Thanks! I've got 14 companies in the game now and I'm agonizing over whether I 'have to' have the Frisco and the CRIP... I'm seriously worried that this thing won't run or will have mass bankruptcies. The map looks like someone dumped a bowl of red spaghetti on it!
![Surprised :-o](./images/smilies/icon_surprised.gif)
The game runs from 1920, when the government handed back control of the railroads, to about 1950 (since the GM&O bought the Alton in 1947).
I've colored the map, put in the economic regions, added the ports/warehouses. I set up 15 players (14 assigned for companies plus Isaac Burton Tigrett). I ctrl-click on the player in the stock display area, start a company, set company cash to $20 mil or so and set up the stations, track and service towers. Then I reset the company cash to anywhere from $1 mil to $250k, have the chairman sell off his two shares of stock and go to the next one. When I'm done I'll go down the list resigning AI players from their companies and I'll delete all the AI players from the setup list. Under 'special conditions' I'm going to prohibit starting a company, so 'Tigrett' will be given enough cash to buy his way into a small or medium-sized company.
Then we'll see how long it takes the AI companies to go bankrupt.
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
The IC and MoP are monsters and the Southern and Nickel Plate should be strong also. Putting together the historic GM&O should only require 3 purchases - the NOGN, the M&O and the Alton. I'm going to set up the victory conditions for passengers delivered to/from Chicago, St Louis, Memphis and New Orleans.
The territories will be purchaseable but at a very high price. Mostly it will be cheaper to buy into a little road that already has access. Chicago, St Louis, Memphis and New Orleans have their own territories, and there is a territory along the lower Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers that prohibits bridge-building until after 1930. That will help preserve the 'monopolies' of the IC Cairo bridge and the St Louis Bridge & Terminal Company. Plus there really wasn't a way to build over the lower Mississippi before the early 1930's.
The map runs from Chicago to New Orleans, Houston and Kansas City to Columbus OH. The current list of companies is:
1) Illinois Central
2) St Louis Terminal RR (connected to by almost everyone either from the east or the west)
3) Southern Railway
4) Louisville & Nashville
5) Frisco (maybe, probably not)
6) Missouri Pacific
7) Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
8) Chicago & Alton
9) Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific (maybe, probably not)
10) New Orleans Great Northern
11) Yazoo & Mississippi Valley
12) Nickel Plate (given an extension to Columbus/Cincinnati because someone had to...)
13) Mobile & Ohio
14) Gulf, Mobile & Northern