Flying Scotsman

[Hawk]

The following text is a compilation of what was salvaged from the old Gathering Forum. It contains postings from several different people.
Thanks goes out to Wolverine for putting this all together.

Hawk

Flying Scotsman
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Wow... 5 year gold in Flying Scotsman? how did you do it in such a short time? Did you buy industries at all? Or just fucus on express cargos?
I hauled all cargoes, like 5 wagons on a Firefly (I din't start running any train until the Firefly became available). I started in London and connected to Birmingham, and after that portsmouth. Then I built a second line around the Kingston upon Hull - Carlise area. I bought my own stock whenever I could, and after 5 years I had a good personal purchase power and a strong company credit rating + an average speed of over 12 MPH, so I just bought up my opponents stock (neither was doing particularly good) and took out bonds to have my company to merge with them, and then connect to Edinburgh.
I think I needed to borrow like $3 million in bonds to afford it, it was at least a not to impressive amoount.
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Played this tonight for the first time (Medium) and achieved Gold on January 1845.
Started in the most obvious location - the Birmingham-Manchester-Liverpool run. Connected to Leeds (and one of my opponents) within a year and Gloucester (the other opponent) within two. Proceeded north to Edinburgh and as soon as that was hooked up and ready to bring income, down southeast to London, via Cambridge. Even got Portsmouth and Guilford hooked up in my spare time. Used Firefly's throughout the game, upgrading my 4 little engines ASAP.
Before I went on my final bond splurge (thereby skewing the figures), my numbers looked like this:
# Stations: 14
# Trains: 20
Total Revenue: $14,249 All dollar amounts in thousands (000) except per-share/load mile figures.
Previous years Rev: $5,425
Total Expenses: $4,089
Previous Years Expenses: $1,501
Total Net Profit: $10,160
Previous Years Net Profit: $3,924
# bonds: 3
Outstanding Shares: 250,000
Market Cap: $18,750
Weighted Return on Average: 80%
Earnings Per Share: $14.89
Book Value per share: $38
Revenue per Share: $20.61
Load Revenues: $14,300
Express Revenues: $10,800
Track Miles: 870
Revenue per Load Mile: $311
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Playing the Flying Scotsman campaign. My average train speed was 15 MPH
After connecting London-Edinburgh I set up a six car nonstop Edinburgh London route pulled by a Firefly. It took 13 months for the train to reach London so-------
13 months x 30 days x 24 hours x 15 mph = 140,400 miles.
I had no idea that the UK covered that much ground!!
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maybe that's what they meant by "the sun never sets on the British empire" It couldn't with that land mass.
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Yes, we all know that the time in RRT3 is out of wack with reality. But what can we do PopTop controls the horizontal and the vertical. They can delude you with a thousand images or expand one image to crystal clarity and beyond.
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So what is the distance that RRT3 claims the track is between Edinborough and London? Then you can adjust that against the 140,400 miles and figure out the great, mysterious RRT3 all-messed up constant to figure out how fast the trains are REALLY going. (My guess? Around 1/250th of the speed, or 0.06 mph)
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actually 15 mph sound more like the West Coast line
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How fitting of me to be listening to the stones "love in vain" while reading this thread.
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Huh?
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Sorry it's a blues tune, with train refrences, sympathy for your plight.
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Campaign Scenario #6 - Flying Scotsman
I completed this scenario yesterday. Not many problems to get the gold medal. Best starting point: Manchester. Next station should be Birmingham, to cut the land. I had some trouble with the volatile stock market and margin calls. Letting my company heavily buying back its stocks helped me to get out of the trouble. Feeding my highland cows with excellent corn from Nottingham gave me industry profits and Edinburgh enough meat. London was the station I connected last.
EDIT: For some weird reason I overlooked the metathread and I could have inserted my experience there. I tried again to beat the time record of forum member besterik and made it in less than 4,5 years at normal level. With some more energy ist should have been possible in less than 4 years. It's a question of stressing the bond limit. This time I abstained from repurchasing shares. What for if my stock price was exploding anyways. Besides one cattle farm I ignored industry entirely. I went straight between London and Edinburgh. The only deviations were Liverpool and Nottingham. I only bought about 25% of the shares of my welldoing competitors. I didn't care about the speed goal at all. And no rebate for the hungry.
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For fun I played this one as the robber barron. While the constraints are starting only one company and being the sole surviving railroad, nowhere does it say that the RR you start has to be the one that survives.
Left a lot of angry shareholders in my wake, wound up with an obscene PNW, and yet took some strange pleasure in the amorality of it all.
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wrote:
For fun I played this one as the robber barron. While the constraints are starting only one company and being the sole surviving railroad, nowhere does it say that the RR you start has to be the one that survives.
Left a lot of angry shareholders in my wake, wound up with an obscene PNW, and yet took some strange pleasure in the amorality of it all.
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from one robber baron to another, there's more than one way to...you know.
Playing on hard, its natural to buy industry, take over each AI, lay burn track with them, buy them a yr later for a song, run a 1-car train one time between London and Brighton, complete connections to all that AI burn track and build stations at each end, get gold after year-end.
No time record though, gold 2/47 (7 yrs). Cbb to play 2nd time.
Glad you had fun with it too. lol.

[RayofSunshine]

Again, I am very much surprised that there is not a thread already started on another Campaign scenario of the RT3 Edition.

However, it is an interesting scenario, and again am some what surprised that on my 1st attempt years ago, that I nearly ran out of time to the deadline, and being able to complete all the requirements for Gold, and probably in the Hard level.

Of course after years of some experience with the workings of the required goals of CBV, PNW, and LIP, the process has probably become easier.

Anyway, the deadline was 1865, and I was able to get the Gold, in Hard level by just a couple months in Jan 1857. I don't believe that I am that good a Tycoon, so believe that the scenario is not all that difficult.

But I hope that anyone who has played it, has had as much enjoyment as I have to go back to these Campaigns, just for fun.

[BikerTim]

You are right. This is not a difficult scenario. In fact, I consider it to be the easiest scenario in the game. One time I achieved the gold medal, hard level, in just 7 years.

[Canadian Viking]

I'm replaying the Campaign and am in the middle of this scenario right now. This is my 3rd time through the Campaign (all played on Hard) and I agree with Biker Tim that this is the easiest one of them all. This time I started by linking Manchester and Birmingham and the money just rolls in. I may not get gold in 7 years because I don't keep a narrow focus only on the game's goals; I enjoy building an empire and growing my net worth even if the scenario doesn't call for it. One time I built south from London to Southampton before building north to Edinburgh. I find the German scenario a tough one so after getting gold in the last possible year on that one, it is fun and relaxing to have this easy scenario next.

[Hawk]

Again, I am very much surprised that there is not a thread already started on another Campaign scenario of the RT3 Edition.

Actually, there was, as you can see by this merge of the two threads I just did.
You probably couldn't find it because you might have misspelled Scotsman in your search.

[sleepy]

Coming from the last scenario I played, the States of Germany, this map was very easy. Waiting 6 months or so and ditching the Adler 2-2-2 for the faster Firefly 2-2-2 on flat sections and Beuth 2-2-2 for hilly sections means the lifetime average train speed requirement is easily met.

I should've been able to complete this scenario in less than 7 years with no rush at all, but I still haven't figured out how to take over AIs effectively other than buying up >50% of shares on margin and paying as little as possible for the merger (and I haven't attempted robber baron tactics yet). So it took me 8 years. One thing to note is the extraordinarily large price differences between Scotland and England for goods, livestock, and milk. Even a train from Dundee to Edinburgh with only 7 cars of milk and goods has an extreme delivery profit exceeding $500k. Also, as before, passengers (and mail) are very lucrative, especially when connecting little towns that otherwise don't have many resources.

My strategy was the obvious one: start in London, by far the largest city, and expand from there. I was considering doing some dirty tricks to the AI, like what I read about somewhere where you can lay track in between AI routes to interfere with the AI's rail-laying algorithm, but I decided against it.

[Gumboots]

Have you tried it on the hardest setting yet?

[RulerofRails]

Some of the prices quoted on your pic are much higher than normal, that would seem to indicate a lower difficulty level but a quick check of this map in the editor shows that these high prices are caused by a famine event that raises the prices of most food products by 50%. RT3 has a bug when implementing this type of event. There is a chain reaction where price starts spiraling upward with outbreaks of much higher price forming at random stations that are well serviced. Link here. If you ever see reports of insane profits, this bug is probably involved. I once had a train with over $10M delivery on 8 cars of Lumber.

This map also has events to increase passenger traffic and revenue. Also, the game mimics the timeline of passenger travel by railways by awarding higher express revenue for an earlier year. This is an early map. Poptop made this map easy.

A lot of Robber Baron tricks require 51% ownership in a company. The techniques you mentioned and the stock market are the main tactics in other cases. Good effort to only need a year to dispense with the AI.

[sleepy]

Nope, I'm playing the whole campaign on Normal.

Just for fun, I've connected every city in the visible map, with the exception of Ireland which I don't think I can connect to England due to suspension bridges not being available. The region around Holyhead is pretty mountainous, but even connecting just to Liverpool can be a good investment, with shipments reaching up to $400-550k.

Connecting to Fort William was the most challenging, but the convenient valley formed by the Loch Ness (which strangely I can build over, but Loch Oich is water on the map) means that long stretches have very low grade.

(A grade 0 followed by a 25?)

For comparison to my rail network, here's a rail map from 1850:
And the network today:

I would like to put these side by side, but I don't see a way to resize images with the img tag.

As for what RulerofRails has said about a bug, I did see a weird blotch only around Dorchester, but I assumed the big price difference was from the region just being cheaper from the map seeding. I started the campaign again to test and there were no red regions for dairy at the start.

[RulerofRails]

No idea why Poptop didn't fill Loch Ness with water.

As to your 25% grade, my is that this was left when the graded banking for the bridge "collapsed" (returned to following the terrain) for some reason. Sometimes it's possible to get long elevated embankments that climb mountains at a sustained grade up to a bridge when building in the mountains.

Your price map is washed out from having the Graphics setting "Disable Hardware T & L" checked. With Vista and later versions of Windows this is often required to run the game at all. However, you could try this which is an emulator of sorts allowing the game to run with that switch off. Result: price map will show much more detail and you will have water reflections as well.

With the washed-out price map, it's difficult to see the price outbreaks. You found one. I'm pretty sure there are more that you cannot see.

[sleepy]

Perhaps that may work for me, but I'm wary to try it because I'm already using a custom rt3.exe, and my experience with d3d8.dll is the game irrecoverably crashing and failing to load, which I had to do a reinstall to fix. I actually rarely use the price heatmap anyways, and instead always rely on hovering my cursor over the spot to determine the exact price along with the station to station shipping profits display. The heatmap is a good enough approximation for me currently.

In fact, I'm not opposed to price outbreaks. I've encountered them rarely and I'm not invested enough in industries for them to wreck havoc. They also make the game more interesting and it's fun to imagine scenario explanations for them (a growing settlement of villagers obsessed with dairy, steel needed to build a massive statue of whatever political leader fervently captures the public's praise currently, etc.)

[Gumboots]

If you like price outbreaks, try Low-grade's Chile map for 1.06. It goes nuts on crystal prices if you pump it right, and has all sorts of scope for dirty deeds as well. You'll really learn how to use the stock market with that game.