Most people don't use maintenance spurs, they put the maintenance sheds and water towers on the main line like the AI does. This absolutely murders your train travel times. Without maintenance spurs, it's pretty much impossible to get express speeds above the mid-20s unless you use cheap tricks like only running a single express train once for the whole map. That's why a lot of people had difficulty with it.Gumboots wrote:Point is that there should be no need to worry about the speed requirement. I'm not sure why some guys seem to have difficulty with it. I was running at least one freight train and one express train on most runs, with two of each on the more lucrative runs, so you don't need to skimp on loads and only run express on "ideal" runs that don't really earn you much. Just load them suckers up and run 'em normally.
Playing this scenario on Hard last night, i got real lucky with the economy seed, such that i was making absolutely ludicrous amounts of money. To the point that i didn't know what to do with it all. Could have built more track or bought more industries, i suppose, but i was just sort of staring agape at the sheer mass of cash that kept rolling in. The Industrial bonus is a total winner in this map if you decide to focus on industry. Most industries take 6-10 years to break even, in my experience, some manage it in as little as 4 or 5 years if they're very well placed and you buy it at just the right time. With the 30% bonus, pretty much every single industry is guaranteed to break even in 3-7 years, with the very best ones managing it in just 2 years. It's a goldmine i tells you.
i bought the AI's companies out several times, they kept starting new ones. Bismark finally gave up after i bought his last one, he got kicked out as Chariman of every single company he started.
Meanwhile, Hudson owns 100% of his last company, which is why i own no stock in it. It has been moderately successful despite only connecting three cities. It's stock has split three times, meaning that Hudson has 154k stocks in my company, and 160k in his own. Hudson was pretty competent, his original network spread from Budapest to Resita, and he owned a fair number of profitable industries. Bismark started doing Vienna-Gyor, but for some reason never made any money, after i bought him out and relaid his track it became one of my most profitable trunklines, especially after i added Bratislava and extended it to Budapest.Here's some screenshots from Jan 1914, but keep in mind that i was half-assing it since 1905 or so. If i had been investing in earnest for that last decade, i bet i'd have most of the map connected, and own every profitable industry. Probably resulting in ~50% higher revenues and profits. Personal Net Worth actually hit $90 million briefly, but dropped probably because i stopped growing the company aggressively.
Total number of trains is 85, with the highest traffic runs being Vienna-Budapest and Gyor-Zagreb (with stops in between), each running eight freight trains hauling 7+caboose to each stop, and four express trains hauling 4+caboose to each stop. Second heaviest lines were Budapest-Timisora and Zalaegerszeg-Belgrade (with stops in between). They also had eight freight and four express, but the lines are longer and so traffic per mile was lighter.
