Scenario Creation Ideas

[OilCan]

What's the basic premise of the India map? Any hints yet?

Sure, I'll share my ideas. Of course, I'm always open to helpful comments.

There will be two India games: India High Speed and See India by Rail.

The high speed is set in the 2000s, maybe starts in 2010. There will be only two goals: (a) haul X amount of passengers for 3? straight years and (b) achieve an average express speed of X for the same years. Electric engines will be the only engines able to achieve the high speeds. Only one AI, Indian Railways which has rail spread out over most of India. The player will be allowed to take over 'corridors' of Indian Railways to build high speed rail, as well as find new high speed corridors. There will be setbacks and opportunities to the player. The challenge will be to know when & where to expand while maintaining high speeds and racing against the game clock. A 1.06V game

See India by Rail starts in 1947, the last year of British rule in India, and ends in 1980 (Indira Ghandi's last term). It is a 'railroadless' map, wide open for the player to build across. (I know that this is not historically accurate: railroads began to appear in India in the 1850s.) This is the game I am currently working on. I will use the same map to later create India High Speed game. There are three 'See India by Rail' options offered to the player: 1) do nothing else but build railroads and haul cargo 2) become a magnate based on CBV and industry profit, or 3) become a tycoon based on PNW and removing rival AI companies. There are 6 optional AI unless the player chooses the tycoon option, which requires at least 3 AI. I have gone to great lengths to make the AI aggressive, especially in the stock market, for the tycoon option. I've done 2 trial runs thus far with lots of adjustments after each trial. I have not yet set the gold & silver goals - always the hardest part. A 1.05V game.

As a side note: I successfully used ACME mapper to create a google map overlay of India. (Many thanks to the person who posted that advice; I forget who that was.) The map looks spectacular with the snow capped Himalayas in the distance and the lush Ganges valley spread to the horizon.

[RulerofRails]

India has a lot of history and definitely a unique culture. Looking forward to these maps.

For the high speed version have you thought about what to do with servicing? Is it going to be a game that requires dedicated spurs? Thinking a little out loud here, if the AI are setup in such a fashion to roughly form hub and spoke systems but can't connect to one another, giving the player the option to connect a few of their hubs should provide the basis for pretty reliable long distance travel volume. I find there is always the tendency to gravitate towards short-distance passenger traffic because the game provides more volume for that. Perhaps, a setup like this would make long distance more viable?

[Gumboots]

For the one that starts in 2010 you could mess with the economy a bit. Coal is going out of style rapidly in India these days. Renewables are now cheaper so the coal industry is going down the tubes. Also, India is installing a lot of power generation capacity to boost the living standards of its people (mostly third world at the moment). Might be more interesting than just hauling pax loads.

[OilCan]

For the high speed version have you thought about what to do with servicing? Is it going to be a game that requires dedicated spurs?

I was thinking about doing away with oil and sand servicing by saying that these services were part of a station stop. This would allow the electrics to zip along between stations.

Thinking a little out loud here, if the AI are setup in such a fashion to roughly form hub and spoke systems but can't connect to one another, giving the player the option to connect a few of their hubs should provide the basis for pretty reliable long distance travel volume. I find there is always the tendency to gravitate towards short-distance passenger traffic because the game provides more volume for that. Perhaps, a setup like this would make long distance more viable?

I haven't thought very far about the AI, except that there would be only 1: the Indian Railway. The idea of disconnected hubs of Indian Railway would indeed work towards a stronger demand for long distance travel. This is a large map and most cities are spaced well apart from each other.

[OilCan]

For the one that starts in 2010 you could mess with the economy a bit. Coal is going out of style rapidly in India these days. Renewables are now cheaper so the coal industry is going down the tubes. Also, India is installing a lot of power generation capacity to boost the living standards of its people (mostly third world at the moment). Might be more interesting than just hauling pax loads.

The modern economy of India was one of the reasons that this will be a 1.06V game: it has a larger offering of industry than 1.05V. India has uranium deposits and I was mulling over the idea of making the player build an electric capacity as the electric line was expanded. The player will be allowed to haul freight cargo as a means to gain company revenue, but it would be limited.

[Gumboots]

Yeah you could tie in a required generation capacity to rail miles. I can see that adding something to the strategy. Wiki has a good basic rundown on where India is heading with power generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrici ... r_in_India

India's government is also developing up to 62, mostly thorium reactors, which it expects to be operational by 2025. It is the "only country in the world with a detailed, funded, government-approved plan" to focus on thorium-based nuclear power. The country currently gets under 2% of its electricity from nuclear power, with the rest coming from coal (60%), hydroelectricity (16%), other renewable sources (12%) and natural gas (9%). It expects to produce around 25% of its electricity from nuclear power.

So there's scope there for using nukes in an Indian scenario. There's no way of having hydro, geo or renewables AFAICT, due to RT3's limitations, unless you removed some non-essential 1.06 industries and added some new ones.

[Gumboots]

Hey here's an idle thought. Uranium mines in reality only produce ore. Fuel has to be made from the ore in a refinery. if you wanted to add something else to the industry chain you could make the map without uranium mines, and use one of the other 1.06 cargoes (ore or rock or crystals) as a substitute for uranium ore, and then have that cargo shipped to a warehouse which does the conversion to uranium.

[Gumboots]

Hey OilCan, I just had an idea about different forms of power generation in the game. The game has the standard electric plant and nuclear plants locked in. The power output is handled inside the .exe and can't be added to any other buildings AFAIK. So although you could reskin the two default power plants as something else that's about all you can do with them.

However, there is a way around it if someone can think of a way for event code to recognise placement of other buildings. You'd simply store the actual power output from either or both of the standard plants as one of the available variables, and use a number generated by building of other things to augment the power output, then spit that number out to the status page and use it for medal triggers.

The only catch here is how do you recognise other buildings, and make sure they're the right ones? Is it possible to disallow a player building certain types in a given territory?

Another workaround, which may have simpler coding and wouldn't require any custom industry or building files, and would also save space on the map, would be to not bother about actually showing other forms of power generation in the game. You could just use a similar system to the way purchase of extra track is handled in AoS V (Phoenix Rising). Place one track unit in a given territory, and get an option to "build" one or more "power plants" of a certain type, with the appropriate amount of cash deducted from your company cash and the appropriate amount of "power" added to whatever variable you're using. This should be simple to implement, and effective, with the only downside being a lack of extra eye candy.

I've been thinking this stuff is going to end up being important for contemporary scenarios. The world is going through a revolution in power generation at the moment, and it's not going to stop anytime soon. The RT3 limitation of only two types of power plant is a reflection of the mindset back when the game was coded, and is way out of date these days.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Isn't there a Windmill "building" already in place among the other buildings? I think I've seen them put on some maps.

[Gumboots]

Yes, there is, but you can't make it generate power. You could rip the model and skin to make either the standard electric plant or the nuclear plant look like a windmill, but that's the limit unless you do some serious hacking of the .exe.

You probably won't even be able to change the displayed name, because I'm pretty sure it will have to keep the same one to be recognised as a power plant by the game, in the same way that recognition of locomotives is dependent on their displayed name and changing that (like Lirio did with some) will mean the game can't find them. Mind you I haven't tested a name change yet, so may be wrong.

[OilCan]

Hey here's an idle thought. Uranium mines in reality only produce ore. Fuel has to be made from the ore in a refinery. if you wanted to add something else to the industry chain you could make the map without uranium mines, and use one of the other 1.06 cargoes (ore or rock or crystals) as a substitute for uranium ore, and then have that cargo shipped to a warehouse which does the conversion to uranium.

This is a workable idea. It would provide the player with a important, secondary task (a busy one too). I'll certainly keep it in mind - in fact, it's already on my note paper.

[OilCan]

[Hey OilCan, I just had an idea about different forms of power generation in the game...

However, there is a way around it if someone can think of a way for event code to recognise placement of other buildings. You'd simply store the actual power output from either or both of the standard plants as one of the available variables, and use a number generated by building of other things to augment the power output, then spit that number out to the status page and use it for medal triggers.

The only catch here is how do you recognise other buildings, and make sure they're the right ones? Is it possible to disallow a player building certain types in a given territory?

I'm not aware of a way to detect what kinds of buildings are where on the landscape except by haul counts from/to a territory. This only tells if a building is present, not how many of them.

There is an incredible database of info that RT3 tracks about cargo, city growth, industry buildings and even trees that is not available to the game coder. I know the game makers did not ever envision such a lively community of user game makers, but just think how many interesting variants that games could follow if we had access to that database.

Another workaround, which may have simpler coding and wouldn't require any custom industry or building files, and would also save space on the map, would be to not bother about actually showing other forms of power generation in the game. You could just use a similar system to the way purchase of extra track is handled in AoS V (Phoenix Rising). Place one track unit in a given territory, and get an option to "build" one or more "power plants" of a certain type, with the appropriate amount of cash deducted from your company cash and the appropriate amount of "power" added to whatever variable you're using. This should be simple to implement, and effective, with the only downside being a lack of extra eye candy.

This is a very usable idea. It would not be hard to create a 'make believe' power system that the player can invest into. There would not be eye candy, but it could be described in ways the player could easily envision such as roof top photo cells and ocean wave generators. This is almost becoming its own stand-alone game story.

[Gumboots]

There is an incredible database of info that RT3 tracks about cargo, city growth, industry buildings and even trees that is not available to the game coder. I know the game makers did not ever envision such a lively community of user game makers, but just think how many interesting variants that games could follow if we had access to that database.

Oh, don't get me started on that again. The number of times I've had an idea for using information that I know is tracked by the game but is simply not accessible via the editor...

If anyone ever does rock up with the skills and motivation for more .exe hacking, I have a long list of stuff that could be done. Useful, strategy-expanding stuff. There's a long list of crud in the editor that nobody ever uses too, so that could even be ditched to reduce gui clutter.

Another workaround, which may have simpler coding and wouldn't require any custom industry or building files, and would also save space on the map, would be to not bother about actually showing other forms of power generation in the game. You could just use a similar system to the way purchase of extra track is handled in AoS V (Phoenix Rising). Place one track unit in a given territory, and get an option to "build" one or more "power plants" of a certain type, with the appropriate amount of cash deducted from your company cash and the appropriate amount of "power" added to whatever variable you're using. This should be simple to implement, and effective, with the only downside being a lack of extra eye candy.

This is a very usable idea. It would not be hard to create a 'make believe' power system that the player can invest into. There would not be eye candy, but it could be described in ways the player could easily envision such as roof top photo cells and ocean wave generators. This is almost becoming its own stand-alone game story.

It's something that interests me because it's already in progress and is only going to become more relevant over the next decade or two. We happen to be living in an era that has already left the world known by the RT3 devs behind, so if anyone is wanting to do 21st century scenarios it would be cool to use all the relevant tricks we can think of. I can probably think of quite a few, and I'm sure others could too. You wouldn't necessarily want to use every trick in every scenario, but having a bucket of them available could be handy.

To throw a few ideas around: eye candy for rooftop solar could easily be done with a bit of custom skinning on houses and other buildings. This would mean custom files dropped in PopTopExtraContent just for the 21st century, but that's not a huge deal and the game would still work without them.

For various types of power generation it would make sense to have most solar units cheap with low output (at least for domestic). Wind turbines would be more expensive and have greater output. Geothermal and hydro, particularly the latter, would even bigger in price and output. The different types could be handy for game goals. For example, you might need to nudge yourself to a generation target with some cheap units before year end. Or you could have specific targets for different types of generation (ie: hydro sites will be limited, so usage in-game should be too).

[Gumboots]

Appears to have lost some posts. Any chance of reinstating those? I did put quite a bit of effort into finding relevant information for them.

[Hawk]

I'm not sure what happened. It's been a while since I tried to split a topic so I guess I screwed it up. Sorry!

[Gumboots]

Just went checking and they're still in my browser history. Will add them in here manually.

I don't know about Australia, but in the US, wind and solar energy is the most expensive there is, and solar still has to use coal or natural gas to help support it.
A couple solar energy plants have already gone bankrupt.
This is not to mention the thousands of birds that are killed annularly by both.

Granted they still have a long way to go to make either economical, but in the mean time our electricity costs are going up and I expect this to continue for some time yet.

Ok, there are several points here, and one could go into a lot of detail on all of them, but briefly:

Renewables can power a grid by themselves if there is enough installed capacity. Mind you, that applies to any method of power generation. You need enough of it to do the job. No point in not having enough of it and then complaining it doesn't work.

Costs for renewables are dropping all the time, and have been for years. OTOH, coal has always been heavily subsidised. IOW, the apparent low cost of coal is historically because taxpayers have partially funded it indirectly, through various incentives. There is a lot of talk about incentives for renewables, but fewer people are aware of incentives for fossil fuels.

These are actually massive. For example, in 2015 the total amount of money spent on fossil fuel subsidies by governments around the world was $5.3 trillion. Yes, that's trillion. This figure is taken from a study by the IMF, not extracted from my posterior. Obviously, subsidies of that magnitude are going to distort the markets. It has even been called a lowball figure by some leading economists, because it neglects a range of costs that result from fossil fuel use.

That $5.3 trillion is money that could easily be spent on other things. For example, if those subsidies were removed from fossil fuels and applied to renewables, the market would look completely different. The market would still look completely different if no subsidies were given to any methods of power generation, and the $5.3 trillion was instead spent on other things, or not spent at all.

Next point is that costs for coal and gas power generation will be going up anyway. This is inevitable, for several reasons.*

One is that many older coal stations are due for retirement, and building new ones costs money. That money spent on new stations will be recouped by adding it to the bills of power consumers. So, if you are going to be building new infrastructure anyway to keep your grid going, it's probably a good idea to build the best sort for the future. Long term, this simply will not be coal or gas, because ultimately they will have to be operated on a zero emissions basis. Doing that, even if it is possible at all (which aint at all certain yet) will vastly increase their running costs. There has been plenty of R&D time and money thrown at "clean coal", and it still isn't workable on any useful scale or at any useful cost. Renewables already are, and then there's the nuclear option as well, not to mention hydro and geothermal. Geothermal in particular has huge potential that is not being exploited yet.

Geothermal Energy Resources - Geoscience Australia

Geothermal energy is an emerging industry in Australia, with exploration being conducted in all states and the Northern Territory. While significant resources have been identified and there are several companies in advanced stages of exploration, presently there is no commercial production of geothermal energy in Australia. That said, there is significant potential for geothermal energy in Australia. It is estimated that one per cent of the geothermal energy shallower than five kilometres and hotter than 150°C could supply Australia's total energy requirements for 26 000 years (based on 2004-05 figures).

So, ultimately what will happen is that market forces will rule out coal and gas.

*I'm not going to get into "political" bunfights here. I'm just going by how the world at large is tackling the problems of the 21st century. Personal opinions don't matter much in that context.

By the way, I went looking for figures on bird deaths and found this: 2014 State of Birds report (pdf)

[Wolverine@MSU]

I can explain the first three in the graph above by pointing out that our "friends to the north" keep sled dogs instead of cats, live in igloos, and drive snowmobiles or dog sleds.

[Gumboots]

Well there's also far fewer people in Canada, meaning far fewer cat owners. There are probably also far fewer birds, especially in winter. No bird with half a brain is going to hang around freezing its beak off when it can nick down to Florida and sun itself on a beach.

[Gumboots]

Oh hey, here's a novel form of power storage which has just been approved for trials in Nevada.

What it does is use a very short and simple railway and electric-powered cars to haul large blocks of concrete up a hill. The electricity is taken from the grid when there is an excess of power available. Hauling the blocks of concrete to the top of the hill converts the electric power into potential energy.

They just sit up there until your grid is experiencing more demand than it has power available. All you do then is throw a switch and the car rolls downhill again. The electric motors in the car are now running in reverse and operating as regenerative braking, giving you outputted electricity that you feed back into the grid.

It's awesomely simple, and can be done just about anywhere there is a useful grade.

America’s First Commercial-Scale Rail Energy Storage Project Receives BLM Approval

Advanced Rail Energy Storage, LLC (“ARES”) announced that its proposed commercial-scale gravity-based rail energy storage project (“ARES Nevada”) has been granted a right-of-way lease by the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”). Once operational, the 50-megawatt project will encompass 106 acres of public land in Southern Nevada, near Pahrump in Clark and Nye Counties, and help stabilize the electric grid. ARES Nevada will connect to the power western grid via the facilities of Valley Electric Association.

“Creative solutions like ARES Nevada provide a more reliable and modern electric grid and help create an even cleaner energy future for our citizens” said Angie Dykema, Director of the Nevada Governor’s Office of Energy.

Utilizing gravity, ARES Nevada will store energy and release it for dispatch when it’s needed. Using a single railroad track sited on a gentle grade, multiple electric locomotive cars can move up the track as they receive excess power from solar and wind power plants during sunny and windy days. The train cars will remain available and, when needed, be dispatched slowly downhill, using their motor-generators to return power to the electricity grid. ARES Nevada will provide a wide range of ancillary services, enabling the grid to adjust to momentary changes in demand and help stabilize grid voltage and frequency.

There's also an article on Vox about this: The train goes up, the train goes down: a simple new way to store energy

ARES says it can build three different kinds of projects.

The smaller ones (20-50 MW), like the one being built near Pahrump, will provide "ancillary services" to the grid — in this case, the California grid.

Ancillary services can get pretty technical (VAR support! grid inertia!), but the simple explanation is that the ARES system can ramp up and down quickly, smoothing out fluctuations in power supply on the grid. That's worth money.

Medium-sized ARES projects (50-200 MW) will provide both ancillary services and short-term storage, roughly two hours' worth. While the former smooths out minute-by-minute variations in wind and solar, the latter can smooth out longer (hourly) fluctuations.

The large ("grid scale") ARES projects could range from 200 MW to 3 GW, which a lot of storage — enough, the company says, to provide four to 16 hours of power at full output. At that point, a project starts looking less like a way of smoothing out fluctuations and more like a full-fledged power plant of its own, capable of backing up an enormous amount of renewable energy.

Nifty videos here: https://vimeo.com/124312632

[Wolverine@MSU]

They do something similar to that here in Michigan but instead of using blocks of concrete they use excess electricity to pump water out of Lake Michigan and up into a reservoir. The water is held until they need electricity, at which point the water flows back down through a hydroelectric generation unit. Same principle, just using a natural resource that they don't have much of in Nevada but that we have lots of here.