Persian Electric

[nedfumpkin]

The electric plants can actually make decent money in TM. They just need to be regularly supplied.

[Hawk]

Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong - ignoring them.

[nedfumpkin]

Here's an example of what the spur method for maintenance facilities looks like. Setting up this way will help you increase your average speeds.

When routing your train, start by clicking on your first station. In this case Qom.

Set the cargo to 0 and make it for all stations.

Add the maintenance facility to the route.

Add Qom again. Remove the the all stations toggle. (this prevents your train from having cargo on its trip to maintenance)

Select your next station, then back to your first, then your next station. Set your consists.

Now your train will start empty, go to the maintenance facility, then back to the first station. It'll do two runs then go for maintenance. Uusuallly I start the train at its first loading station.

This will mean that your trains are never stopping for maintenance when they have cargo.

[Hawk]

I do a lot of mine like this,

Click on image to view full size

or maybe off at a slight angle, if I have to carry track on straight, but I set the consists up like you do.

[Blackhawk]

Well I finished the scenario on hard. After having the initial infrastructure up it wasn't that bad. My biggest concern was getting enough troops, but that turned out to be just a matter of waiting for the years to go by til enough were transported. Although building a missile was difficult.

A few things I ran into again:
1. I had a train apparently get stuck on a track and just kept repeating the same couple segments of track before jumping back and repeating those segments. I only noticed this when I saw I had a train that was out of oil and sand so it had been doing it for a few years. Probably a RT3 glitch rather than something from TM, but I'll mention it anyways.

2. When I connected all the cities, the last page of my ledger went blank, so I was no longer able to see how many troops I had left to transport.


3. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but it was incredibly difficult to make missiles. I built my own plant which lost several million (or so it said for the cost of materials) and it didn't produce anything. Yet other years it wouldn't lose much money. It seemed like I had to build 2 missile plants in the same city in order to get enough missiles to ship in a railroad car.


My nuke plant made money again, I'm not entirely sure why it made money, had a deficit and then made money again. It seemed to vary at times as there were a few years it was fully supplied and it still cost me money.

As for speed, I really didn't focus much on the speed bonuses so I didn't bother doing the spur maintenance yards. Since I read that the stock splits quicky and often I ended up buying up all the stock early on so I was the sole owner after the first year and then years later when I was making a few million a year, I set a large dividend to get me over 10 million personal cash.

Being that I played on hard rather than on expert I'm not entirely sure how useful this will be but I'll give a general outline of how I went:
-I built from Tehran to Firuz to Oom and bought the meat plant there. (I also heavily bought back the stock early in the first year and sacraficed initial expansion for complete control over the company). Then connected the ranch from the NW of oom as well. When I was making enough of a profit I expanded east to Gamsar with the textile plant, and made sure I'd have enough money to buy it in a short amount of time. Eventually I upgraded the textile mill there.
-From here I kept building East thru Damghan to the mountains for the Bauxite to supply the allumium mill.
- After I got the requirement to ship Persian Rugs, I still spent the next 8-10 years building East, and up in Turkmenistan.
- I eventually built from Damghan to Emasharah, but early on I connected the farm southeast of Emasharah to give my textile plant more supplies. Emasharah was useful to make electronics (Until later when It was easier to just ship them in from Mashhad as I used my limited allumium and rubber elsewhere)
- Before rushing for the mountains to sell my Persian rugs I built a lumber mill up in Turkmenistan and sent the lumber to Ashkabad and then connected the farm a little northwest of it. I then connected the oil well to Kizyl, which soon turned into connecting all the rice patties southwest of Kizyl after I realized these were rice patties. Around this time I also connected Kizyl to Ashkabad so I could send the chemicals there for the explosives plant. Having noticed chemicals were already there, and there was a distillery well stocked with corn and fruit, just no plastic/glass, I decided it would be a nice place to also build a plastics factory. Eventually I upgraded and bought up the explosives factory, distillery, and plastics factory.
- Also important was to build your own nuke plant in the mountains by the uranium. Mine was between 2 mines northeast of Bafq. (eventually upgrade it so it makes around 1,000 gigawatts a year)
- At this point I was making a nice yearly profit and decided with 5-8 years left i should tackle the western mountains. I started with Tabriz and connected the farm south of there. I then worked Southeast city by city towards Tehran. Then finally connected Oriumyeh. I was tempted to connect to the port Rasht for the rubber at the port, however, I figured enough of the supplies were brought to my stations by the Tycoonians so I decided not to build over the mountain.
- From here I was making a good profit each year and refined the way I was doing some things. I linked up my Turkmenistan track with my Iranian track in Gorgan, bought industries as I went on, Again used my northern Turkmenistan track to connect to Mashhad. (I'd later connect my early track when I connected to the mountains for bauxite to Mashhad as well, but the northern connection was useful for getting to the ammunitions plant in the SE part of the map, far south of Mashhad.
- at this point I did what I needed to do to get the proper goods in certain places to build the ammo, weapons, and missiles. (I built to the steel mill which was northwest of my nuke plant and southeast Oom since I already had a partial rail line in the area being used to transport the lucrative isotopes. So I connected the towns on the way from Oom to the steel plant and the coal mines from the east (eventually one of the mines disappeared on me but by then I already had made the weapons otherwise it might have been costly). I took the steel then to the city West of Tehran for the weapons factory there. Other random tidbits: For extra allumium I built a reclamation facitity in Damghan so any Bauxite that was salvaged from the reclamation of waste would be immediatedly fed to the allumium mill. Finally I connected to Chah Bahar and put it on fast speed and just waited for my 500 troops to be sent. Once all my 500 troops were sent, I connected to the final city and the game ended.

[Blackhawk]

I forgot to add I used diesels the entire time since I was not concerned with my speed.

I also just updated to the beta version of TM, and I still can't see the building for the rice fields. But if everyone else sees them then it must be something on my side.

[nedfumpkin]

Now let this be a lesson to all you scenario writers out there....just because you played a map right through and then made a few changes to the scenario, doesn't mean you didn't screw stuff up while doing it. :)

I haven't seen the problem you've mentioned about the train getting stuck, but after reading some things others have experience in RT3, it may be a glitch in RT3.

I think I initially set it up to change leddgers at some point, and forgot that I changed my mind. (probably lost parts of it along the way too.)

The missile plant was tested, and under the right conditions it was working well....I think I may have made a change that messed it all up....I'm going to work on that and fix it, I am upping all the outputs.

Again, and I think this might have an effect on the missile plant, but the Nuke plant and electric plant are definitely affected by the prices of their supplies.

I like that you bought back all the stock in the first year...I was tempted to do it, but wanted to play a different way. Glad to see that the average speed issue can be overcome this way.

I took a different direction than you and stayed out of Turmenistan completely. My intial connections were similar to yours, but I then proceeded south of Qom to get all the goodies there. Like you I put a nuke near the mines, but I also used that for the basis for my expansion for connections since I was in the desert where the ground was flat.

I also went for the port at Raht in a previous game, and surprisingly, there is a nice flat route through the mountains to it....just takes a while to lay your track but you can keep all the grade at 3 or less, and almost all at 2 or less.

Steel mills really depend on where the iron shows up, when I went south early the iron mines really showed up in great places. Can't remember the name, but its past the tannery, then between the paper mill and petro plant. Very lucrative part of the map.

Thanks for all your comments, and pointing out my screw-up in the map. I'll work on getting them fixed as soon as I can. I appreciate everyone's patience.

[Hawk]

I also went for the port at Raht in a previous game, and surprisingly, there is a nice flat route through the mountains to it....just takes a while to lay your track but you can keep all the grade at 3 or less, and almost all at 2 or less.

I guess you took a different route than I did.

Click on image to view full size

[nedfumpkin]

Hawk...that's basically the route, but my bridge was in a different spot and my strack was a lot snakier. :)

Also, the running the track out behind a station instead of a spur is something I only do when its a terminus.

As an aside, I found that even when not required for a speed goal, the spur method helps keep trains organized by reducing congestion and running efficiently.

[j484fan]

Being I noticed this mentioned, I had a train get stuck in a really weird place in one of the Germany maps. I forget which one, but you have to at some point connect to Prague. I had electric track setup from Berlin to Hamburg and also to Horsens. Yet at some point, when I went to check on city progress around Prague I had an electric on non electrified track going back and forth as though it had forgotten its route. It had a load of cars, but would not go to any station, just kept going to where the track at Prague dead ended, turn around and then back. When I clicked the arrow on the station in its route I wanted it to go to, it followed the track all the way back to where it was supposed to be.

On these kinds of maps, especially this one, I have not connected Berlin to Prague since. Though, that I recall, I have not run into this on any other map.