Hi to all.

[JSS]

Well, I am nearly a new member since I have not posted for ages. So how are you folks making out?
Myself I am playing mostly Railway Empire 2 and am enjoying it. Graphics have come a long way since RT3.
Would be nice though if it had editor capabilities similar to RT3. But then perhaps not. You would just end up with an frustrating scenario from me.
Happy Railroading.
JSS

[Gumboots]

Hey there. Dunno about the rest of them but I'm doing fine, although I have only been playing RT3 intermittently.

That's what most of us seem to do. Just drag it out for a binge every so often, to try things we hadn't thought of before, or just for a bit of fun. It's a bit primitive in terms of graphics, and the game engine has a few eccentricities, but it's still basically a solid game.

[JSS]

Gumboots, do the Private Messages still work?
I have one in the outbox but can't send it.
JSS

[Grandma Ruth]

Hi JSS, good to hear from you again! Still here, off and on, as Gumboots says, now and then. I've gone back to the Coast to Coast scenarios and it's driving me bonkers

[Gumboots]

Gumboots, do the Private Messages still work?

Should work. Can't think why it wouldn't. If it's just sitting in outbox, that just means the recipient hasn't read it yet. As soon as they read it, it gets moved to "Sent messages".

[RulerofRails]

I got your message. There is no editor at all in Railway Empire 2. At the moment the Restaurant and Market Hall are giving 10x the revenue they should. Plus the whole thing is sandbox, you can just doze stuff and redo. I played it for 140 hours or so, but now my enthusiasm cooled off a bit. What do you think about the track laying? Compared to the 1st one, trying to plan a careful route seems a lot more fiddly and getting a reward, lower earthwork cost, seems quite finicky.

[JSS]

Gumboots:
Yea, that makes sense. I pressed every button i could find to move it from the outbox to no avail.

Grandma Ruth:
The last few days I read up on your adventures trying to test the SCBC map. Thank you for all your efforts. I hope your sanity has not been sacrificed in any way.

RulerofRails:
Doze stuff and redo: My kind of play - until I get it perfect.
Track laying: In my opinion it is not too bad even though there is room for improvement. Have yet to figure out how to make a rail cross and cant figure out why adding a double track is sometimes more expensive then the first single track.

There certainly is more work to be done in Railway Empire 2 but as a successor to the first try it is not bad.
My main beefs are the geography of the maps, the goals in some scenarios (300+trains as an example where you already do well financially with 100+), the track laying that is a bit tricky at times and the signalling.
What does impress me very much are the graphics and all the activities on the map. When I think back to RT1 and the developments since - astonishing. Even in RT3 I felt the graphics for the time were not as good as they should/could have been. I recall ranting about the bad track joints that should have made any train derail.

Let me also thank you for all the efforts you have made with the SCBC map. You have sacrificed so much time and in my opinion very few players will ever take the time and effort to play such a map. Its a shame though because the KVR has had such a great history and to reenact that time was my original goal. It is a tough path between historical happenings and game play ability. In any case my heartfelt Thank You.
Happy Railroading.
JSS

[Grandma Ruth]

Grandma Ruth:
The last few days I read up on your adventures trying to test the SCBC map. Thank you for all your efforts. I hope your sanity has not been sacrificed in any way.

There wasn't much there to begin with! Managing surprisingly well without it ...

[Orange46]

So, this seems to be the RE2 thread.

If you want a North America thru the Ages type of experience, you can set up a custom game with hard settings, $1 million in cash, no refunds after 5 minutes, inflation (try just moderate first), increase the building costs as much as you can and reduce the revenue tab to 70% and then play the map initially to remove all of the bonuses - either wait them out, or just build the links and then destroy everything. Also, take out some loans while you can, but make sure you leave yourself with enough money to rebuild your first station and a single track line to another city. In my current game, I had $527,326 on March 1 1830 after building and destroying a lot of stuff and was on the hook for 2 bonds for about $610,000. I then rebuilt the first station in Philadelphia on the all US map. You want to start in your original city because no bonuses will show up anywhere near there for a long time and the game does force you to restart there. I am currently 12 hours in, it is 1838 with 13 trains, 16 stations and debt free. I also had no competitors.

If I knew how to post the save file, I would.

[RulerofRails]

Interesting, so you are trying to negate the "bonuses." What about using dozing to adjust your cash balance for those connections you want and just letting the others expire? I don't quite understand your process or it's intention.

Which character did you use? Barti Shiloh with +30% tracks/bridges/tunnels is a good one to add an extra bit of spice. I have done some custom games using Barti with Expert + Regions ON + Refunds for 5 days only. I get a bit bored by the tasks that require huge build-out though. $7M revenue from mail per quarter for example. The only way to make those on the toughest settings is to really boost your population. Max growing the map is boring. The result is known and without random occurrences, like depression, droughts, floods, etc,, the journey isn't interesting either. The kind of thing that's possible, but that doesn't mean you should do it.

I am already feeling frustrated with RE2 because the "patch" that in their words fixed "100+ bugs" in the game, also introduced some new ones especially with warehouses. The Australia DLC for RE1 was one of the best ones, but they dropped the ball with it because it introduced a very basic bug with bulldozing. Instantly noticeable by anybody playing the game for more than a minute. It was reported within 30 mins of release by me and others. The fix took 6 months to appear. In that case I thought it's an "older" release now and maybe they don't care. The fix also introduced a new bug which made some missions almost impossible. This also took months to be fixed. I bought the Japan DLC, but I could never bring myself to actually play it more than once. I'm getting a hint of deja vu. . . .


I have started playing Train World. It's maybe more of a "sim," it makes use of a high-level 2D view, and close 3D view, works quite well once you get used to it, and your rail network is quite realistic. It's typical to run 10-20+ car trains. Only 3 fictional maps so far, but there are difficulty levels. The hard one will keep you scratching your head for efficiency. It's a lower budget project, with a just a couple guys behind it, but the developer will typically fix reported bugs within a few hours. That's refreshing.

PS. Are you having trouble finding the save files, or actually zipping and uploading one onto this site?

[Orange46]

PS. Are you having trouble finding the save files, or actually zipping and uploading one onto this site?

I found and zipped the file, but don't know what to do with it. Oh, and I used Barti.

I have got to follow you more closely. I am just now downloading the Train World demo.

[Orange46]

Interesting, so you are trying to negate the "bonuses." What about using dozing to adjust your cash balance for those connections you want and just letting the others expire? I don't quite understand your process or it's intention.

I am only human, so I need to remove the temptation to use the early bonuses; however, the later bonuses become something to look forward to, as cash just creeps up slowly, especially because of the bond interest.

There is too much money in the game at the start. I get tired of constantly building and want to think about each train and its route for as long as possible. North America thru the Ages (RT2)started out as a massive game with 100s of trains and I soon tired of that and ended up with a map that only had enough money to set up one viable train line, with very little income, resulting in needing to many each train for a long time until the railroad finally got successful enough (after 30 or more years) to stop worrying about each train.

One thing that really hit me while doing this custom game was the lack of ports. In both REs, cities can only survive if they have goods delivered by trains. Great Cities with ports are no better (and sometimes worse because of just water on one border) than a small city in the middle of nowhere with one basic resource nearby. Why build to New York with an expensive bridge thru the Jersey Palisades when you can just go south and reap all sorts of riches. NY, Chicago ,St Louis (OK, lived in all of these places) and the other ports, thrived before the railroad and were destinations that railroads wanted because of their ports.

[Gumboots]

Umm, is some of that actually a quote? And which parts of it are, and are not?

[Orange46]

That's how it came out. Just the 1st paragraph is the quote.

[Gumboots]

Fixed. You had deleted the end tag for the quote, without replacing it where you wanted the quote to end.

[Orange46]

Thanks

[RulerofRails]

To upload a file you need the Full Editor. There is a button next to "Submit" for that. Then below the text box there is a tab for "attachments."

Please note with Train World that the demo is very easy to make money. The demo doesn't have difficulty level selection.

I will keep in mind to try RE2 without bonuses. But I just don't have enough time for such a game in the immediate future. I assume that you can make it "tight enough" so you shouldn't use bonds at all.

I did discover a weakness with RE2 refunds for only 5 days. I think you get refunds for engines you scrap. Especially if you go to edit the line and remove the engine. This is probably so that upgrading to a new engine doesn't cost an absolute fortune, but it is not realistic. The problem I face is that I'm using maybe 5 engines to establish a new settlements. That town will need only 2 engines for a long time. I want to "store" those engines, but I don't think the game lets me do that. What would you do in such a case?

[Orange46]

I did discover a weakness with RE2 refunds for only 5 days. I think you get refunds for engines you scrap. Especially if you go to edit the line and remove the engine. This is probably so that upgrading to a new engine doesn't cost an absolute fortune, but it is not realistic. The problem I face is that I'm using maybe 5 engines to establish a new settlements. That town will need only 2 engines for a long time. I want to "store" those engines, but I don't think the game lets me do that. What would you do in such a case?

I found an opposite problem to bonds from what everyone else is complaining about. When I repay a bond shortly after purchase, I get charged very little extra, but as time goes by the penalty escalates. The only two bonds I had in the above game had such large penalties that I waited until they matured and just got charged the face amount. But, I also noted that every quarter that the bonds were active the very large interest charge to my cash increased. So, bond interest rates inflate also?

As for engines, it does make sense that you can get some money back because you are selling them. RT3 did that, I think. But with tracks and RR buildings the scrap value would be minimal. And on that topic, the RE series badly needs maintenance costs for tracks and based on more than just original cost, as in RT3.

Because of the engine refunds, I regularly try to remember to just scrap a route, rather than edit it because the trains (at least in the version my current game is in) still frequently get lost and don't deliver anything for a while after a route edit. I think they don't get lost if you delete all of the stations, exit, and then put in the new route and perhaps also when you edit an empty train in the station. I am not sure how engine maintenance is calculated, so I also get rid of engines that need to get repositioned to another location. (and then they don't use fuel to get there.)

[Gumboots]

As for engines, it does make sense that you can get some money back because you are selling them. RT3 did that, I think.

No, it doesn't. You can't really sell RT3 locos. You can only retire them, and you don't get any cash for doing that.

I think it would be impossible to code "refunds for selling locos" by event in RT3. I think the only way it could be done in RT3 is via an honesty system, where the player triggered an event when they actually did retire a loco, but obviously that would be leaving it open to exploitation.

[Orange46]

I stand corrected. I have played too many RR games, but RT2&3 are still my all time favorites.