka6ma8 ... _Guide.zip
http://rrt3.krijgjeniet.nl/Downloads/Do ... t_1.06.pdf
Right?

[Krouton]

Thanks much!

[sbaros]

I haven't tried Trainmaster myself, but everyone says it requires a lot of micromanagement to make industries work.

I find this quite true, after about 4 months of parallel experimentation with Trainmaster and version 1.06 . An important cause of this flaw -albeit not the only one- seems to be the widespread requirement for packing materials, apart from the basic raw materials needed by industries for their rudimentary production cycle(s).
Obviously, Trainmaster's developers have partly failed to adhere to the degree of selective compression imposed by RR Tycoon's simulation mechanisms and overall structure. I am in the process of compiling an analytical report and recommendations for this. So far I have not touched the industries' supply chains in this aspect, although I have corrected some of the other fundamental errors in their production cycles. I want to test a bit more the experience and feel of these Trainmaster intended concepts.
I believe that some streamlining will also occur when several over-diversified building categories are consolidated into more generic ones, I observe already positive results just by consolidating all military activities into a sole Military Base.BCA, all animal farms into a sole one and all Farmstead co-operatives also into a single category (both for Trainmaster and version 1.06). I'll probably end up consolidating all corporate/administrative/education BCAs into one, and all recreational ones into another. This will also speed up mapmaking.
Needless to repeat (that's why I repeat it!) that the 52-commodity sets of either version won't be touched yet (as far as I am concerned), despite notable modifications in their lifecycles. I don't expect such a move (which practically constitutes a new version) to become possible within this year.

[Gumboots]

Trainmaster was Ned's idea. He deliberately wanted to make management as difficult as possible. Some people find it challenging and interesting. Some people find it a nuisance, and too much like work they don't get paid for, instead of being an enjoyable game.

I tend to think too much micromanagement detracts from the enjoyment of the game, and I didn't like the aesthetics of Trainmaster's interface, so I've never got into playing it. It does have some good ideas in it, but I'm not sure how applicable they would be to 1.06 or whatever. I've used the idea of extra cargo car eras myself, but that was around before Trainmaster anyway. I think WP&P was the first to experiment with that idea.

[RulerofRails]

IMO, TM has a fundamental problem with the packaging materials: their demand is below the practical level for acceptable cargo retention. Paper, Lumber, or whatever will have a tendency to wander off rather than stay at an industry, even if you deliver to it's doorstep. Decent level is 2 loads per year consumption. 1 load per year may be passable in some cases.

There is a way to fake higher consumption: multiple conversions. Demand is the sum of all conversions. For example at the Cereal Company:

2 Food <-- 1 Corn + 0.2 Paper
2 Food <-- 1 Grain + 0.2 Paper
2 Food <-- 1 Rice + 0.2 Paper

3 Food <-- 1 Corn + 0.3 Sugar + 0.2 Paper
3 Food <-- 1 Grain + 0.3 Sugar + 0.2 Paper
3 Food <-- 1 Rice + 0.3 Sugar + 0.2 Paper

Achieved demand for paper is 0.2 x6 = 1.2 Which is probably acceptable.

The other thing with TM, is that it uses the 1.06 exe as the base. That means that the mechanic to transfer price between station cells is turned off. See this thread. I have personally modified a copy of the TM executable. This does something to help cargo retention, at least to make 2 loads per year properly usable. <1 is still a lost cause.

At the moment, TM play is normally about building and babying some specific industries, to neglect of most others. Including the idea of "industrial zones" where a whole group of related industries are built together. So, for sure, there are some issues with the balance of supply. And also industrial profitability, some industry prices/outputs are setup as "golden geese" and not balanced to promote realistic/balanced economic development.

[sbaros]

Thanks for reminding this, it's another important argument for the exclusion of packing/container materials once they constitute a minority percentage of most products' gross weight. An exception I can think of is pressurized industrial gas (if selected to be introduced into the "Tycoon"), in which case the metal container forms a considerable part of the whole lot. Thankfully Nedfumpkin in many cases forgot to add lumber for the palettes as well !
For the imposed "selective compression" purposes I mentioned (I hope to find some spare time and explain in detail) I would suggest a "rule of thumb" that only the top components forming 2/3 of each product should be included in the industry recipe. If a product consists of 1 part component A, 2 parts component B, 3 parts component C and 4 parts component D, only the last 2 need to be taken into account. Pre-Trainmaster editions more or less have respected this I think.
So, for the next 2 evenings I think I'll add some towns to my testing map and then use the 3-day bank holiday to revamp the affected industry BCAs. During the lunch break I'll probably bid farewell to the default Trainmaster production model...
I'm also thinking of adding a "Sugar Mill" BCA that will be assumed to be located amidst a sugar beet/cane plantation, so that it will require only coal as an external supply.
IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION ON THE ABOVE ADDED July 11:
The suggested 2/3 "rule of thumb" is indeed logical, however I overlooked something crucial: This ratio must cover both WEIGHT and VOLUME of the end product. More specifically: A brewery cannot dispatch more carloads of beer than the received carloads of bottles and barrels, no matter how little the latter weigh compared to their content. It is a case of packing materials becoming a determining factor for the industry's potencial within the RR Tyconn context. On the contrary, paper and plastic sacks for food products form a negligible fraction of both weight and volume of the end product, thus they can be ignored in the production chain. Generally, non-collapsible containers should not be ignored when configuring BCAs.
After realizing this, I will have to re-instate some of the affected industries to Nedfumpkin's ingredients and re-run the tests of the past month. His quantitative suggestions however sound absurd. Probably this has been already been commented upon, although I have not found anything yet in the forum. How the hell can 1 carload of grain and half a carload of glass produce 2 carloads of beer ?? I have not researched yet how much grain is required per ton of beer, but regardless of this, you cannot seriously expect 2 carloads of beer to be shipped in half a carload of bottles!

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All this casts doubts about the validity of production recipes in the distributed BCAs and many of them may have to be re-defined from scratch.

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UPDATE July 12:
As far as the above brewery example is concerned, dramatic and radical modifications seem to be necessary: A brief statistical research reveals that a carload of beer will only require 0.294 carloads of grain, far below the 1/3 threshold in my "rule of thumb". This means actually that the grain is subject to be omitted from beer production, not the bottles! This was quite expectable, as beer consists by ¹⁹/₂₀ of water. To further strengthen this argument, we calculate from global industry statistics that the beer industry absorbs only 14.7% of the grain that the flour industry does. So, in a correctly balanced RRT3 economy, less than 13% of the produced grain would end up in breweries anyway, which is a negligible percentage by Tycoon's standards.
It is understandable that financially the grain may cost disproportionally more than the water and bottles in beer production, yet unfortunately and unavoidably this aspect is sacrificed due to the built-in level of detail in Railroad Tycoon 3. Since an overall accuracy of the whole economy is unachievable due to the simplifications imposed, my opinion is that emphasis should be placed towards producing plausible commodity flows, not realistic individual factory budgets.
No matter how shocking it may sound, my revamped brewery will just produce a carload of alcohol for each carload of glass (bottles) and lumber (barrels) received, no grain or rice whatsoever. Besides, you don't want unrealistic breweries holding up your grain, which is far more needed for flour/food.
Other industries will follow suit as their production cycles are evaluated more thoroughly.
I am also thinking of making houses "return" their bottles by converting alcohol and other liquids back to glass.