Eastern China

[Gumboots]

The AI's are useful in this one. You can make good supplementary income by connecting their networks to each other cheaply, but not to the tracks you want to run on yourself. They'll happily run on your track and pay you for it, but you don't have to let them onto your network as such. It's a good dodge.

It's been ages since I played this one. I can't remember if I ever got it without AI's.

[RulerofRails]

It was so long ago that I played this also, but I'm sure it can be completed without AIs. The goals are quite simple, typical of the PopTop maps. Unless you keep yourself entertained with some interesting strategy choices it can become a waiting game.

Something to remember on this map is that it uses a fuel cost reduction event. Thanks to careful testing we now know that these are broken. They appear to be working as you will see a rating of "Good", but in reality the engine's fuel cost is unchanged.

This may be a good map to split passenger and freight traffic once the QJ becomes available (that's with the default 1.05 engines/cars). The other thing: did anyone try ignoring the warnings and just maxing out bonds from the start? I will put that down to try in the future. A depressed economy has cheap track laying which will still allow decent expansion. Might allow starting the hauls earlier which could in balance turn out comparable in terms of time-to-complete. I'm talking if you don't purposely "cheat" the haulage (linking the ports together anyone? Hauls of Coal and Iron within the Northwest Mountains.) If you cheat the haulage, maxing the bonds will probably be noticeably quicker.

[CeeBee]

I played this without AI's sometime in the last year. I don't think I made the goals but I do remember running a lot of coal and iron trains down the mountain.

[Gumboots]

It was so long ago that I played this also, but I'm sure it can be completed without AIs. The goals are quite simple, typical of the PopTop maps.

The tricky bit is that if you are determined to play steam to the end your overheads will go through the roof late in the game. I don't doubt that it could be won without AI's if using electric and/or diesel, but steam would be rather hard. Once the steam overheads go up, the miscellaneous income from AI's is about all the money I made.

I'm tempted to have another crack at this one just to use some new autoracks I saw somewhere. Unfortunately this map's timeframe uses the ugliest ones.

[low_grade]

I tried issuing all the bonds for some cheap expansion, but the event triggers every year until you pay your debt back down to $2M. I paid back maybe $4.5M of the $8M I needed before running in the red with no hope of climbing out. Still might be possible, but probably not at the start, more when you've done some work to develop the industries and see some good price gradients and stacks of cargo that need fresh markets.

And I used the V2 until it went away in 1966, then the DB BR 01.5 (I downloaded that one here I think, decent engine but not better than the V2), which I'm sure would have taken me to the win before 1983, but the Deltic and finally a few HST's were nice at the end.

And yeah, usually if I don't have to play with AI's I choose not to, their sloppy track laying drives me crazy. But I never even thought of using them to subsidize me, I'll have to keep that in mind on future maps.

But dang this map was hard to stay profitable on! Even when I won, there were three or so save points I went back to multiple times after attempting a strategy for development which ended up running me into the red within a few years. I rarely use save points, if I mess up once on a scenario the 2nd try is usually golden. I wonder if Poptop had a beta version of code that they playtested this on where the fuel cost reduction events worked properly, and then afterwards the fuel cost reduction events got broken?

[RulerofRails]

Well, I'm pretty sure that I scanned the events carefully - I did it again just now - there is no event that increases overhead cost. There is however a +15% Steam Maintenance attached to the event where you have to choose whether to switch to Diesel or Electric. This compounds with the +10% that is applied at game start. Effect: +25% at that point the game. Steam engine costs rises at the same time which helps somewhat to balance things.

My latest research (still testing) seems to indicate that the closest correlation to engine life is really the ratio of engine cost to maintenance per year. I'm still working on this, but I expect that it will be good strategy to replace the QJs every 3-4 years. The other engines (A1, Class 01) might make 5 to 6 at that point. (Low_grade you seem to playing in 1.06 if you have the V2?)

Low_grade, it's pointless to try to pay off debt unless you ran out of good investment options, in which case you should be making a lot of money which will make it easy. A hard-nosed effort to re-pay when you aren't finished the expansion phase will flat-spot growth severely. More than 3 years for the process is too long IMO. If you are going to ignore the limit, go all the way. Just accept that the economy will stay down. Disclaimer, I didn't actually complete a play this way yet, will inform when I do.

[low_grade]

Really? I regularly go 25 years on engines with decent reliability, it's pretty low on the priority list (but reliability is very high...) so I never get around to it until I've got nothing else to do with cash. If I'm looking for 20%+ returns, I guess the increased cost of maintenance would have to be >=20% the cost of replacement. That's really in 6-7 years?!? And yes I'm playing 1.06, though I'd be happy to use the A1 and Class 01, with the AI's for some help maybe, and try again.

And when I bonded out I really got beat up quick by the crash in cargo rates due to the already high fuel and maintenance and other expenses, my profit was maybe $2.7K on $10M revenue for much of the game (55/225 lifetime to be precise on this win) and that was with the economy generally good. But if what you say about engine replacement rates checks out, I'm leaving a lot of cash on the table in my games...

[Gumboots]

Really? I regularly go 25 years on engines with decent reliability...

Then you're throwing away money. We crunched the numbers on this too. We haz done lotsa number crunching.

The short version is that due to the way maintenance cost increases every year, which is hard coded and can't be fiddled with, keeping locos for long periods rapidly becomes bad economics. You can do it if you just want to keep them for sentimental reasons, but it will cost you (lots).

The caveat here is time until end of game. If you have some locos which are nearing their optimum replacement year, but only a few years left to play, then in that situation it can be cheaper to hang onto them. OTOH if you're halfway through a 30 year scenario like this one and you have 10 year old locos, keeping them until the 30 year deadline just wouldn't make sense. They'll cost you more than newer ones, and they'll be less reliable.

[low_grade]

Well, I do replace after 10 years a lot of times if I can, because I know maintenance goes up... but mostly I hate the increased risk of breakdwns. Looking at a save from the playthrough, a V2 in 1977 has a cost of 141k (there's some adjustment to cost in this scenario, usually 150k), maintenance of 62k the previous year (I selected diesel, so +25%? so *.8=50k, starting maint of 14k, so +36k over the years (24 year old train), and 36/150 = 24% return on investment savings by replacing, that's not much more than the 20% goal I usually keep in mind, so in this case it appears that waiting to replace really didn't cost us a potential good return, and in fact replacing after 10 years was a bad return. All the 11 year old trains had 33 maint, *0.8=say 27= +13 over base = 13/150 which is less than 10% return on investment.

Sure about those maths?

[Gumboots]

Sure about those maths?

Yes. Like I said, we haz done lotsa number crunching. We now have spreadsheets for everything. We can tell you exactly what breakdown chance any loco will have at any given age with any given consist. We can tell you how fast it will go on the flat and up any grade, even grades the game doesn't give you figures for, to an accuracy of 1 mph at worst, for any combination of locomotive weight, consist weight, pulling power and free weight. We can tell you how much it will cost to run per year or per mile. And we can tell you which year it should be replaced in to minimise overall costs, provided only that we know the applicable purchase price, maintenance cost, consist weight, and annual mileage.

We haz done lotsa number crunching. I may have mentioned this. Short version is that we have managed to reverse engineer the game's formulae for just about everything, and compiled them in a digestible format. Anything is predictable now.

[RulerofRails]

It's not just Maintenance Cost. Fuel Cost increases with age as well, but not as quickly. Also, when you choose to switch to Diesel or Electric engines, you don't get the second penalty for Steam Maintenance, only if you stay with Steam.

---

I checked the relationship between engine cost and maintenance cost some more. I was looking at some B-era locos. Shay versus Eight Wheeler for example. After some more checking, in D-era with an Average fuel rating, fuel costs are high enough to make the ratio of engine cost to maintenance much less significant on the overall. As such the event late in the game has little effect on the optimum lifespan (maybe one year), contrary to what I hurriedly guessed in my last post. No ridiculously short lifespans.

Also, my engine data that I had copied in from one of the older spreadsheets on this site had the wrong price for the QJ: $80k. This knocked a year off it's Optimum lifespan. It should be 7 years on medium to long runs with a full (7+caboose) consist of default (40 ton) freight cars. With the events in this game we see a drop to 6 years.

Note: this is referencing Displayed Engine Age which is used in the aging calculations, in reality thanks to engine age = 0 until an engine's first December, there's up to an extra year of life to be had.

In the engine replacement calculations (spreadsheet) we are calculating the Average Yearly Cost (all costs including that of the new replacement engine) for replacement in any given year within a practical range (22 or so years) and then taking the minimum value.

This is the low point on a curve which is pretty broad. There's not a great penalty for keeping engines longer (reliability obviously and I've seen a little evidence that engines slowly lose top speed as they age). Sometimes they can go double that age before Average Yearly Cost rises by 20% (lots of factors in play). This must be related to Engine cost to get any sort of ROI figure.

I've hesitated to recommend replacing engines from a ROI perspective. I can't decide if cost-cutting should be treated as a real investment.

On this map I salute you if you can get a reliable 20% ROI from steam (including cost of stations and track) without micro-managing. This is D-era. In the 19th century it's a different story.

PS.
Fundamental discoveries you should know about:
1. The in-game performance readout is wrong. Car weights are double what they should be, so to see real D-era stats, consult C-era display, or use the spreadsheet (NOTE: At time of writing this is still using the track pieces count for any reading of "mileage". I cause a whole lot of confusion with that. )
2. Engine and Tender weight has a direct affect on fuel cost, charged at the same rate as consist weight. The logical explanation of: what on earth is wrong with the Big Boy/Challenger!?!

---

On the topic of the map, my natural instinct is to haul Coal and Iron to Taiyuan as this is the only location close enough to the Iron and Coal mines that we would hope to see enough price transmission after some load deliveries that the mines will turn a profit. This is good because when they are running in profit, the mines will actually produce their stated output. But it's a cheat. This is the problem with haulage goals: in order to not "cheat" them in some way I restrict my options so much that it's not too much fun.

[low_grade]

I suspected but hadn't really looked at fuel costs rising with age, too, of course this makes a big difference... I fiddled with the spreadsheet a bit and can confirm that 20% ROI is reached in 10 years with the Class V2!

The 20% ROI is a guideline I use for purchasing industries mainly, if I can't get 20% I feel it's generally better to expand my rail network, and I'll probably stick with that figure for loco replacement calculations. Is 20% ROI realistic for steam networks post 1950? Probably not, but I have no problem switching to electric preferably by then for the few outstanding electric locos available (E18, Shinkansen, Class 103, ICE.) In this case it made no sense to go electric since the cost of converting would have been astronomical, so I went with diesel, though the Red Devil is also an awesome loco, but I finished in 1983 so it wouldn't have become available and I would have been stuck with engines a fair bit inferior to the C55 Deltic.

[RulerofRails]

I completed two different runs without any AI players. The first one I maxed out the bonds started in the south, and was really fastidious about preventing re-hauling (only connected to one port). Mao's forced collectivism on the farms was enough to hit my profit margins which understandably were not that high. By the time I had the long-haul trains running to make the hauls there was little hope of paying off the bonds. Didn't haul any train between two cities in the North-west territory either. Wasn't quite sustainable, but made the hauls anyway. Not the best idea I've had. If I was more patient to build my company a bit stronger instead of trying to push for the haulage early which weakened me, would have completed quicker. Can't see any clear advantage.

The second play, I wanted to try something different starting somewhere other than the south and never issuing any bonds. There are two decent options (only started the map a handful of times) depending on the seed. There seemed to either be 2 or 3 ranches in Baoding, or 2 Oil Wells in Lishi and Jiexiu. When I figured out a plan of action, it turned out that I had the seed with the "extra" Oil Wells. So I started with two H10s running from Lishi and Jiexiu into Taiyuan. I never connected to the north to prevent getting "cheat" haulage numbers for Coal and Iron, instead my first expansion was south to Houma and Weinan for Coal and Iron that can be safely hauled to Taiyuan without counting towards the goals (those cities are not in the north-west territory). Used the H10 exclusively (actually has slightly better fuel economy than the others). Company was healthier (better economy helps), and without burn track I finished this play when I reached Shanghai in October 1969 with a more balanced focus for corresponding timing on haulage completion (Clothing was last). All Autos were produced in Dalian. This time I wasn't as careful to watch for re-hauls as I was playing more relaxed. I connected to two nearby ports and hauled between them. I don't think they were responsible for that many hauls of consumer cargoes. And, not on purpose, but I did catch one train carrying a couple of loads of Coal from Yuxian to Datong (was originally running from Yuxian to Beijing, re-routed it since supplies at Yuxian were temporarily exhausted without thinking about the potential for a Coal haul up the hill).

For the record, I didn't replace any engines on the second run. On the first run I replaced some of my 20 year old A1s, but finances were too tight to enable me to replace as many as I wanted to. I thought maybe you guys were hitting a wall with a big escalation of costs since there was described a big "overhead". That's why I thought, oh, maybe engine replacements will help.

What I now think was happening is a result of Mao's forced increase in farming output (all resources -50% production for 5 years). (Maybe I'm incorrect on this also ) The effects of this will be felt for a bit longer than the end of those 5 years (after production is reset to normal, it will take a year or two for normal flows to stabilize). There's an attitude to be super-duper careful and button down the hatches to weather the storm (even if you don't know of such event, if I see a big change in economics with things that used to be profitable becoming break-even I know to watch out. I tend to reign in expansion for a while. And not be super worried if I make a loss for a year or two, just look ahead (a previous event mentions a 5 year plan, although a better warning couldn't go astray).

[Grandma Ruth]

I am playing this in 2023: it feels really uncomfortable playing a game where Wuhan is the prime location. When this scenario was created, of course nobody had any inkling of what role Wuhan would play in real life a bit further down the track. Spooky!
However, I enjoyed the game and its interesting quirks. I haven't read this thread yet but I wonder if everybody did the same as me - took out loads of bonds just to see what would happen? Having found out what would happen, I kept my debt to a reasonable level in the next try!
The requirements are all quite modest and you have thirty years to do it so I didn't bother too much at first. I connected all the major cities - by which I mean **** and *** size. Just two or three together wherever it was convenient to make a route. Then I let this run for a couple of years.
Next was to connect to a port - Rizhao was the nearest so I connected all stations from there to Wuhan and made the port cargoes quite easily. I took my time and finished this part of the requirements in ten years 1958 to 1968.
By now I thought it was time to connect Beijing and Shanghai. Most of the map was connected already so it didn't take much to make that final link. It was actually a working railroad, I hauled cargoes along it (not my usual technique with connection goals).
Meanwhile the NW coal and iron was actually quite a pointless exercise. In my first few tries I wanted to make and use steel but the terrain was just against that idea. Wuhan was already making autos so what would be the point? It was very easy to bring the iron and coal down as far as the steel mill near Taiyuan - I didn't connect the city, too much like hard work! The steel mill remained in existence just about long enough to fill the iron quota, then suddenly disappeared. Not a problem as coal was still needed by electric plants so I did then connect the city. I finally hauled the last load of coal in June 1971 and got the Gold.
This was a very gentle, leisurely scenario and I finished quite a bit before the deadline even taking it easy. Now I'm going to read the thread and see what everyone else thought!
ETA:
I never even thought about having AIs, just played it without any - as it came "out of the box".