- Rainy Days.jpg (96.82 KiB) Viewed 7340 times
This is what I managed this time, the last Coal train is about to arrive in St. John. To start I bought a Lumber Mill in Montreal. In the beginning of the third year a new Dairy popped up right near Montreal under my nose so I snapped it up. Then once I could take out some more bonds I upgraded my Lumber Mill, and after I saved some more I bought a access and a newly seeded Paper Mill in Ottawa. That took about 5 years of game time, and then I took the plunge into real railroading. I connected Montreal to Ottawa with a cheap wooden bridge straight across the river and started service with the Firefly. At this time the Textile Mill in Montreal was producing well, so I had plenty of Textiles and Lumber to haul. As soon as I could and before all that cargo migrated up the river, I connected to Huntington. Then I ran all trains to Huntington and bought as many more as I could fill. This gave me a million or two. I used this money to expand south to Toronto with the goal of buying and running the Tool and Die I had in Hamilton. Huntington had only one house, so after around a year the prices of the Lumber, Textiles, and Milk that were sitting there had dropped considerably. It was time to connect to Sudbury, allowing for great profits and also giving me a collection point for Iron to use down in Hamilton. Once all this money came pouring in, I could issue lots of bonds at next year end (around 4M worth, I was issuing as many as I could except when I was in industry only mode at the beginning when I would wait for a good investment to eventuate). I used this money to expand east over the mountains to Boston, and worked towards the haulage goals. Before making the long stretch over to St. John, I built up western Canada and connected to Detroit and bought and supplied both Tool and Dies there. But that should give a general idea of my expansion strategy. All the logs, pulpwood, wool, and iron in the north west of the map are the best idea I can see here as everywhere else is hilly and has few resources with the exception of the US coast, which is hilly but has some resources.
In case you were wondering: I didn't use any hauling tricks including bait and switch in any form. I only built one station in each of the cities I connected and none out in the country to gather resources (my latest stipulation, that others may have been doing for ever). I did no real micro-managing of trains but when I had less than 20 trains I did shuffle routes to deal with expansion and get some one time high-value runs to a newly connected city. I was playing on Expert difficulty, like I always do. Of course, I have more ideas now with potential for an even better/faster strategy, but hopefully, this gives some ideas on how to win this map in the original time frame.
I like this map and the ideas in it. I have some minor complaints: some rivers flowing the wrong way, there are a couple of spelling errors, and the ground is rough around St. John. The bumpy ground around St. John seems totally unnecessary. There are plenty of geographically challenging areas on the journey there which I can see fit into the story idea here with the difficulty of slow acceleration and poor climbing abilities of the locos. But, that last little stretch of Newfoundland on mainly flat ground seemed too jarring for my liking at least. Enough of the negatives, the good news is I liked everything else!
I like the way that passenger production has been subdued. I also like the hamper put on industry production in the beginning along with the gradual increase. I just took a look in the editor and am surprised at how simply this is scripted, but still enough to give a good game experience and mix up strategy. I like the engine cost increase. This helps me think more about how many trains to buy late in the game when I normally buy too many, and gives an incentive to buy them earlier a bit like industry. The concept of the connections and the goals is setup nicely and is lots of fun. Nice map. Thanks to the creator for all his efforts and thanks to Sugus for the event fixes!
PS. Sugus, if you want to tackle the spelling mistakes I can let you know what I saw.
Rainy_Days_in_BNA.zip
. Let's see what Sugus has to say.
