The original start is a bit tricky. Bear in mind that I never built stations outside the cities or more than one station per company at a particular city. On the third or fourth attempt, I ended up waiting for a year and a half until I saw a good price differential for Milk: demand at K'oslin; supply from Deustch Krone and Landsberg. Built all large stations right from the get-go. If the economy fades at the start it may even be better to sit on the starting cash to earn interest. It's a bit of a risk though as you also lose out on cheaper track costs if you wait until you get notice that the economy has improved. Hence my strategy of waiting as long as it takes for a good price differential which is hopefully before the economy gets to improve that much.
Attached is a screenshot of Berlin. My strategy for building up the next company was to use the previous companies' station there, but before leaving I would build a new station in Berlin for that company and then disconnect from all the other companies' tracks in such a fashion that I could easily connect them up with the next company. This way I was always in control of which companies were connected together there and a jammed-up situation never developed.
I found that the second time round as West Eisenbahn was quite challenging as well. This road travels through fairly mountainous areas with few resources and by that stage of the game the heavy service from the other railroads around Berlin was limiting good price differentials from forming. In this play, I left it just after the heavy cars were introduced in 1900. Mostly I was building minimum service while expanding so had to save and spend for 2 years or so simply building service on each road.
I am left to wonder which locos were intended for this scenario, was it made for 1.05? I played in 1.05, but the "All European Locos" check means that there will be many more options if some one were to play it in 1.06. I am left wondering why people ever use that switch in the first place. If this was made before Coast to Coast, I had a significant advantage over other players.
Seeing this scenario is based on a PopTop map, the seeding is a bit nasty especially over 100+ years. It can be viewed as part of the challenge which industry building would largely circumvent, but too many cities will spawn the same industries over time. This can be viewed as ok, but the thing that made me a bit annoyed is that specific types of industries disappear over time. For example, Meat Packing Plants would have a tendency to disappear even when they were working at capacity turning a good profit. I never had more than 3 on the map. From the editor, I can see that out of the 4,300 loads of Livestock produced, over 3,000 rotted. Steel Mills also tended to disappear. Until late in the game there isn't always a possibility to try to supply a specific mill and if it disappears that becomes a bad investment. Large footprint and overall lower ROI make these industries less profitable in the game and I fear contribute to their scarcity and disappearance. Anyway, main consumer cargoes hauled after 1880 were Alcohol, Clothing, Milk/Cheese, and trace amounts of Lumber and Goods. Not really a wide range, can be viewed as part of the challenge, but leaves me wanting at least a little more variety.
I don't think that the tasks for 100 hauls from Ost to Budapest/France/Denmark are possible to code easily in RT3. Currently, they do not work, but count all loads delivered to those places wherever they come from. I made sure to complete these tasks "honestly", by not adding any other trains to those places while the chair of Ost Zug until after I had 100 loads. Mainly it was something to do while waiting for the loads hauled. I used the other companies track and stations for Budapest and France.
Interesting engine events, which I guess are mainly aimed at helping the AI. I found that engines have a long life on this map. Only in Depression/Crash will any engines crash. I have some 37 year old P8s. Engine maintenance was only costing 5k a year more than base price (8k). At the price of 120k per engine, some super rough calculations give me an engine life of roughly 40 years. But the P8 is no longer available so maybe I should have replaced them just before it disappeared 14 years ago and kept it until the end of the scenario. Final engine count across all companies: 307.
Here's a screenshot of the end of year 110. Almost made the 200,000 loads that year. What I did in Berlin is visible. I think I didn't do too bad in the early game, but am sure that there is a better way to handle later parts of the game. For example, I tend to believe that the game would be faster if you buy more trains for the AI before leaving a company for the final time, especially the Nord Bahn. The previous year's loss is because of a poor economy. My margins are tight enough that my company is losing before overhead in a crash/depression economy. Interest charges are because I have never "saved" so cash was just recently at a max of -$1.9M.
- Four Roads to Berlin.jpg (66.27 KiB) Viewed 14984 times