North South Corridor

[belbincolne]

I'm guessing cos I haven't built a scenario for years but I guess you use a cheat code:

Press period key, then type

big dog : Give your player $10 million
fat cat : Give your player $1 million
bailout : Give your company $10 million
subsidy : Give your company $1 million

[BikerTim]

Thanks. Any suggestions help.

[EPH]

I didn't use cheat codes. I set up the AI players as usual, then (still in the editor!) selected the player (click the small portrait icon) and founded a company. You can click on the company cash display and type in any amount you want. When all railroads are finished, set the cash toi a nominal amount, have each player resign and then remove the AI players from the list.

Sorry if this isn't clear; I'm down with a cold and don't have access to RRT3 right now.

[Dixie Flyer]

I still have not got Gold on this. I really need to give it another go. I have tried several variations of the historical route and that has led mostly to nowhere.

[EPH]

Orange46 - there is a good place for a station on the west side of Chicago, close enough to have full coverage, and there are usually two places in Memphis, either toward the river or east of town. New Orleans is too crowded for a fifth - that's why you buy one of the companies that already runs there. :) My favorite trick is to buy the Mississippi Valley line, buy the New Orleans Great Northern and then link the line from Baton Rouge across to the NOGN terminal.

As you have noted, the 'best' way to play this one is by purchasing and assembling companies, not by laying new track (though a Houston-New Orleans line will be amazingly profitable).

I have a number of 'new' engines in my kit including the G6, Hudson, Zephyr and U1. I almost never use the F3 because of its slow acceleration, though it is useful for express-only runs (say, Chicago to St Louis).

BikerTim - I've found the St Louis Terminal to be a cash cow once the other railroads buy trains and get running. Almost all profit, though the large amount of track in and around the city is some overhead. Try starting with the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley or the Alton - those are both fun.

Dixie Flyer - this one is hard, largely because of the post-WW1 economy and the Great Depression. Play for the long-term and concentrate on making your purchases count. Control expenses (fuel savings!) and don't be afraid to go into debt if the railroad you want to buy will make money (they will, just not when the AI manages them :) ). DON'T try to buiild lots of new track - you will kill yourself. For most of the roads, local traffic is the key (for the Alton, the Chicago, Peoria, Springfield, St Louis run and the St Louis, Jefferson City, Kansas City run). USE THE OPTIONS to customize your railroad (press 4 to be taken to that area, then lay a single unit of track in one of the boxes. When you exit track-laying the cash for that track will be returned to you and you will be offered ways to customize your railroad). Single-agent freight pays you $100,000 cahs per year - that's a free bond every 5 years! Others cost money but may well recoup many times that cost. Experiment. :)

For a beginner I recommend starting with the Alton or the Miss Valley. Pause the game when it starts and buy up more than half of the stock, then get yourself elected chairman. After the first year you will be given a $1 million dollar payout - spend it wisely! Hope this helps.

[RulerofRails]

Just tried this one for the first time. Was meaning to try it for ages now, but finally got it. Great scenario, lots of fun, thanks EPH!

I spent 15-20 mins studying the different companies and a quick glance over the economy. Decided to pick the Nickel Plate RR to start as the short distance hop from Gary to Chicago will virtually guarantee steady points and I wanted to get those Steel Mills running and help the economy for everyone. I could only manage to purchase 45% of the company, so I waited out the first year and after the year end stock split, I had enough purchasing power to get the 51% (which I maintained throughout the game) and took control of the Nickel Plate RR.

I had a pretty relaxed run, and only had to back-track at the Great Depression. I was anticipating something like this, so mid-game I was trying to keep debt less than purchasing power. But I had overextended as I was in the middle of a buy-in aiming for a mid class merger. Spectacular fall. Could make the merger, but I had spent too much on the buy-in so was -$1M purchasing power. A back-track to the start of the year and selling out most of my shares in the AI companies except those in the company I wanted to merge was the ticket (didn't short-sell). I didn't takeover any of the AI companies to manipulate anything, just did straight out mergers (I found their trains after the merge by their smaller consists, Pg Dn through the list, pretty fast). At this point in the game PNW didn't matter all that much as far as the goals went.

Wovlerine, I was surprised to read that using robber baron tricks and disconnecting the St. Louis station you only had 166 points in 1944. I left all track intact and if I played for an extra year would have been only 3 behind. I am sure your PNW and company profits dwarfed what I had though. I didn't control the map, just made strategic investments towards the goals. Maybe what made the difference was focusing on the short-haul passengers to and from the required cities for which I was using custom consists for an express/freight mix. Normally 5-freight+3-express. This way I was catching most of the low value passengers as well.

I enjoyed this one a lot. I liked the way the AI behaved. Later in the game they were making great money some years, average others, and only a little occasionally. This dynamic makes it nice to strategize good timing for the mergers. I like the story of Tigrett as well. Maybe it is no coincidence that the name Taggart from Atlas Shrugged seems similar? Maybe I am seeing the connection, but from the in-game snippets it seems maybe he had a bit more integrity than some of the other tycoons. Will have to check out his story further. I incorrectly assumed that the customization options were choices that you could only have one at a time. This means that it was mid-game before I discovered my error and got them all. This might have slowed the AI up a little, but I will look to get them much earlier in the future.

[EPH]

Isaac Tigrett is one of the 'forgotten' but great railroad tycoons - and he did it without using robber baron tactics. In fact he played very well with competitors and tried to work with the IC until they tried to muscle him out of his Paducah/Cairo nexus. Once he decided he had to beat them or fail, he won in spectacular fashion. For years university business courses used the GM&O as a showcase example of how to take scattered failing companies and unite them into a profitable whole. It is telling that after his death, when the GM&O was sold, the IC broke up and sold off the pieces so that it could never be put back together (and then the IC went bankrupt, but that's another story).

The Nickel Plate is probably the easiest route to a win. Try starting with the Yazoo, or the GM&N for a little more challenge. The NO Great Northern is another good fun start. My last game I started as Burlington, picked up St Louis Terminal, then I think the Mobile & Ohio and the Missouri Pacific. It was a massive monster - but it made gobs of money.

The customizations are my favorite part of this one. I confess I usually turn them all on (the ones that require cash I wait a bit for). The increases in performance are worth the increases in overhead, or so I think.

Around 1929 the St Louis Terminal gets choked with trains. I usually make acquiring the Terminal railroad a priority, then build another station (or two) and route my traffic over lines the AI hasn't clogged. If you take over a major railroad like the Missouri Pacific you'll find it is running dozens and dozens of outdated trains, all of which seem to be broken down in St Louis LOL. If I take over the Alton I always run a line to Gary (and sometimes on to Indianapolis and Cincinnati). That puts a crimp in the Nickel Plate.

Glad you enjoyed it! Try Lama's North-East Corridor, if you haven't already.

[Shamough]

The game doesn't allow me to test by total cars of cargo delivered, so I test for passengers only.

Event:
* End of Year
Conditions:
[Terr in question]
YTD Loads hauled to Terr. by Comp. Highest In Class is TRUE (this test is above the rest of the cargo tests. V1.06)
-=OR=-
YTD Loads hauled from Terr. by Comp. Highest In Class is TRUE

Hope this helps.


Shamough/Hans

[Shamough]

Game modification:
Player starts with $5M & The Great Depression stocks are set to -75%

Object is to own all companies and all stock before 1935. And make a profit! (For some strange reason when I take over a company it starts to tank ... and I haven't done a thing to the trains, consists or stations. I got tired of being $40M+ in debt and set all cargo prices to + 500% ... in two years I had over $6B !!! That implied that V1.06 is using 64 bit numbers for $$$ !

Just me messing around having fun in my second youth.

Shamough/Hans

[RulerofRails]

I was playing a little with the possibilities at the start. It is possible to absorb all three small companies by using the three medium ones to get 3M+ PNW without un-pausing the game. I was using the potential of all the bonds available. I first took control of a small company then used its bond to buyback all the stock there that I didn't own. Then I bought control of a medium company and used its cash+bond to pay double to take over that small company. Repeating this will give a great PNW. It is also just possible to takeover the smallest medium company with one of the largest ones of your choice. (Requires getting some of the shareholders to side with you as you need to sell some of the majority stake to bring the merger cost down to 1.5M.) I was just messing with this stuff and after then maxing out margin buying and then running the game for a second my PNW is just over 10M. Initially the AI companies are not going to make good money so I am not sure if selling out would be a good idea or to simply keep control and issue some of the now expensive stock which should give some money for engines. Else, let the AI buy the engines for you, maybe it will get some magic bonds? If you stay in command of the large company you now control, it should be pretty easy to merge with the remaining two medium companies which will give a large network pretty fast.

For some strange reason when I take over a company it starts to tank ... and I haven't done a thing to the trains, consists or stations.

I believe the reason the AI didn't make any money for you is because the AI automatically micro-manage their routes. The computer will often recalculate a train's route at each station (I don't claim to know what it checks for, but loads available and profit are likely). Once you takeover the company or merge with it, this process stops. The micro-managing nature of the computers calculations mean the current routes aren't selected for long-term sustainability. Because price differentials on the map are temporary, the computer will realize after a few trips that there is little current demand for transport on this route and re-route the train, instead of waiting for the consistent profits of a permanent route. The AI will often have many trains on a route that has lots of traffic even if there is only a small profit in it. This is what its re-routing algorithm tends to settle upon, short high-density routes. The re-routing algorithm is also good at finding highest profit available but it can sometimes ignore distance or running on another companies track. So you see some AI trains swarming on particular routes and others running really impractical routes (too long, or doing impractical long-way-round routes to a physically nearby city).

The computer also has a system of checking for un-hauled cargo to see if it needs to buy another engine. Once the original train has been re-routed it will only be a matter of time (demand drops, cargo builds up) before the computer sees the same need for a train as it saw to buy the first one. So, it will buy another train, which is also likely to eventually get pulled off this route onto another one. This process can repeat many times over the course of a game. This is my theory as to why the computer buys so many engines. I suspect that increasing express traffic is a good way to strengthen the AIs routing, as it should consistently visit much more of the map.

[EPH]

Winning with one of the big dogs is easy. Try piloting the New Orleans Great Northern or the Gulf Mobile & Northern to prominence.

[RulerofRails]

Well, I gave the New Orleans Great Northern a try since it looks the smallest bar the St Louis Terminal RR. To mix it up a little I decided to go into the editor to check the no margin stock buying/short selling box. I also elected to not issue stock or bonds. I never left the chairmanship of the New Orleans Great Northern throughout the game.

I bought a H10 Mikado to run from New Orleans to Jackson, MS. Then for the first 5 game years I did nothing apart from manage my stock investments in such a way as to line up a takeover of the St Louis Terminal RR. The St Louis Terminal RR is smallest and profit grows slower since it relies on the build-up of traffic to make good money. The way I managed to avoid using any bonds was to save the $1M government money and add on top of this what little I made on the New Orleans to Jackson run, plus the 100k per year I got for hiring the single freight agent. This time, I snared the St Louis Terminal company for around 1.7M in 1925. Then I targeted the Yazoo. In 1927, thanks to an economic downturn I bought it out. Then all I needed was to get control of the Alton and the Gulf Mobile & Northern to set up the hauling routes (access right costs and high station costs really encourage me to build the minimum and use existing architecture). I took advantage of the Great Depression to buy up the Alton in early 1930. I setup a few trains to finally start hauling a few passengers to and from the cities I now had access to, but kept focused on saving to buy out the Gulf Mobile & Northern while share prices were low in the depression. Then I worked on setting up the trains to haul the passengers to the required cities. I built some new track for this also. It then took me a couple of years to get everything up to speed, but then I was earning 10 points every single year to reach 153 at the end of 1945. This makes my first attempt look pitiful, only 3 years quicker, but using the compounding effect of bonds!

I was impressed with some of the AI's profits this time. Two companies each had a year of 8M profit, with a couple averaging 4-5M profit per year fairly consistently in decent economies. As a comparison, my last year I just hit the 5.0M mark, so they ended up being bigger than me for once, which is nice for a change. They did plenty of stock-buybacks and I tried to profit a little from these cycles, to end up with 21M PNW.

So, basically I ended up doing your tip of an early merge with the St Louis Terminal RR. Good tip! I enjoyed playing the map this way a lot. Clean, simple, and efficient. Thanks a lot! I have played Lama's North-East Corridor and found it to be excellent also. Previously, I didn't play this one at the same time because I read about the possibility of PC overload from all the AI trains. I am happy to have found that I can play this one fine.

Hans, I don't think the count for any cargo is available in 1.05 (this is a 1.05 map). I am also unsure what you meant by taking over all companies. Did you manage to make enough company profits to merge all companies into one before 1935, or did you rely on bonds and jumping companies like I was trying to do in my post above this?

[Shamough]

Hans, I don't think the count for any cargo is available in 1.05 (this is a 1.05 map). I am also unsure what you meant by taking over all companies. Did you manage to make enough company profits to merge all companies into one before 1935, or did you rely on bonds and jumping companies like I was trying to do in my post above this?

Didn't notice that it was a 1.05 map ... Oh well.

My 2nd go at the game I gave myself $5M upfront and changed the depression stock from -25% to -75%. I took over Nickle Plate. Right before Oct 1029 I took out $10M in bonds at 5% interest, and had over $8M in cash. I sold most companies short 20K shares. For some reason one of the companies stocks didn't loose value and I had to rebuy at a small loss ??? 10-1929 almost all stocks took a dreastic nose dive. I repurchased my short positions and took out 20K additional shares from each company. At this time I also bought all outstanding shares of my company. Looking at their cash on hand and their current market values I bought the companies with huge cash reserves, so even though I was spending my companies money I was coming out with more cash on hand. The two large companies were a problem as they bought their shares lowering their cash on hand and at the same time increasing my % of their shares. the two companies shares stayed tanked through 1933 at which point I bought them and had about $2M cash in the bank. In all cases I altered all new consists to eight cars and no caboose.

I tried leaving things as they were but I was loosing too much $$$ ... so I backed up to the point of the take over and raised the prices of all caro 200%. (Having a monolopy is great and having total power ... something about corrupting absolutely ... until the meddling feds stepped in ... <In 1936 I lowered the cargo prices to normal.>) Anyway like I said I was just having a little fun

<<I'm currently taking abreak from RT/TM. I have a couple books and several short stories that I've writter and have been ignoring for too long.>>


Shamough/Hans

[RulerofRails]

I discovered how to get control of the map in this one while staying chairman of my initial company. As I have mentioned before buying up all shares of the Chicago Terminal RR and 9k of those in the New Orleans Great Northern, running the game and then pausing, then selling out of all those shares will give a personal cash of slightly more than 2M. (This is the best combination because the small value share prices are easier to buy with your purchasing power, enabling you to run the prices up much higher. This increases the margin you can use, which means much greater return from the un-pause correction.) It is possible to buy a majority stake in the company of your choice except the Illinois Central (this is the weakest "large" company) and Missouri Pacific Railroads which are both too expensive.

I was trying to takeover the Missouri Pacific with only 45% ownership and I found that if I waited a month I was successful on one attempt. I combined this knowledge with that of my last play of the Southern Railroad where companies were accepting all my merger offers at the start of the third year, to figure a strategy to get 100% control of the map at the start of year two. In fact all the "other investors" really want you to merge with their company so bad that it is possible to completely short their company first and thy will still all vote to let you merge! If this seems ethically questionable, without any short-selling it is possible to still merge with all of the small and medium companies which will give a fast time to the gold medal. I believe that it should be possible to hit the maximum points every year with this setup to take the medal in 16 years.

I was looking at this map to find potential high revenue for the first year, and I thought that the Southern Railway and Missouri Pacific had the most potential. After attempts with both (1.5M first year profit MP, versus 2.3M with the SR), I am convinced the Southern Railway is the easier, cheaper AND better option. With both these attempts I was issuing stock twice for the max I could get (sacrificed PNW to get over 800k from this) which with the bond and starting cash gave me enough capital to build a large station or two as well. The west has good potential with supplies of Meat, Diesel, Chemicals, Cattle to haul, but towns are too far apart and the network isn't laid out that well. (I believe these are both better options than the Nickel Plate profit-wise for the first year, but the Nickel Plate is more resilient especially in the second and third years as towns are close together, and supplies and demands are solid and steady.)

To make the Southern Railway work, I built a large station to capture the 3 Coal Mines near East Link-South, and another in Birmingham to better capture the output from the Steel Mill (upgrading the medium one will wipe off some CBV, probably doesn't matter with this large a company). I also made a connecting link from the Illinois Central station in New Orleans so I could pick up more Rubber to haul to Atlanta as well as starting a train in Nickel Plate territory at Columbus going to Knoxville to make big profit on Milk and Autos. I started a train in Memphis to haul Lumber and Clothes to Huntsville. Then two hauling Coal from my shiny new station to Birmingham. With two for the route from Atlanta to Birmingham. Then I put another on local traffic from Cincinnati to Lexington and Evansville. I added another 3 during the year, but otherwise tried to save money. I didn't use any of the customizations in the first year to try to slow the AI down.

There may be a way to goof this strategy if your stock price suffers (you need to make a lot of money), but after seeing this effect a couple of times I think it's pretty likely the "other investors" will be clamoring to accept your merger offer. The beauty of this is that unowned shares are generally worth FAR LESS than owned ones as in most circumstances a buy-in will necessarily inflate their prices, and at the beginning of the second year most of the companies hadn't spent the 1M cash they had just been gifted by the government. Also, the high profit I had made gave me access to 8M worth of bonds up front.

Where you take this is up to you, but what I just did is merge everything after shorting each company first. This means that I was getting heaps of CBV for a song and company cash afterwards was only 1M less than when I started merging! This should be enough to setup trains to make a profit from this monster. That's the next challenge!

I wasn't planning for this, otherwise I would have kept a higher percentage of my companies' shares. In this case, I owned maybe 25% of my company. I don't think it best to maintain the initial 55% through the first year, as share price is elevated to the point that interest payments are likely to be greater than the small growth possible on high CBV shares where ROI of CBV isn't great. Year-end for the split may be a different story, but I was expecting the SR to suffer profit-wise in the 2nd and 3rd years as I have no new room for cheap expansion, costs and overhead will rise, and mergers will necessitate crippling interest payments. In this case I rashly decided to make a run for my companies' shares as they were sure to jump with all that CBV when I un-paused the game. I spent another 5M on the last 14,000 after the un-pause correction. Here's a screen of what I am looking at:

North-South overrun.jpg (90.63 KiB) Viewed 24175 times

[RulerofRails]

I continued this attempt to see how hard it is to run a profitable railway if you control the whole map. I got 51 trains from the mergers and then added 25 more. I tried to upgrade some stations, but many of them are cleverly blocked so upgrading is impossible. I didn't go on any bulldozing sprees, which would likely be a good call to remove some of the duplicate tracks. I suffered one bad year - a 2M loss in the third year. I didn't use micro-managing here, whoever is patient enough to do so can likely avoid any losses. Then I made a tiny profit the next year followed by a little more the year after that as cargo built up on the map (the economy only improved two years before the depression. By this time (year 5) profit was picking up and my first concern was replacing the Pacifics I inherited from the mergers. Those things are blood-thirsty! That brings up something: because this scenario uses the "ALL North American engines" check box, custom engines will be usable. In my case, I was playing with the G5s which I had simply left in the game's content folder as I had used it in a different scenario. It is cheap to buy, run and maintain. If it was unavailable, I would have chosen the H10 Mikado. The game start is unaffected as I was only using the H10. I only played up till 1936, and with the G5s I just touched 20M profit one year during boom times with 150 trains. Using the H10 I estimate I may have hit 15M at the same time. I wasn't too careful with management after the first 5 years. If you can endure the early lean times, making money later doesn't seem to be an issue.

PS. The lean times meant I had no company cash to spare for dividends to re-pay personal debt. Furthermore, bad results on the books caused share price to crater, leading to a margin call and wipeout, which I did nothing to avoid as I was focused on simply trying to get my company profitable. For a re-play, I can't see the advantage of holding many shares on margin until I can get the company to the point of starting to rise from it's slump. Rashly buying just to say I had ownership instead of as an investment decision was certainly foolish.

[EPH]

Good grief. I hadn't even imagined that was possible. JP Morgan's got nothing on you.

I usually count myself lucky if I get control of the Alton, the St Louis Terminal and a couple of southern roads, usually buying up the CBQ, L&N or MoP at the end of the game. I love the MoP - not only was it my hometown railroad, it is a cash cow in this game - properly run, of course; the AI tends to buy a hundred locos and jam them all into St Louis. That's why I usually build another station in St Louis just for my traffic.

Using only the smaller companies (Your Mileage Varies, Mostly Open, Great Mistakes Now, New Orleans Goes Nowhere) there is still a good bit of replay value here. You can always adopt a house rule like requiring electrification if you need to make it a bit more challenging.

[Shamough]

They jam up because of the MINIMIUM CONSISTS being set to ONE.
All AI trrains have their MINIMUM CONSISTS set to ONE.

The problem is that the stations don't service the trains on a first come first serve basis. The trains are being serviced based on their creation number in the master train list.

[RulerofRails]

I ran out of real life time, otherwise I thought to upgrade to all electric also. To upgrade 150 trains to the GG1 plus electric track would conservatively cost 100M. Upgrading the tracks during depression would make a considerable saving on cost here. While posting this, I hope not to discourage anyone from first playing this the classic way. I noticed in my earlier plays that the AI revenue I was gifted accounted for a considerable portion of my revenue, so there are some advantages to keeping the AI around also. Both ways are fun!

Hans, I have seen AI trains that don't always have a minimum consist of one. A common thing I see is a minimum consist on one of two stations while running on a small network. I am not sure you are right about that. I think the blockage comes from treading tails at the station and the obvious bottle-kneck to the east of St Louis. You are probably right about the order the trains are filled, I know age affects their order in the list after a merge.

[Shamough]

Hans, I have seen AI trains that don't always have a minimum consist of one. A common thing I see is a minimum consist on one of two stations while running on a small network. I am not sure you are right about that. I think the blockage comes from treading tails at the station and the obvious bottle-kneck to the east of St Louis. You are probably right about the order the trains are filled, I know age affects their order in the list after a merge.

It all depends on WHO created the trains ... HUMAN when creating the AI networks will mostly have a ZERO MINIMUM. Once the game starts all new AI trains will have a ONE MINIMUM.

Start a new N-S Corridor and look at the trains of each company ... all are zilch. The first thing the AI companies need to do is purchase engines and create trains and routes.

[RulerofRails]

I had a look at two saves from this map and I didn't find a single AI train that was setup with a one-minimum consist. All were running without waiting. I don't pretend to understand all the AI behavior. I have often seen AI trains with one-minimum consists on other maps, but my best guess is that the computer does this only when there isn't enough cargo to haul and the available network is small, such as in normal maps when the AI is slowly expanding. On this map the large pre-built network seems to generally preclude this behavior, as even the small companies have the opportunity to enter other companies' track.

I never used wait-to-fill on this map (I'm not convinced that it's an efficient strategy except to collect all output from a factory or farm/mine, but that's a different story), so I can't comment on whether using it may influence the AI to do it too. Sometimes the AI does seem to make feeble attempts to do some of the things I am doing.

I wouldn't really expect wait-to-fill to cause traffic bottle-knecks. I would expect to see many inactive trains stacked at a station, but as I said I never have in my experience. Maybe we could learn something if you post us a screenshot of this behavior?