Nice to see you stop by and hear some of the back-story for your scenario. I wasn't around the scene early on, so nice to talk to you now.
This scenario is among my favorites. One aspect I think you did a great job with was balancing the economy here. I also think that RT3 economy works best on a peninsula (fewer dead price zones near the edges of the map), as can be seen with the Poptop's Italy map. So the shape of the Indian subcontinent helps out as well.
I'm not the only one who was impressed with your sceanario. Oilcan, who over the years also made a lot of maps, 50+ at a guess, mentions your map:
OilCan wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2012 10:07 amThere are several games which I have learned from. My most favorite 'teachers' have been Colonial India, Michigan 1830, Big Valley, Japanese Miracle, Great Northern, Chile, Panama Canal, and Denver & Western. There have been many games which I just looked at one or two events to see how the author wrote it.
To refresh my memory I played it through without bonds while taking the credit option to make things a little interesting for me. It was just as fun as I remember.
There are a couple minor things that could be "fixed"/improved on it.
The Steel haulage notice doesn't say "x loads of Steel" delivered this year.
"Status 4 French Ports" shoud test for on screen player's company only. At the moment the ledger reads "unconnected" even after you have connected all French ports.
The Cotton event is, I'm pretty sure, not doing what you intended.
What happens with this coding:
+20% production of Cotton at any farms owned by you or the French railway from April 1861- April 1865
-70% on Cotton prices gamewide after April 1865
Two reasons:
1. pricing only works if done gamewide (side-note pricing for express cargoes is non-functioning)
2. Temporary effects have limitations. In the case of production, they can unwind succesfully at different companies. But for most other uses, including variable setting, when the game "unwinds" the effect back to normal it will do it at the gamewide level. There were two unwinds generated when the event triggered, one for each company. Both of these are applied gamewide to give -70% pricing.
The easy fix is to apply the effects gamewide. Then prices will rise correctly and the problem with the unwind will be eliminated.
It's questionable to apply passenger/mail production increase to a company. They don't own houses. This would help Hotels a little (normally Hotels produce 2 loads of passengers per year), but the Mail increase I believe is of no practical benefit. Tweaking that would I feel change the balance of the map though, so I would leave it alone. There should be no negative side effect.
Events to change passenger/mail/troops pricing are broken as well, unfortunately. Again this is something that isn't causing any harm. There are some other events which also increase cargo price at companies. In reality, those as well are doing nothing. But I wouldn't "activate" them because it will change balance of the game. See more info on dangers of price increase in the next paragraph.
Whenever an event that increases cargo pricing a fair amount is used cargo prices at particular station can "break-out" higher than any exsiting price on the map. The bug is somewhere in the code that raises price at a station that has recently seen a pickup of that cargo (which normally is doing a form of equalization between two stations). Somehow, the higher price isn't used everywhere in the algorithm and the price will be raised higher than it should be. I saw successive outbreaks where Lumber prices (at +30% combined effect, +15% Lumber, +15% all cargo) eventually rose to about $500 per load. I was hauling a lot of Lumber. Players that haul less may not see as many outbreaks, or perhaps weaker ones. The shape of the map (surrounded by ocean) does help with containing outbreaks. I was just able to manage it. But the risk is that Lumber stacks at the ports for Weapon production may just wander away. The practical problem is with supply for industry (here the ports). Because the outbreak happens at the stations, the industries are no longer the strongest demand cells, so cargoes may drift off stacks which cripples industrial production. I just managed to keep Weapons production going toward the end, but it was tight. Just thought I would bring it up. More info on this topic here.
I don't even know if you have the game installed? Did you play your map again recently? I realize you didn't ask for a report on your map. I hope it's ok I brought those things up. They aren't major and often authors never stop by while their maps have some serious problems. Your map is one of the best in current state. With the knowledge gained in the subsequent years, most of those things are not positive
, there is a chance to further improve the quality of your excellent scenario.