Some of the mechanics that operate in RT3 are striking anachronisms. I cannot speak for how things were in the "golden age", but these days, in the USA, the notion of a naming a locomotive to increase profits is a bit like clapping gold earrings on a pig to increase the price to the consumer for the bacon made from it. But, then again, people flock to any number of gold-plated hog troughs for "superior dining experiences" (koff*koff*Appleby's - sneeze*sneeze*Red Lobster). Also, the mechanic of a "station" is quite "a century ago", most freight is loaded at and delivered to a location that is not a station per se. And, yes, I know that RT3 is not a rail simulation, etc. And, yes, I understand that sacrifices had to be made to make a playable game (I am still playing it). But, be that as it may, there is the conceit that RT3 represents real railroading in some pedestrian manner and the places where it drifts from reality, such as representing iconic locomotives poorly, is part and parcel of the general drift from realism.
I want the game to be something more, as, I believe, we all do. I am all for making the trains run more profitably. I am all for making the iconic locomotives do in-game as well as they did in the real world. I am all for making the locomotives being field assigned in-game as they were in the real world. But after trying to tamper with the game's economics, I am becoming increasingly hesitant to suggest that more realism is what is needed. So, allow me to play the Devil's advocate a moment. Please, keep in mind that none of this is meant as a criticism or meant to dissuade you from hammering at the game files.
- Off-Topic:
- Take, for instance, the matter of rail miles as calculated by the ledger. If we agree that 1 track segment equals 1 statute mile, then we must also agree that 1 height map pixel equals approx 1.37 statute miles. That, then, makes us need to face the elephant in the room, and admit that:
1\ The game's height exaggeration for terrain is astonishingly out of whack and that no locomotive yet made could scale the peaks on most maps without catastrophic failure, and,
2\ The average firebox of a steam locomotive is approximately 1 mile wide, thus inferring that the quantity of fuel cost needed to move such a locomotive from the World Trade Center Station in New York City to Grove Street Station in Jersey City, New Jersey - a distance of approximately 1.7 miles - would exceed the GNP of a fair number of small nations. These two things alone dismiss all doubt that realism was most assuredly not what they designed the operation of locomotives around in developing RT3.
Now compound all that by the fact that the game's "mile" is a flexible, somewhat misleading, unit of measure that may or may not, on any given map, represent the same unit of measure in terms of the distance between the World Trade Center Station in New York City to Grove Street Station in Jersey City, New Jersey. The unsettling reality of that is that a finely calibrated locomotive that is set up for large maps with long distance runs may spend 50% of the year loading and unloading on another map. Even though a locomotive that is not in motion does not have fuel cost, it still ages, steadily decreasing fuel efficiency, and still has a maintenance cost. True, though it may be, that the flaw is not on the locomotive's side of the equation, but rather bears on the map-maker, the player will most likely not have a wide spectrum of options to choose from in terms of locomotives based on the year of the map. The knee-jerk fanboy reaction is "make more locomotives for the game!" (and I likely will), but how then do we go about calibrating new locos to fill the niche for maps that are peppered full of short-distance runs without making the new locomotives useless clutter in the purchase window on larger maps?
I have had in the past, because I neglected to add a maintenance shed to a line, had locomotives that ran dry on oil and remain dry on oil for six or more years until I happened to catch my oversight by merit of the "out of oil" icon displaying in the train list. After reading the information on the forum about oil and its relationship to reliability and chance of breakdown, I wondered how that was even possible. It has led me to think that "chance of breakdown" approaches being a meaningless term when Random Number Generation is in play. RNG is not like drawing cards from a deck of cards with a known and limited number of cards, so that each card removed increases the certainty of a specific card appearing as cards are removed. Rather, RNG operates more like a card being drawn at random from a freshly opened deck, every time. So, the expression "chance of breakdown" lacks the terminal certainty that it implicitly expresses. Conversely, that also means that the reliability rating approaches the same problem. I believe this to be true because the way the game expresses a reluctance to generate a new random kernel over multiple runs of a map in a given period of time (i.e., the same random tycoon assigned to the player, strikingly similar building arrangements during the seeding of the map). So, if what is observationally true extends to the hidden parts of the game that rely on RNG, it is entirely possible that the RNG gets "stuck" in a certain range until some intervening circumstance (e.g. rebooting the system) and thus possible that even the most reliable locomotives operate as badly as the most unreliable, with very negative impact on the profitability of that "near perfect" locomotive. I have had "bad runs of luck" in this direction over the past 14 years, and my solution has been to quit the map, reboot the system and start over.
How this chance of breakdown affects the performance of all locomotives on a map is best illustrated when one does breakdown and brings all other locomotives on that track to a halt. This would be a very significant problem if RNG does indeed get "stuck". More so, if the goals of the map are such that the player needs to haul X loads of Y cargo within a given period of time and the plan goes down the pipes over one stalled loco (I'm looking at you Russia map). In such an instance, fuel economy and grade climbing and acceleration are somewhat less crucial than getting the goods delivered without interruption of service. And it drives home the fact that we have very little control on how profitably we can make any given locomotive operate if we cannot with certainty control the chance of breakdown of all locomotives more perfectly or at the very least more fully understand how the RNG works and how the game calculates and effects the chance of breakdown.
With many of the game's functions locked away from view in the EXE, without calling them liars, I am beginning to wonder if any of the information we have been given by PopTop is reliable. The Big Boy is a prime example of the PopTop Locomotive Chart being downright misleading. It brings into question almost every part of the economic model. At start of play on any given map, the price of coal begins at a set price. If a locomotive's primary fuel is coal, then it stands to reason that the fuel cost should then be linked to the market price of coal within the game's economy. Only it isn't. The same is true of diesel locomotives; their fuel costs are the same regardless of the market price of diesel. And I have no idea what sort of pixie dust is involved with electrics, because electric plants seem to be nothing more than cargo sinks. Thus, the very conditions that caused steam to become obsolescent in the real world may not evolve on a game map, yet steam power is edged out regardless of that. But, then that begs the question, what manner of steam locomotive would be working rails in a world of 80 or more ton freight wagons? Or, even, how do we represent "alternative fuel" types (e.g. liquid natural gas, hydrogen, nuclear) in the game without recourse to game events and custom language files that are dependent on the map-makers to use?
From my own very limited experience tampering with game files, my concern would be for Johnny "Ima download all this" Newbie compulsively downloading and installing everything without fully understanding how new locomotives (and possibly new buildings) are going to impact the playability of PopTop scenarios and campaign maps. Many of which are already terribly skewed.