Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

As I posted in my Evil Genius at Work thread, I was reading about phantom Islands. This map is the result.

I've twittered on it for 3 days and I'm fairly comfortable saying it is not an easy one to win. I managed to win
on medium difficulty several times, but not consistently. I reckon that comes down to my playing style and
that others might do better.

So, without further ado, I give you the Dutch colony Sint Mattheüs in the year 1850... veel geluk!
Optional additions: coruscate's Lavendar Farm and Vinyard (available here) - you will need to enable them in the editor under industries after installation.

Note: Only two locomotives are available during the course of the scenario, the Baldwin 0-6-0, then, later, the Consolidation 2-8-0.

Aha! Pre-ordering track a year in advance. I'd thought of that one myself, back when I was kicking around ideas for a revamp of the Italy map. Good to see someone implementing it as I think it has potential.

Anyway, stock is the way to go here. Since there's no value in holding stock yourself, you might as well issue as much as you can. A strong company will prevent anyone trying to sack you.

Gumboots wrote:Aha! Pre-ordering track a year in advance. I'd thought of that one myself, back when I was kicking around ideas for a revamp of the Italy map. Good to see someone implementing it as I think it has potential.

Anyway, stock is the way to go here. Since there's no value in holding stock yourself, you might as well issue as much as you can. A strong company will prevent anyone trying to sack you.

It seemed the "right" solution here. And like you, it was the Italy map (one of my favourite PopTop maps) that gave me the rough idea.

And, true, stock is the way to keep the company solvent in this one when things get lean. you homed in on that straight away.

Gave it a test play. The concept is good and the map plays nicely.

The test play took 4 years, and I think that perhaps the loan isn't working the way it should. After the play, I checked the editor and I see a reference to $1M in the text the player will see in the warning event, whereas everywhere else it's $5M. Probably a place that you forgot to update with a new change. But there's another thing. In the Control Panel -> Player page the player has $5.1M of cash. Maybe this is sort of a "twist", but the text gave me to believe that my company should have received $5M. What happened is I started a company with $9.1M of cash. Makes the game a bit short. Although you did mention keeping majority control which does line up with what happens. Leaves me a little .

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If I may suggest something, since there will only ever be one company on the map you might consider pre-starting the company. This way you could give the player a majority stake in the company and pre-set company cash as the "bonus" add cash events can be exploitable especially when adding a large amount compared to book value.

There's a quirk in the editor, whatever we put in the field on the Control Panel -> Player page, is used to set player cash at game start, it has no direct effect, so it's useless when pre-starting a company. (Side-note: when pre-starting this value can be 0, or even a small negative value such as -25000.)

We must use a workaround. When starting a company there is the option to select less money from outside. This can give up to a 20% stake in the company, but probably not a good idea because it's better to have 10,000 shares to work with. The way to manipulate a player's stake in a company is to manipulate the stock price by adding/subtracting company cash with the special "Set Cash" option on the Company Detail section of the normal game interface. The trick is that you must un-pause the game for a split second to let price update.

Remember that at game-start player cash is set according to the value in the Control Panel -> Player page. We aren't trying to give the player more cash, just to change his ownership stake in a company. That means buying shares which requires cash, but it doesn't matter how much, just as long as there is enough. Also, overall PNW is of no consequence here either. The value of the stake we are establishing is temporarily irrelevant since we will afterwards go back and "Set Cash" for the company to the desired setting for game start.

There is more than one way that will work, but an example just to give an idea:
After starting the company, sell off the player's entire stake. "Set Cash" for the company to 0, micro-second un-paused, stock price will crater to $1-$2 per share. Now buy up the number of shares in the company that will give the player the ownership stake that you want him to start the game with. (Because the maximum number of shares that a new company started with $100k personal cash can have is 10,000, this is limited to ten percent increments, for example, 30% 80% or 50% . . . still a pretty useful trick.) Finally, go back and set company cash to your desired value.

Brilliant, thank you!

I went round and round with the editor trying to get the money and shares owned to the values I wanted. I never hit upon any combination without making things easier than I wanted.

Your suggestions are pure gold.

I am having a little problem with that $5M. Totally over the years I amassed $6.1 in "revenue", and still the year end ledger shows the "0" being earned, and the $5M amount still not paid. Once I reached 1860, I then did notice that the ledger show "loan paid", of which I didn't notice previous. I would have believed it would disappear, but I guess that is the way it is being programmed. A good concept of challenge. Being that there could be more versions, I am also looking forward to more challenges as well as future scenarios.