See India By Rail - BETA Version

[OilCan]

Attached is a beta version of ‘See India by Rail (1947 - 1980)’. This is a 1.05V game.

The story line picks up immediately after India’s independence and carries to the end of Indira Gandhi’s last term.

The player is presented with three types of game options:
(1) To be a railroader – to connect cities and haul goods;
(2) To be a magnate – to build an empire of rail and industry; or
(3) To be a tycoon – to build personal wealth and become the sole railroad in India

Each choice comes with its own set of goals for gold and silver (no bronze).

There are 6 optional AI players (the tycoon option requires at least 3 AI players).
The player starts with limited track which increases as steel loads are hauled.
34 Years. No train crashes. No multiple companies.

Any comments, suggestions or ideas to improve the game are appreciated (actually 3 different games). Highlighting of spelling errors is also appreciated.

NOTE: Beta Version Removed. Final Version is in map archive.

[Gumboots]

Great. I'll have a look at this for sure.

[Wolverine@MSU]

I'll try it out too when I get a chance. I've been waiting for something new to show up.

[Hawk]

How does a trail crash?

I don't know how you would do it in such a small space for text, but shouldn't selecting AI Players be mentioned in the initial description?

[OilCan]

How does a trail crash?

We may never know because no trails are going to crash in this game, by Jove. Coincidentally, no trains will crash either.

[RulerofRails]

Have played through this twice. First as Tycoon with electric then as Magnate with steam. Both times with 6 AI players. I had plenty of spare cash here, so industry buying/building was a place to park that money.

First, the scenery is gorgeous. Well done! The colors of the Himalayan lakes came through beautifully.

1st play:
Played through as a Tycoon with 6 AI players. Was tired when I started it so bungled around a bit with the start. I only built electric track and was running solely the E-18. Starting with a line from New Delhi - Agra - Kanpur and a Paper Mill. Anyway, maybe it is the bug with counting electric track, but I received the notice/choice to remove all eletrics from my roster.

With the E-18, I had little maintenance or fuel costs so could provide the low cost service that Indians demand. Their running cost averages from $60-70k per year.

The AI were crazy into stock buybacks possibly because the economy recessed, one company actually managed to get their chairman a majority, he had 16,000 shares and I had 9,000 with 6,000 outstanding. After I bought them up I was left with a 16/15 split. I immeditately offered him all the money I had including maxing out the last of my bonds. Maybe 40% above asking price and thankfully he took it. That gave me the wake up call that these companies were buying back like there was no tomorrow and I better get in on the action before I finished getting a majority in my own company. I ended up pretty much stopping expansion at that point (around $5M profits per year) and proceeded to pick the AI off one by one. Smallest one first.

If I had a qualm it would be that the AI seemed a little too artificial in their growth. The AI received lots of cash but they didn't manage to be very profitable with it. I connected to one in Bhopal to try to get some Steel haulage early on. That AI did pretty well obviously helped by the extra passenger traffic from my network (made $1M that year). Paid about $14M for him after having paid between $4M and $8M each for the rest. Perhaps their running costs could be reduced (overhead, train maintenance, and track and station maintenance)? Fuel cost is impossible to adjust via event unfortunately.

The AI's choice of engine is not great here. Did you consider trying to influence their engine choice? The 242 A1 costs slightly more than double in fuel compared to the latest available diesel (the F3). The U1 is much more comparable in cost to the diesel at around 10% higher fuel cost to F3, with a reliability boost. Also, it would be nice if the U1 and Class A1 could be set so they don't become unavailable later in the scenario.


2nd play:
This time I went for the Magnate option. I used the U1 until it disappeared, then some Class A1s, and, finally, when the A1 disappeared a few QJs. This time I let the AI grow. Because the economy boomed earlier, the AI behaved quite differently. This time they were very happy to sell off shares in their own companies. Half of them sold right out (1,000 shares remaining in their respective companies). Needless to say, I was never in danger of failing to get majority control in any of them.

I had fun building a Plastics Factory/Toy Factory on top of a single Oil Well as the cash was rolling in. This play took longer than Tycoon. I didn't issue any stock. I also didn't do fire sales to get cheap merger prices or assume charimanship of any AI companies for manipulation purposes. Nor did I ever take any of the cash bonuses that were a choice. Maybe with those things it would be different, but my Company Book Value was slower to rise to $500M than LIP and about on par with PNW. This was just a quick play where I wasn't too careful in the last few years, so not representative as a great effort, but the Magnate Gold medal took me 25 years whereas the Tycoon Gold Medal took me 18 years. Maybe it's just my play-style. I also realize that PNW goals are harder for some, but seeing that this a choice where players can choose different medal goals maybe it matters less? That's it for me, was great fun and a top notch economy as always.

[Hawk]

I'm playing Magnate now and it seems like some of the text on the status page isn't necessary (see the red boxes in the screenshot).

Granted the second line of text boxed in is needed for the Railroader option, it's not needed for the Magnate or Tycoon options, and the first red box text doesn't seem necessary for any of the options, and needless to say, it will always show $0 when the status page displays at the end of every year.
Course for reference during the year it would show right, but still doesn't seem necessary.

Also, in box two, the words 'Number of' don't really seem necessary.

FWIW!!

[OilCan]

Anyway, maybe it is the bug with counting electric track, but I received the notice/choice to remove all electrics from my roster.

You comment recalled an older discussion about there being a glitch in 1.05V regarding the count of electric track. I'll test this. I may have to remove that option if there is such a glitch.

If I had a qualm it would be that the AI seemed a little too artificial in their growth. The AI received lots of cash but they didn't manage to be very profitable with it. ... Perhaps their running costs could be reduced (overhead, train maintenance, and track and station maintenance)? Fuel cost is impossible to adjust via event unfortunately.

The AI are predictable to be unpredictable. The tycoon's traits actually have a lot to do with this. As you know, some prefer to invest in expansion, some in stocks, some in industry and some in a mix of all three. The tycoon events in this game gives both the AI companies and the AI tycoons a steady stream of cash. The companies periodically receive sums of cash to spur on their expansion - but they don't always expand. The desired goal was to make a tougher than usual challenge in taking over the AI companies and to make the AI tycoons more aggressive than usual in the stock market. This will, of course, vary between games depending on where the companies start on the map and the traits of the AI tycoons.

The AI's choice of engine is not great here. Did you consider trying to influence their engine choice? The 242 A1 costs slightly more than double in fuel compared to the latest available diesel (the F3). The U1 is much more comparable in cost to the diesel at around 10% higher fuel cost to F3, with a reliability boost. Also, it would be nice if the U1 and Class A1 could be set so they don't become unavailable later in the scenario.

I too am sometimes amazed at the types of engines an AI company will purchase. They tend to choose very expensive engines, even at start up. I'm guessing there is some reasoning in the code for how the AI select train engines, but I often fail to see it.

Regarding the U1 and Class A1, I'll provide the player the option to continue their availability for a fee, a choice of $1M for one or $1.5M for both (?).

[OilCan]

I'm playing Magnate now and it seems like some of the text on the status page isn't necessary (see the red boxes in the screenshot).

Granted the second line of text boxed in is needed for the Railroader option, it's not needed for the Magnate or Tycoon options, and the first red box text doesn't seem necessary for any of the options, and needless to say, it will always show $0 when the status page displays at the end of every year.
Course for reference during the year it would show right, but still doesn't seem necessary.

Also, in box two, the words 'Number of' don't really seem necessary.

FWIW!!

The YTD company profit in the status (your first box) was supposed to help if the player chose the tougher AI option. This would in turn trigger a board's decision that your company's profit should grow at $500K/yr - hence knowing the YTD profit becomes of interest to the player. A player can, of course, find the YTD profit info in the ledger or on the company info. I agree that it is not really needed. I'll drop it from the status.

I went back and forth on whether to include the extra information or not (your second box). It's a follow along from the other game options. If someone played the railroader option and then played the magnate option, the extra information in the status kind of keeps track of what would have happened in the other option.

After trying to explain this I can see where it is confusing. I agree that it is probably best to drop it out of the status.

[RulerofRails]

Here's a link about the electric track counting in 1.05: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=2732&hilit=electric. In the last post, Ned reveals how one can manually fix their exe with a hex editor. Unfortunately, I don't think that you could count on the average player doing that. I haven't done this change in my "clean" 1.05 install which is what I used to play this map.

Extending the availability of the U1 and Class A1 for some fees sounds great.

I was thinking that the AI could be forbidden from buying the 242 A1. But then that's probably more testing to see what they would buy instead. I don't pay a lot of attention to the AI character traits (maybe I should improve in that line), instead I tend to go by what they have already done as an indication of future behavior. I tend to buy into AI companies that are holding a lot of cash ($2-3M+) which have also previously bought back stock. AI stock does grow fast here, but I didn't decide that it wasn't fast enough for me to put off getting a majority share of my own company as a first priority. For an AI to consistently make a profit every year they almost need an industry to cushion their erratic train route scheduling behavior.

Edited: removed idea to use the previous year's annual profit + $500k for the bonus as I realized that is extremely difficult to code in 1.05.

[Gumboots]

Here's a link about the electric track counting in 1.05: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=2732&hilit=electric. In the last post, Ned reveals how one can manually fix their exe with a hex editor. Unfortunately, I don't think that you could count on the average player doing that. I haven't done this change in my "clean" 1.05 install which is what I used to play this map.

That is something that, if it is going to be done, would be best done as a fixed 1.05 download that anyone can access.

Which makes me wonder about other things that we know don't work, in either 1.05 or 1.06, like some of the locomotive attribute changes via event. Those are probably fixable too, if anyone can figure out how.

[RulerofRails]

Which makes me wonder about other things that we know don't work, in either 1.05 or 1.06, like some of the locomotive attribute changes via event. Those are probably fixable too, if anyone can figure out how.

Gumboots, I agree with your idea. However, I am not up to the task of combing the exe for other fixable "bugs" at the moment. Sure would be nice to get them fixed, and it's probably simple mistakes too.

Oilcan, I tried this map with the AI forbidden from purchasing the 242 A1 (an event applying to the AI disabling it each time a company was started) this did help to make the AI slighlty more profitable early on (especially second year, only one failed to make any profit), but I then realized that they tend to only buy 2 of these engines as the Class A1 is most likely available when they purchase subsequent locos. So, it's not a major improvement.

Just for fun I put the figures of the F3 in the spreadsheet "Fuel_Cost_Calculator" and a rough yearly cost is $74 at a replacement interval of 13 years. For the E-18 as it is in this scenario (reduced price) is $46 at an interval of 12 years. Electric track on flat terrain costs approximately 47% more than regular track. Because of grades and bridges etc, the actual figure could be estimated at closer to 35% of total track cost in most circumstances. Track maintenance is approximately 5-6% of the total track value shown as part of book value. Normally, one would expect to be able to buy more Diesels on a new expansion, but I find myself being able to buy more electrics. I could go more into details, but I am just saying that perhaps, cheaper electric engines doesn't need to be a player help on Expert level. The E-18 is a super engine for it's time, head and shoulders above the rest.

Played this one twice as a Railroader. The first time with Diesels for a more seriously as a Railroader. The first time with diesels (the F3, with a couple of V200s which are a no-no economically) for a 15.5 years medal, and the second time I improved some more this time with electrics (E18 exclusively) for a 12.5 year medal.

Spoilers ahead! Beware! Maybe you shouldn't read this before trying the map. In both these runs I broke from my established "thinking" which was that all my track should be connected to achieve higher express traffic, I was also less wary about connecting to the AI which didn't seem to affect their overall profitability as much as I had suspected. I also realized that it wasn't worth going for the Cattle-Meat and Milk haulage potential from an immediate New Delhi to Kanpur start. Instead I did a passenger focused hub of 3 seperate connections from New Delhi to the closest 3 cities. With great electric costs and adding Hotels, Restruants, and Taverns as the money rolled in, this was good for a $1.2M first year. The AI (versus all 6 with aggresive setting) started with a connection to Kanpur as I expected, but that's fine. With my track allocation for the second year I started an unconnected network of Culcutta-Haora-Cuttack-Bhubaneshwar with a connection to Jamshedpur once a bit of cash rolled in. Together with industry purchases with loose cash this was good for a $6.5M second year. I then decided to go all out for the Steel haulage but without using out-of-city stations. This meant 2 year's track allocation and connecting Bhopal to Bhubaneshwar. Yearly profit stagnated a little during this period, but then it was a third unconnected network for the fifth year of Ahmadabad-Vadodora-Surat-Bombay-Pune. I made sure to focus on Paper haulage progress enough to keep it in line with progress on the overall haulage quota. The warehouses are important for this, but also going to Burma early. You can still receive the bonus for connecting to Ragoon even after it has been connected as long as you don't connect it to the rest of India. It's important to give the AI enough room to make new connections so that upon merging them all you end up close to the cities connected target. Meeting the Goods haulage is easy, just build a Plastics Factory in Jodhpur. In this game I only built one Tool and Die there because that's all I needed, but it's really easy to "pump the Goods" with a couple more.

[RulerofRails]

I spent an hour or so, skimming some of Milo's notes to see if he even knew about the issues with the application of those loco performance modifying events. Didn't see a mention, so he probably didn't know about it when making 1.06, otherwise I am sure he would have tried to fix it.

The good news from that is this:

Electric track counters are definitely not working for companies,
territories, or comp-terr. Oddly, it is working for game.

This means that the event that checks for any electric track pieces works fine if the check is "# of electric track pieces" instead of the company one. I tried it and it works.

In my understanding, the AI will never build electric track unless electric engines are their only choice, so currently the only electric tracks possible on the map are those built by the human player. Just for fun, I made a few events to limit some of the AI companies to electric track. This idea sounds promising on paper, however, the problem is that some of their builds have the famous one-piece-of-electric-track missing bug.

Because of all the stock buybacks on the tougher AI choice, I am still finding that some of the AI characters are very likely to sell many of the shares in their companies and even to start big short-selling sprees whenever the economy improves. A couple will have negative stock values every time. Perhaps some events to actually reduce AI stock price in years 3-5 (possibly all the way to year 10) with a subtle unwind thereafter, would help them to have more of a buy-and-hold stock strategy which in turn will make it harder for the human to unseat them in cases where they manage a majority of ownership before the human player can do something about it. Such events could be tied to economic state, but optionally could be incorporated in general to try to influence the AI's stock behavior. Funnily enough, the AI who are supposed to be "smart" in stocks are doing the worst in practice by selling out most easily.

[Gumboots]

I spent an hour or so, skimming some of Milo's notes to see if he even knew about the issues with the application of those loco performance modifying events. Didn't see a mention, so he probably didn't know about it when making 1.06, otherwise I am sure he would have tried to fix it.

The good news from that is this:

Electric track counters are definitely not working for companies,
territories, or comp-terr. Oddly, it is working for game.

This means that the event that checks for any electric track pieces works fine if the check is "# of electric track pieces" instead of the company one. I tried it and it works.

Oh good. That's handy to know. That gets me thinking. Take the infamous cargo price increase bug. What happens if that is only applied to a territory instead of being applied game-wide? Does the spiking all over the map still occur? Or does having the price increase limited to a territory make it behave better?

If it can be made to play well, or at least better, by limiting the price increase to a territory then it could also be made to play well by simply dividing the entire map into territories and then applying the increase to all of them individually, instead of using the game-wide option.

In my understanding, the AI will never build electric track unless electric engines are their only choice, so currently the only electric tracks possible on the map are those built by the human player. Just for fun, I made a few events to limit some of the AI companies to electric track. This idea sounds promising on paper, however, the problem is that some of their builds have the famous one-piece-of-electric-track missing bug.

Haven't heard about that bug, probably because I never use electric.

[RulerofRails]

. . . Take the infamous cargo price increase bug. What happens if that is only applied to a territory instead of being applied game-wide? Does the spiking all over the map still occur? Or does having the price increase limited to a territory make it behave better?

Go ahead and try it. It has been reported somewhere (would have to do a search) that the price adjustments only work game-wide. This seems logical because on the price map we never see any indication of territory borders, there is one base price which is then applied to each cell in proportion to local demand, however, whose to say that there isn't a way to set up a price increase event that works? When I was exploring the bug I tried a few things without success, but new angles and ideas make for new possibilities.

[Hawk]

This map is now available in the archives.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/map_arch/r ... ndiabyRail

[TheBonobo4]

Great map. Got Gold on Medium on my first proper attempt, did it as a Railroader. Started in New Delhi, with 6 AI and went for the tougher AI. Eventually managed to take over all of them (not required, but did help), although the last 2 were tough as they required around $20M in cash and manipulation of Stocks to take over (the last AI I took out by short selling a load of their stock then buying them out at a significantly reduced price).


I never bought access to Pakistan, nor Bhutan (is there any point in Bhutan, it has 0 cities and is only $250K if I recall). Same with China, $20M for no cities/industry? Why not make China unavailable to the player? Actually this reminds me of the last scenario in the Campaign "A Chip Off The Old Block" where you can (theoretically) pay over a billion dollars for access to a useless piece of territory. One has to wonder why.


My only problem with this map however, (and it is minor) is that there are "regions" in the game with certain features (increased track/station building costs), but there is currently no way to know where these regions' boundaries are or what the effects are after the initial notification. Also, I'm not sure on this, but it seems the notifications only appear when *you* build rails in that area, so in the case where you merge with an AI and gain their track no notification is received as information on the region.

[Gumboots]

So after saying I'd have a look at this one about a year ago, I never did get around to it.

I have now downloaded the map and will give it a good thrashing.

[Gumboots]

Righty, so I'm about halfway through my first crack at it. Went for the Railroader option just because I felt like it, and can see it won't be that hard to get the goals.

Chose to play with 3 AI's, also just because I felt like it, and I have to say they don't really add anything to the game. They would if you were doing the Tycoon option where you have to take them out, but for the Railroader option the AI's are basically pointless. They just sit in their corners doing dumb AI things, and occasionally spew some random crap across some part of the map. So they end up being slightly irritating in the classic RT3 AI way, but nothing more than that. If anyone is going to play this as Railroader my is you might as well skip the AI's.

I probably shouldn't have tried this one straight after the Malawi map, because it's another track-limited game, and it's already giving me the same old "oh dear buckets of cash and nothing to do with it all year" feeling. This leads to wanting to play heavy on industry, just to have something to do, but there are so many duplicate industries seeding in so many towns that running any one of them becomes a nuisance. This has rather detracted from the otherwise epic feel of the map. It starts off feeling epic, then sorta tends into "lost the plot" a bit. I think this is a map where buying industry should, with some rare exceptions, generally be limited to primary producers like farms and logging camps. That way the secondary industries can fight it out among themselves without it being your problem, and you can just ship stuff to and from them whenever and wherever it's profitable.

I will say that pax traffic works really well on this map, which makes an important point. Pax prices on this map are halved, but pax production is more than doubled. Pax price of 50% with initially standard (100%) production, followed by a cut in production, as on the Malawi map, makes for a game where pax is basically disregarded entirely. OTOH pax price of 50% but with 250% production, as on this map, makes for a game where shipping pax is a total riot and decently profitable to boot. The point being that obviously pax numbers are far more important than pax prices when it comes to determining the viability of pure express consists.

This is probably why pure express never worked on the Canyonlands map. There simply wasn't the population density to make it viable.

Edit: Just tried doing a bit more on it, but rapidly ended up swearing at the screen and deleting all the saves. I am obviously NOT in the mood for another limited track game at the moment. I think what I'll do is make a copy of the map and remove the track limitation. This will get around my current feeling about such games (which involves lots of naughty words used in a very imaginative fashion) and let me get a good feel for the rest of the scenario.

Just thinking about limited track: really it's a very blunt instrument. It's not a challenge, because there's no way around it. It's just a brick wall that artificially appears even when everything else is totally rocking. I can't help feeling that really there should be better ways of slowing down expansion, if slowing down expansion is what is required.

[Gumboots]

Just thinking about this pax traffic thing some more. It's probably possible to come up with a rule of thumb guide to pax production, based on total map area vs number of towns, and average size of towns.

For example, Malawi is a 384x794 map and only has 37 towns (IIRC). Pax is fairly insignificant even at 100% production, and virtually non-existent at 70% production. India is 832x832 with 100 towns, some of which are unusually large, and pax is a big feature at 250% production. Orient Express and its variants are 576x384, so roughly 3/4 the size of Malawi, but with 83 towns. That plays decently for pax even at 100% production, which I've tested, and with the scenario events applied has 125% production. Canyonlands is 704x640 with only 60 towns, many of which are tiny, and express is insignificant in the early to middle stages.

So if you divide map area (in px^2) by number of towns, then divide by pax production, you get 8240 for Malawi at game start, before pax reductions. After the 15% reduction it's 9476, by which point pax might as well not be there at all. Canyonlands is 7509 in the early to mid stages, and sure enough pax is insignificant despite what all the pop-ups are telling you. Given the tiny town sizes it's effectively the same as Malawi for density. Late in the game pax production can go as high as 250%, which would bring the figure down to 3004. Against that, you have to wait a long time to get it to that level, and many of the towns are still tiny, which would account for OilCan's recommendation to never bother with pure express trains, and to get your pax haulage via mixed consists.

The corresponding figure for India is (832 x 832)/(100 x 2.5) = 2769. At that level pax is rocking the house, but that does also include proportionally more large cities than Malawi, and much larger than Canyonlands, which is going to further boost India. For Orient Express and variants it's 2664 at 100% production, which works, and 2131 at 125% production. These are higher densities than India, but pax traffic seems more or less the same with OE at 125%, which is probably related to average city size (the India map has some big ones).

So based on that, my first stab at a rule of thumb would be that if you want pax traffic to be a good feature you should be aiming at a figure somewhere in the 2,000 to 3,000 range, depending on average size of cities and how much of a feature you want pax to be.