Alternate USA

[Gumboots]

All of the default scenarios are intended to be played with 1.04 or 1.05. PopTop never even knew 1.06 existed.

TBH I would prefer a version of 1.06 that had "haul at a loss" removed, because the problem with the way it was coded in 1.06 is that it screws the original custom consist option. This is really useful at times. I often want more control over the consist, but without forcing the train to haul things at a loss.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever played Alternate USA (or not that I can remember) so I'll leave the assessments of the revision to those who know the original.

[Grandma Ruth]

Of course! I should have realised that as I worked on the development of 1.06 myself... We had a lot of discussion about what we wanted to include/exclude, add on, bring back, etc. I think the custom consist thing was an attempt to mirror real life: you might want to ship raw materials for your industry, for example. The railway side would make a loss but the industry side would make a profit. Something like the reverse of what the big American railroads did when they created amusement parks to drive up passenger traffic. It would be nice if this was a feature you could switch on or off, but I don't have enough technical knowledge to figure out how that could be done.

[RulerofRails]

(My take.) It seems that back in the time, a certain portion of players weren't perfectly happy with the core gameplay compared to RTII. I think ship-at-a-loss was an effort to make gameplay more like RTII. Over time I think that the "newer" players accepted/embraced the gameplay mechanics in RT3 more. If somebody succeeded to make 1.05 gameplay (cargo behavior) more like RT3 I think South Central British Columbia is as close as it gets. Done with a great deal of care/uses precise setup.

The thing with ship-at-a-loss is that you are forcing a move. Except in cases where the differential is $0/1, the same train on auto consist will try to bring that cargo back to the source. If there is another train on the route it will also try to bring that cargo back. I would compare it to swimming against the tide. Can be done (but why?), and is good if you like micro.

It can be good in certain situations for recently introduced cargo, or equalzing resource stacks. Actually, the removal of price islands in 1.06 (part of the ship-at-a-loss implementation) means that resource stacks and consequently industrial production are a lot more unstable.

Disclaimer: through advanced planning of routes I have the experience to get about as much control over 1.05 cargo flows as I want. I've definitely outgrown what "help" ship-at-a-loss can provide.


I did take a quick look at your version. Didn't see anything wrong at a glance. My musings on the display (it's not meant to be a critique of what you did): In 1.06 it's not too hard to have YTD displayed in the end-of-year ledger, if you save to a variable. Then just display this variable at year end only. Also the in-year haulage could be just one event positioned under the original block for each territory. That would be a saving: 3 "new" events per territory instead of 5. For 1.05 it's impossible to display YTD haulage in the EoY ledger correctly (no "live" update to correctly count hauls made in the last days of the year). The "solution" is to record to a variable three states: fail (1), threshold met (0), success (2). The current events can record these, then to display in the ledger 2 extra events are needed, bringing the total back to 5.

[Gumboots]

Re "drop shipping": You could be right about the RT2 comparison thing. I remember in some of the old 1.06 discussion threads they were talking about "drop-shipping", and seemed to think HAAL would help with that. The reasoning may have been that (for example) you could haul coal out of the hills to a rural station on the flat, in an area that still had a $0 price for coal, and then have it picked up by another train that would haul it to your steel mills. I can see the sense of HAAL in RT3 from that perspective, but not having ever played RT2 myself I have no idea how its cargo system worked.

My problem with 1.06 HAAL is that often I want to do something like have an express train haul one or two cars of any cargo, just to keep profits up when express is somewhat intermittent. Naturally I want it to pick up the most valuable thing available for the "any cargo" slot, and run empty if nothing profitable is around, but sometimes it will end up hauling any old crud at a loss if nothing else is available. This reduces speed, burns fuel, and reduces reliability for no benefit. It can also drag away a cargo that I want to stay put. Admittedly it doesn't happen all the time, so I could probably just ignore it when it does happen.

Incidentally, WP&P's additional trackside buildings were an attempt to allow "drop-shipping", so he may also have been influenced by RT2.

Actually, the removal of price islands in 1.06 (part of the ship-at-a-loss implementation) means that resource stacks and consequently industrial production are a lot more unstable.

You think the price islands were removed as part of ship-at-a-loss? Offhand I can't see how they are related. How would that work?

[RulerofRails]

RTII system is static. If you never connect to a resource, the products it produces have no impact on the game. Also conversion at factories is instantaneous so there aren't any "stacks" of resources waiting for conversion. The variable on price is at the point of consumption only (your job is to chose the best location), which is promoting heavy micro since there is no auto consist. But the main flaws in that game are the passenger model, you get to pick their destination and also the formula for price is breaking to the verge of exploit when travelling a long distance. The other problem is that the only corner angle is 45 degrees, but the train thinks it's a 2% grade. When combined with a real grade, this is a show-stopper for express trains. In other words the mechanics are promoting un-realistic track plans. Run as straight and far as possible and hook a lot of express = cash cow.

Milo disabled the station-hold-cargo code aka price islands when putting ship at a loss, for an understandable reason. The price equalization between stations of a heavy losing shipment can drag price at the source station (green zone) way down on the station cell (even to deep red). It's open for exploit, if you try. I just don't think he understood fully the benefits that price islands give. If we are worried about exploits, I realized a bit ago that there is a bad exploit in normal 1.05 which is IMO way worse than price islands could ever be. If you remove a station at the top of the list (when train is unloading), the train thinks it's in a different station (previous 2nd on the list) and will load cargo from there. Even though physically it never moved. Bending the time/space continuum is the worst exploit I can imagine for a transport game.

[Gumboots]

I don't think anyone is likely to use the 1.05 exploit in practice, although I suppose you could invent specific situations when it would be usable. The 1.06 exploit is definitely usable if price islands are removed, although again it would only be in some specific situations.

[Grandma Ruth]

In 1.06 it's not too hard to have YTD displayed in the end-of-year ledger, if you save to a variable. Then just display this variable at year end only. Also the in-year haulage could be just one event positioned under the original block for each territory.

I just made these changes for my own convenience, then thought other people might like them. I wasn't really too interested in the end-of-year status but in the day-to-day, so I could know when a cargo requirement was satisfied and then put that train into doing something more useful. I don't have the patience to keep count on paper or in my head so I made it an automatic thing.
Playing in 1.06 made the whole thing different, I now realise. I used a mixed cargo consist quite a lot - so it's a custom consist but you have, say four "grain" plus four "any cargo", and set to haul all eight. Usually works, but sometimes the train can't find enough cargo so stays put; you have to keep an eye on it.
Thanks for the feedback.

[LJC-DDS]

I wasn't at all sure where to post this, sorry!
I think everyone who's played this scenario has been frustrated by its shortcomings, little annoying things like the win not being triggered. Also I found it very difficult to keep track of how many loads of stuff I'd hauled, so I've made a few tweaks to the original. The only major thing is to make the revenue requirement a bit more realistic (though it's still not much of a challenge!).
By the way, I think this is supposed to be played without the 1.06 patch or at least without using the "custom" consist. A fine line between cheating and
So here's a new version - the Alternate Alternate USA.

I downloaded your version and installed the file under maps in my RR Tycoon 3 file, but only the original Alternate USA shows up in the game. Did I miss a step somewhere or did I place it in the wrong folder?

[Grandma Ruth]

I think this is something to do with what version you've got. My "Alternate Alternate USA" is for RT3 with the 1.06 patch. So it won't show up in the unmodified RT3 version. (I was pretty confused at the time, and even more so now!) But that's what I think you need to do.