******, is it time for me to try a scenario on Expert?
Just enjoyed playing through, one shot, but on medium, and got gold in like 1903. So many great historical notes and events I'm just dying to find out what I missed by ending so quickly!
Hardly worth mentioning my strategy since I only played on medium, but I started by laying track around Chicago/Milwaukee/Madison/Rockford, got to buy a dairy farm, then build build build. Only bought my own stock. Constantly had higher growth than the AIs. Took every offer, very nice boost to train power! Never tried for 30 mph express, it just hovered at 21-23. I try not to micromanage, and doing the express speed thing in the Orient Express scenario from the Campaign was fun once but I won't spent 5 days to do it again... After the court case went my way I build all kinds of industries. Bought one AI, decided not to buy others so I could play for PNW instead, CBV was already gold.
To build PNW after it was already at like $60M I just repeated a simple routine every January. Issue stock, issue stock, buy, buy, buy 25K at a time until price is back where it was, buy back stock with company money, sell, sell, sell until price is where it was again. I got $3-$6M per year doing this, and company growth did the rest, with some nudging at the end with all that extra company cash.
Very diverse game. Nice map, hardly any 4 grades needed if I just fiddled with track laying a little, except to Chattanooga, making the boosted 8 wheeler awesome practically everywhere when it came up. Great to see so many profitable AIs. I understand you had to tone them down, but I did wonder why they never built any track... maybe give them a limit of 25 sections per year that accumulates?
A couple of surprises. I've never seen hotels and restaurants make as much money as on this map. Like $800K/year for a hotel?!? Insane! What's up with that? Also surprising, but not in a good way, it seemed like the values for cargoes was kind of erratic, and sometimes things wouldn't go where they should (lumber to furniture factories, coal to steel mills, etc.) And I felt kind of guilty making $2,000K per load of coal to Lafayette where there was nothing other than houses that wanted coal... But not that big of a distraction. Maybe you tweaked it to that hauling was more profitable. Halfway through the game I got a depression but it never seemed to hurt my profits, which was curious.
Well, guess I have to try it again on a more difficult lever if I want to experience income taxes, etc.
Thanks for all the hard work you put into this!