belbincolne wrote:Mastered the original on Expert after only a few tries. Cant get anywhere on Medium with this one. Can never make enough money from either a rail or industry start to buy into another teritory...
1/ Do not use a rail start. On Expert level, your railway will not make much money. Get an industry base going first, then build rail.
2/ Choose your industries strategically. If you are going for an A-H start, Zagreb can be one of the best options. There are often a large number of logging camps that have no demand for their pulpwood, and there is a retail that wants paper in Zagreb. If this is the case with the seeding you get, a paper mill here is a very good way to start.
Do not build the paper mill in Zagreb itself. Build it just over the river and build it
right on top of the closest logging camp*. This way, you don't have to wait for it to start drawing in resources from a distance. It will start eating them
immediately. This can mean the difference between zero profit in your first year, and 500k profit in your first year. It's tricks like this that make the difference to the early stages. You have to pick the options that will generate the biggest returns in the least time.
*Note: closest to Zagreb, but in a bunch with the others. If there is one camp that is closet to Zagreb, but it's three squares away from all the others, do not pick that one. If the bunch three squares away has four camps tightly grouped, build there. Make sure your mill is within the existing stack of pulpwood for at least one camp. Not only does this give you the sure returns for the first year, but it means that after draining the existing stockpile for the first camp in the first year, your mill will be close enough to start munching on the other stockpiles.
If there are four camps tightly grouped, your first year profits will pay for an upgrade to your paper mill, and in the second year it will have enough immediately available pulpwood to run at full production. An upgraded paper mill, running at full production (6 loads/year), in an area that still has a $0 price for pulpwood and a roughly $150+ price for paper, will make your second year bottom line look very healthy indeed.
You do not, under any circumstances, want to have to wait for your mill to generate enough of a price gradient to get the pulpwood moving. This is a general principle for any industry in the early stages of the game. You want it to make money, and lots of it,
right now.
...and also rarely make the passenger speed and borrowing money becomes prohibitly expensive (don't think this was in the original where, so I recall, I only ever ran one passenger train on the straightest, longest, flatist line).
Passenger speed is easy in A-H. A few tricks:
1/ I always use maintenance spurs, in any scenario. It's just the way I always play. If you don't want to use them, that's up to you (I know EPH hates them). However, if you are having trouble meeting the speed goals, using spurs will make a big difference.
2/ Do not use Stirlings for express unless the terrain is absolutely flat. Budapest to Novi Sad, for example, is fine for a Stirling. Zagreb to Pecs is not so good. Budapest to Vienna is a disaster for a Stirling.
However, a Consolidation can be run Budapest to Vienna direct, hauling a 6 car + caboose auto consist (ie: freight and/or express, depending on delivery price at the time) and still easily beat the 25 mph station to station time, as long as you are using maintenance spurs.
3/ To play it safe, I often wont run any express until I have at least two runs set up. That way, if one express train breaks down it wont have such a bad effect on the overall express speed for that year.
4/ Breakdowns suck. Even if one of your freight trains break down, it will still ruin your express speed if the broken freighter blocks an express train. Three ways around this.
First, do not run old locos. Replace them when their reliabilty bar starts looking a bit dodgey. Yes, it costs to do this, but it can save you money too. Overall, you wont lose.
Second, never run them with less than 50% oil. It makes a difference. If your loco gets to a station and has 74% oil, fill it up. This is not a needless expense, if you value reliability. When trying to meet speed targets, you should value reliability.
Third, double track rocks.
I learnt the Belgrade idea on the original and it works well here too but never thought of building anything up river. I shall now give it another try. Maybe I'll even try Romania.
Resita can be a good place for your pirate steel mill, or you can build it near Craiova in Romania. Western Romania is often the main source of coal and iron for the Belgrade mill anyway. The thing you want to watch is the exact course of the streams. You want to intercept them as quickly as you can. I'll often build a large station as well as an industry, even if the station is not connected to anywhere else at first, if the station can grab an existing resources stream that the industry can't quite reach.
Listed below are my top three.
