Navajo Land - Beta Test

[Gumboots]

Ok, gave it another quick run. Best thing to do at the start is, as I suspected, just put the game on maximum speed for the first two years and go do something else until that time is up. The only problem is that you''ll have to watch out for dialogues stopping progress during that time. Once the three years are up, company capital is at a useful level and you can start laying track.

That brings me to dialogues. Frankly, this scenario has far too many of them. They're popping up all over the place and IMO get really annoying. The most annoying ones, again IMO, are the ones that assume I've never played RRT3 before and need instructions on the most basic things, all the time. Those can and should be dropped. The ones for the prosperity index tally are also a PITA and unnecessary, since any player with half a brain will get the idea the first time. It would be better to put the same information in the briefing. That way if someone forgets they can get themselves a reminder, without having to deal with dialogue diarrhoea.

My current guess at the moment is that so far nobody has managed to win this one using steam engines on Expert level. That means the game balance may need looking at. Also, once the Northern 4-8-4 becomes unavailable in 1966 the game wil be unplayable with steam, simply because the only other options (Challenger and Big Boy) are so notoriously bad for running costs compared to loads hauled that they are usually avoided like the plague.

[Gumboots]

Ok, just played to 1970, when the AEC stops demanding uranium and will remove the depot at Gallup.

The map is ultimately unplayable with steam engines at high difficulty levels. Also, supporting Navajo education is a waste of money and the extra cost is enough to kill your business.

I don't like having to say this, because I know how much effort goes into maps, but in its current form this scenario has absolutely nothing to interest me. Frankly, it's totally boring.

Suggestions:

1/ Cut the number of dialogues to something reasonable, and leave the beginners' tips for the RRT3 handbook.

2/ Re-code some information that may be required as a reminder so that it is permanently available in the record of the briefing.

3/ I took a look at your editor coding, and at Navajo land on Google Earth. The distance from Gallup out to Navwotsit where the closest three uranium mines are is only about 60 miles in real life. That's within the range of a steam engine on one load of water. So, if you want to use a large scale map, with not many miles per pixel, to get more realistic looking geography then I think it would make sense to tweak locomotive resource use to suit, since the defaults are set for the usual RRT3 map scale of around 1.5 miles/pixel.

What you have done is tweak them back the other way, to make things worse. On your map, a steam engine runs out of water after a distance of 30 miles. That doesn't make any sense, since water consumption may increase for humans in a desert, but not for locomotives. If anything the extra ambient heat should make them more efficient because of the slight degree of feedwater heating it would give. Any locomotive can make 60 miles on a load of water.

Also, there's no earthly reason why sand usage should increase in a desert environment. The rails are already going to be sandy. If anything, you'd expect to use less sand under these conditions. The terrain is so flat anyway that hardly any will be needed.

So, I'd suggest putting sand usage back to normal and roughly halving water usage compared to the current coding.

4/ I'd make all NA and W steam engines available, or at least some of them, since the Challenger and Big Boy are utterly useless when running tight margins in basically flat terrain. It needs something decent available after the Northern becomes unavailable in 1966. I'd suggest making the Red Devil available in 1981, since by then any old Northerns will be costing heaps in maintenance and will really need replacing.

5/ I'd think about some way of making the first couple of years more interesting. It's not absolutely necessary, since anyone can just skip them at high speed, but at the moment they're rather pointless since they're just a means of gathering capital by doing absolutely nothing. The game really starts in 1958. So, you might as well just change it to a 28 year scenario and give the company more cash to start with. Same meat, different gravy. Less events to trigger too, so saves on code processing.

If you made those changes, then you will probably have a scenario that would provide an interesting challenge for anyone who likes to play steam on Expert level. Not sure yet, since I haven't played past 1970, but I think that might be enough to tip the balance into making the game just winnable.


6/ One more thing that is not related to playability as such. I appreciate your efforts to include a fairly comprehensive primer to Navajo history. I agree they deserve that and the scenario shouldn't just be mindless entertainment for people who don't give a rat's.

I think it would be a good idea to provide an option to turn off such dialogues though. The reason is that they're only interesting the first time or two around. After that, they rapidly become something that does encourage people to not give a rat's. Nobody likes being nagged. Perhaps add a readme to the zip that puts the history there in more permanently accessible form, and could perhaps provide links for people who want to learn more.

PS: If your intention is to make the scenario unplayable with steam, then here's another suggestion that will stop me nagging you about it. Just be honest about it and disallow steam entirely, like you have done with electric. If you are going to allow steam, IMO it should be winnable with steam. Allowing steam but coding it to be unplayable makes no sense.

If you want to do that it's fine with me. I'll just play something else.

[Gumboots]

Right, well after being so evil I decided to do something constructive.

I've made a few coding changes to a test version: shortened the scenario by two years, gave the company more cash at the start (basically starts with what the AEC would have given you anyway), got rid of some superfluous events and dialogues, given the steam engines a realistic range, made a reasonable range of steam locos available, added an option to switch off the history blurbs, as well as a couple of other minor tweaks.

I think it's now too easy. I was out of debt and had the Gold by the end of 1980.

Will think about it a bit more. Should have some more dialogues bundled up in the switchoffable option. For locos I think just making the QJ available by event once the Northern can no longer be purchased would be adequate, with perhaps the Red Devil in 1981 (even though I don't like it much). I used the N&W Superduper Class J early on, just because I could, and that thing really is a bit too good. Only ran four of them but still, they're unbreakable rockets and almost cheating.

Since there was discussion recently about how a few people like to play for no company debt at game end, maybe make that a requirement if playing steam. Also, if playing a steam option, maybe a fuel cost reduction for shipping coal to Page (say 5% for every 20 loads or something).

ETA: Oh and it was rather nice to get out of the flat country and up into the hills later on. Just laying straight flat track is no challenge. If anything, I'd recommend that people do not use the editor at all, since the track laying is so easy anyway, even out to places like Pegosa Springs.

[Gumboots]

Hey something's buggy with the coal to Page. Saved game attached. It's not counting the loads this play through, even though it did last time. There have been quite a few loads into Page (about 90% of the total loads in have been coal). Nothing was changed for that event, so for some reason the load tallying appears to be inconsistent.

Also, there's hardly any demand for coal for shipping is patchy. Yes, I know I could build non-functional steel mills at Page to create an artificial demand, but to me it seems like a bug in the coding. Having to build steel mills when there's no iron anywhere on the map is just silly IMO.

There seems to be a bug with the mail connections being recognised too. Even though it's supposed to work when using the other company's rails to hook up some towns, it doesn't work. I had Leupp and Kayenta connected to the other company at Wilma or Wilcox or William Tell Overture or whatever the silly town is called, and had Hospah and Wind Rock and Ship Rock connected to the other company at Gallup. So, all were connected but the game didn't recognise it.

To get that to work, I had to connect Kayenta round the back of the map to Ship Rock, so all towns were on my own track. As soon as I did that, I got that connection recognised.

[Hawk]

The coal tally always worked fine for me. I wonder if you broke something in your tweaking?

It doesn't bother me a bit that steam engines aren't practical in this map. I prefer diesel. What I don't like is electric.

[Gumboots]

Well it bugs me. Like I said, if you want to make steam unusable, just disallow it entirely. No point screwing around. Just do it.

I didn't break anything, because I just gave it another test on high speed with the same coding and this time the coal tally worked. It worked before too, but for some reason the next to last time it decided not to work even though the stations were in the same locations as the other times. I've looked at the coding (which is just OilCan's original coding in this case) and it should work all the time.

This time around the connection for the postal stuff worked too, even though it didn't last time and as still running the same code. The only thing I did diferently this time (and the other times it worked before) was to have my own station at Winslow before joining onto the other company's track there, but that shouldn't make any difference.

[Hawk]

Must have been one of them gremlins lurking about.

[Gumboots]

Could be. Maybe the game got indigestion on the coding or something. It's just weird because I haven't seen it happen before. Usually if the coding is right, things just work. That game is basically toast since there's no way of getting the coal haulage.

Anyway, having given this a few test runs I can say that having an option to switch off a lot of the dialogues does massively improve the replay experience. Game Variable 3 was unused, so it was simple matter to grab that for an extra conditional on the dialogues.

Now I'm thinking about the mass of them that hit at the end of every year. It should be possible to rationalise those down to something more digestible, but it's a bit trickier.

Also, by tweaking the conditionals on the Gold event it should be possible to make the game give you a Gold in December, rather than the year rolling over and then you having to wait for the end of January (which is what it does now). Everything gets counted up at year end. If haulage and other tricks were counted at week or month end, then Gold checked at year end, it should all work correctly.

ETA: Ok, looked at the event coding for Gold and haulage again. What's happening is that although the haulage counts are constantly updated in the status report during the year, the events for incrementing the NPI due to haulage, etc only happen at year end. That means that even though the Gold is checked at the end of every month, there's no way it can tell you have already passed the requirements until those events fire at year end. So, if you start the year not having met all Gold requirements, then get them all halfway through the year, the game will have no way of knowing this until year end.

That means checking for Gold at the end of every month is rather pointless, since that will only ever work at the end of January (becase stuff will fire at year end, updating variables, meaning Gold check at end of month works after the next month: January).

Two options: either check for Gold at year end only, or alternatively modify the updating of variables to happen at week or month end. My 2c is the latter would be better.

[Hawk]

I didn't have a problem getting the coal haulage. It wasn't until near the end that I got it though.

[Gumboots]

You will have a problem getting it if the game decides not to count it at all, no matter how much coal you haul.

I agree that usually it's easy enough. It could just be a random glitch in the game, like the odd crash to desktop it does. If it happens, probbaly best to just chuck that game and start another.

[Stoker]

As Stalin said: "It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes that counts."

[Gumboots]

Hey just figured something out about the graphics. I was wondering what the weird grey lines in places were.

sat_image_tiling.jpg (37.35 KiB) Viewed 8631 times

I'm pretty sure it's an artifact from Photoshop that was introduced when tiling the .tga for the map image. I had something similar happen when I made that large test map of part of Australia. Resizing chunks of Google Earth shots can bring in a partial transparency along the edges of the tiles.

One way around it is to duplicate the tiled layer, then set it behind and offset 1px in both X and Y directions. That will fill in the partial transparency with the adjacent pixels, which are usually close enough to not be obvious.

If they are still obvious, the other way around it is to work on a very large image and tile it without resizing the tiles, then merge into one layer, then resize that.

ETA: Oh and by allowing the QJ by event in 1966, the game becomes playable after that date. The Red Devil isn't necessary. Just the Northern and the QJ will do the trick.

[Gumboots]

Figured out what was happening with the coal haulage. The territory shown on the game map as "Page" is not really "Page" at all. Only about half of it is.

That means that if you try to use the capture area of a large station to cover the power plant, which is basically necessary sometimes to generate any price differential so you can ship coal, then the centre of your station can be just outside the border of the real "Page territory", even though when you look at the map the territory borders are telling you that your station is smack in the middle of "Page territory".

page_territory.jpg (42.97 KiB) Viewed 8628 times

This sucks. If there's going to be a seperate "Power plant" territory chewing up half of "Page", and if said powerplant territory is going to invalidate any haulage to "Page", the player should have an indication of this. Call it "Page industrial area" if you like, but have it clearly marked as a seperate territory.

Alternatively, just run your "destroy all" on the entire Page territory, and then re-seed the whole city. That way you only need one territory. If someone buying early access to Utah and building stuff in Page is a worry, you can either disallow buying access to Utah and just do it by event when it suits the scenario, or you can just say "Oh dear, we had an earthquake in Page and your stuff is borken. You get that." since there are active faults running through the area anyway.

Or, you could just make the power plant territory much smaller, so it's only the size required to hold the necessary power plant, and put it where a large station can cover it while still connecting Page city. The problem of destroying stuff built by someone who buys in early could be circumvented by simply not allowing a player to build in the small power plant territory until after the destroy-and-seed is done.

Or, just move the western border of "Power plant" slightly east, so that if a large station is placed far enough east to just register Page City as connected and give maximum coverage of "Power plant", it will be just inside "Page" instead of just inside "Power plant". This is probably the simplest to implement.

Any of those would work. Take your pick.

[Gumboots]

Ok, got the mail connection event debugged now.

What was happening, as far as I can tell, was that the "force test against companies" for the onscreen player's company was making it necessary to use your company's track to do the entire route. The original event is this:

mail_cnx_event_1.jpg (104.72 KiB) Viewed 8619 times

If it is changed to this, it works perfectly:

mail_cnx_event_fixed.jpg (94.37 KiB) Viewed 8619 times

This should still be safe, since in this scenario the AI company is nobbled and never builds track or stations in any of the times I've played this scenario through. If it's necessary, adding an insane AI company station building cost should cover the possibility of the AI perhaps, just maybe, putting a station in one of the five critical towns. Since it would have to lay some of it's own track in the town too, to get any connection even to your rail, and since it never builds track anyway, it's probably safe as is.

PS: Oh and in case you couldn't tell, I do think this scenario is quite an enjoyable one once it gets going. It just needs a bit more polish, IMHO (and it is beta anyway).

[Gumboots]

Ok, those end of year dialogues. They're not too bad when there are only one or two of them, but by the time you have sponsored all sorts of stuff and hauled lots of everything it gets ridiculous. At the end of every year it's like this:

dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -dialogue - click -

LEDGER!!!!!!!!! YESSSSS!!!!
ONE MORE CLICK AND I CAN GET BACK TO PLAYING THE GAME!!!!!
AWESOMESAUCE!!!!!

CLICK!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sweet relief.

Suggestion: don't try to make things idiot-proof. Someone will always just go and build a better idiot anyway. Using the "or" conditional it should be possible to wrap them all up into one simple dialogue which says something like "Education donation has been deducted from your company account." or, if haulage bonuses are applicable, "Education donation has been deducted from your company account. Haulage bonuses have been paid to your company account."

That way there is only one dialogue, no matter how many things you are doing, which IMO would be much better. I can always see the status, so should already have a good idea of what will happen at year end.

This could also be used to divorce the end of year dialogue from the incrementation of the NPI and other stats, meaning it would then be possible to update those variables more frequently, which would allow the Gold event to operate at any stage of the year.

[Gumboots]

Here's a zip with what I think is a more playable version. I haven't done all the end of year dialogues, but have done the rest of the code changes.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Hey something's buggy with the coal to Page. Saved game attached. It's not counting the loads this play through, even though it did last time. There have been quite a few loads into Page (about 90% of the total loads in have been coal). Nothing was changed for that event, so for some reason the load tallying appears to be inconsistent.

It may have to do with where you placed the station. I put mine too close to the Electric Plants the first time I played and it didn't count the loads. A quick foray into the Editor and look at the Territories showed that the Page territory doesn't include the area where the Electric Plants are located. It would be nice for mapmakers to somehow show, perhaps through ground color if they don't want to show territory lines, the limits of territories that are linked to haulage goals so that players have some notion of where, or where not, to place a station.

[Hawk]

What I did was place a large station so that it captured Page and the Electric Plant. I never had a problem with the coal loads being counted.

Page.jpg (36.03 KiB) Viewed 8546 times

[Gumboots]

Hawk, whether or not you can grab them and Page without going into the wrong territory depends on exactly where the power plants seed in their territory. They can seed in a 5 cell radius around the nominal location.

Hey something's buggy with the coal to Page. Saved game attached. It's not counting the loads this play through, even though it did last time. There have been quite a few loads into Page (about 90% of the total loads in have been coal). Nothing was changed for that event, so for some reason the load tallying appears to be inconsistent.

It may have to do with where you placed the station. I put mine too close to the Electric Plants the first time I played and it didn't count the loads. A quick foray into the Editor and look at the Territories showed that the Page territory doesn't include the area where the Electric Plants are located. It would be nice for mapmakers to somehow show, perhaps through ground color if they don't want to show territory lines, the limits of territories that are linked to haulage goals so that players have some notion of where, or where not, to place a station.

Yup, I did check the editor later. What I did in my "more playable" zip is to slightly trim the corner of the power plant territory that went onto the "land bridge", and make that territory inaccessible to the player. That fixes the problem, although there are several other ways you could do it.

[RulerofRails]

I saw some of the discussion about it not being playable with the original steam engines. Well, I am always up for a challenge and I tried it out. I managed to get the gold on expert with a year to spare. I ran 19 steam locos in total, including six Challengers on the western section of the map. There were a few tight spots along the way, I lost all the uranium mines at Cove and eventually two of the three near Nagoezi. I relied on industry profits to keep the company strong. If you watch closely there are enough opportunities for smart industry investment outside the Indian's land to make this work. I am pretty confident that this is winnable with any seeding. It is not easy, but that is the way it would be in reality running steam engines in that period. I am not bothered at all with all the history announcements that appear. I learnt a lot from them and they are easy enough to ignore on re-plays. I find issuing and re-financing bonds to be much more annoying than any announcements that come up in game. For me the story helps a great deal to add dimension to the map. I had a ton of fun playing this with steam and hope Oilcan will publish this map soon for everyone to play.

Hauling coal out of Page to keep demand high.jpg (140.75 KiB) Viewed 8386 times

Navajo Steam Win.jpg (160.57 KiB) Viewed 8386 times