Latvia (beta)

[juriko]

Hello,

we created a new nice and small map - Latvia. We already spent a few days to manage it, it was tested on different levels, looks good. The available resources on the map are very close to real situation. Also no heavy industry except a few factories - according to real situation.

Your comments are wellcome.

Here are some screenshots:

Thank you,

Juri and Alex.

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The finished version of this map is now available in the archives: Latvia - by Jurijs (juriko) Kornijenko

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[Gumboots]

Welcome to the forum.. Your map sounds like fun. I'll give it a go.

Do you want corrections for English translation? The briefing is good, but could be improved a bit. And don't bother being embarrassed. Nobody else here can speak Latvian, so you're ahead.

[Gumboots]

Ok, it's a fun little map but there's a bug in the Gold event. If you use < or = 30 instead of =30 then the event will fire if someone gets the requirements earlier. At the moment it will only fire in the 30th year.

Also, I think it could do with a greater range of steam.

Edit: Hmm. Come to think of it, there aren't any other default options for Euro steam in that period. That's a hole in the roster than needs fixing.

[juriko]

Welcome to the forum.. Your map sounds like fun. I'll give it a go.

Do you want corrections for English translation? The briefing is good, but could be improved a bit. And don't bother being embarrassed. Nobody else here can speak Latvian, so you're ahead.

Ok, it's a fun little map but there's a bug in the Gold event. If you use < or = 30 instead of =30 then the event will fire if someone gets the requirements earlier. At the moment it will only fire in the 30th year.

Also, I think it could do with a greater range of steam.

Edit: Hmm. Come to think of it, there aren't any other default options for Euro steam in that period. That's a hole in the roster than needs fixing.

for Your comment! I was wrote all text from map in Latvia.txt file, please, make a correction, see txt file in attachment...
And I was corrected a bug in Gold event...

Latvia.txt

Here are all text

(1.7 KiB) Downloaded 270 times

Also new map version is in attachment!



Alex.

[Gumboots]

Cool. I'll take a look.

If anyone else gets curious about the history behind this map, I found this page yesterday: http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r096.html

RT3 needs wood-burning Moguls.

[juriko]

Cool. I'll take a look.

If anyone else gets curious about the history behind this map, I found this page yesterday: http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r096.html

RT3 needs wood-burning Moguls.

OK. So, i will correct history in map at this weekend...

Alex.

[Gumboots]

Try this for the text. Obviously there are several ways of wording the same idea in any language, but I think this is what you were after.

[RulerofRails]

Gave this a test play. There aren't many cargo types on this map (many have no significant supply). Also, some cities are very close. Personally I think it might be better to setup so that some cities have industry sliders at 0% and never seed with an industry, as I got the feel that there's a high chance of newly seeded industries being cannibalistic on resource flows (as time goes on a fair few nearby cities will end up with the same industry mix). However, default PopTop maps are notorious for this so it's not a huge deal. Just not great for a rails start. Much less head-ache to take control of the resource flows yourself with an industry start.

The ocean is green. It needs to be re-done in the maps editor with the "Change Color" radio button checked. A bucket fill below the height of your cursor will work, but I would recommend using the tool to raise the land first (oceans stay at the same level). It still may not be enough to prevent a blocky appearance on the edge of the ocean cells which wouldn't happen if time was spent to do it manually (no bucket fill).

Enjoyed the play. Looking forward to the next version. Thanks for sharing the map.

[juriko]

Gave this a test play. There aren't many cargo types on this map (many have no significant supply). Also, some cities are very close. Personally I think it might be better to setup so that some cities have industry sliders at 0% and never seed with an industry, as I got the feel that there's a high chance of newly seeded industries being cannibalistic on resource flows (as time goes on a fair few nearby cities will end up with the same industry mix). However, default PopTop maps are notorious for this so it's not a huge deal. Just not great for a rails start. Much less head-ache to take control of the resource flows yourself with an industry start.

The ocean is green. It needs to be re-done in the maps editor with the "Change Color" radio button checked. A bucket fill below the height of your cursor will work, but I would recommend using the tool to raise the land first (oceans stay at the same level). It still may not be enough to prevent a blocky appearance on the edge of the ocean cells which wouldn't happen if time was spent to do it manually (no bucket fill).

Enjoyed the play. Looking forward to the next version. Thanks for sharing the map.

for Your comment! I will make changes in map...

But in my editor all is ok... See isn't green...

Alex.

[Hawk]

But in my editor all is ok... See isn't green...

Alex.

To confirm what RoR said, here's a screenshot from in the game. It looks the same in the editor.

[juriko]

But in my editor all is ok... See isn't green...

Alex.

To confirm what RoR said, here's a screenshot from in the game. It looks the same in the editor.

Latvia.jpg

Hawk, do you start a game with 1.06 patch? This could be the only reason...

Alex.

[Gumboots]

I just checked it on my box, using 1.05. The original beta has the correct colours, but the v0.01 beta has lost all the colours for land and sea and is just a dull green everywhere.

[Hawk]

To confirm what RoR said, here's a screenshot from in the game. It looks the same in the editor.

Latvia.jpg

Hawk, do you start a game with 1.06 patch? This could be the only reason...

Alex.

No. I loaded Latvia in my 1.05 install. I have multiple installs of RT3.

[juriko]

We were created a new map version - v004. Changes:

ADD: A few more cities are added to "empty" districts, some cities are placed more accurately according to real map
FIX: Riga and some other ports stoped accept meat, meat is shanged to other things
FIX: Riga and other ports stop to change wheat, logs and etc to other supplies
ADD: Abrene (Pitalovo) according to historical map is part of Latvia
FIX: Belorus part renamed to Poland
FIX: Central part of map produce livestocks
FIX: A few American locomatives added

Unfortunately, we don't understand why sea is green... if a sea is green agan, please, correct the map and attach it to your post.

Also, about this comment:

Personally I think it might be better to setup so that some cities have industry sliders at 0% and never seed with an industry, as I got the feel that there's a high chance of newly seeded industries being cannibalistic on resource flows (as time goes on a fair few nearby cities will end up with the same industry mix).

- it looks like I understand what you mean and mentioned correction above targeted to improve the map, but not sure...

Juri and Alex.

[Hawk]

Yep! Sea is blue now.

[Gumboots]

I noticed that the latest version disables the lumber mill. I assume this is to simulate the log export trade that was important at the time.

However, the furniture factory and toy factory are still enabled, and the port at Ventspils demands furniture. There's no way of producing any furniture or toys on the map, since no port or warehouse supplies lumber. So if you want to make people export logs, which is fine, it would be best to disable the furniture factory and toy factory and remove the furniture demand from the Ventspils port.

[RulerofRails]

Played the lastest version. I noticed the improvements.

An example of what I meant.
I bought this Meat Packing Plant not long after it was seeded in 1920.

This upstart one was seeded in the neighboring town just 2 years later. This could be viewed as extra "challenge": new competition. But the game doesn't really handle this close-quarters competition very well. IMO, it looks messy and un-natural to me.

Notice how the same industry spawned within 2 years at the very next town? RT3s percentages for the sliders aren't true percentage chances of appearance. They could be simplified a little and described as a relative measure to determine the odds of one industry appearing vs. another. My suggestion: only have the slider for the Meat Packing Plant set to allow them in one of the cities. For the other city use the setting of 0%. Map should play cleaner.


Something else:
I noticed you have Lumber->Oil conversion in the Riga Port. As Gumboots pointed out the Lumber Mill is disabled, so this conversion will never be useful (it's hidden).

Port conversions rely on economics just like regular industries. If you take something expensive (Cheese for example at ~$400) and convert it to something cheap (Iron a max of about $80) at a 1:1 ratio the port wont do much. There is a built in protection mode that cuts production back to prevent the port losing heaps of money. It may convert a very small amount per year: 0.2 or 0.3 of a load.

In order for the Port to break-even (needs to be a net profit to clear labor and overhead costs) the price of the input needs to be a little below the price of the output. For the example above, a 1:5 conversion should allow decent production.

A side-effect may be that this makes too much Iron, the solution is to set a second recipe in the same port to only demand Cheese. This way, not all Cheese will get a chance to be converted to Iron. Hope that makes sense.


PS.
I might suggest raising the cost of access rights (for example all x10), this should slow down the faster players a little. All my plays and Gumboots have been sub-10 years. You could have an event that drops the price of access rights to the current level after 15-20 years have passed.

[Gumboots]

Yes I noticed something similar with the industry spawning. It's a % chance, but still random, so sometimes the map will spawn well and other times it will have an overload of some industries. I agree that setting sliders to 0 for some cities would be the way around this problem. You'd have to decide what general distribution you wanted and plan your slider settings on that.

Another option: if you don't want to play with a lot of city settings you could split the map into territories and set the sliders there (leaving all cities at zero). That way you can deal with bigger chunks of the map, if you want to.

Good point about the port conversions. I'd missed that.

And I agree the access costs are probably a bit low. I did one start in Estonia just for the heck of it. That brings up another point: steel production.

There is only one port producing steel (it's in Estonia) which is why I decided to try the Estonia start for a change. With only one source of steel on the map, a tool and die there is a guaranteed long term return. You can get the ports at Riga and Vestpils to produce coal and iron, so in theory you could run a steel mill of your own. The production of both ports, if optimised, would be enough to make a steel mill profitable.

The catch here is that you will need all of their output to make a steel mill worthwhile, and you have to ship at least half of it long distances to reach your steel mill. That means that if any intervening cities have sliders set to spawn steel mills, or even electric plants*, the chances of you running a steel mill of your own are just about zero. That, in turn, means the map's steel production will always to limited to the Estonian port's 4 loads per year. Which is fine is that is the result you were aiming for. If it wasn't what you were aiming for, it might pay to adjust a few things.

*I know a lot of towns are set to spawn electric plants, so in practice the only way of running a steel mill would be to put it right on top of a source of coal, then ship in all your iron from wherever you could get that. But even then, steel mills in other cities could bork the whole thing.

[Gumboots]

Ok, it's a fun little map but there's a bug in the Gold event. If you use < or = 30 instead of =30 then the event will fire if someone gets the requirements earlier. At the moment it will only fire in the 30th year.

Gold_event_bug.jpg

This bug hasn't been fixed. It's still in the fourth beta.

[juriko]

all for comments! We will make changes at this week...

About this:

This bug hasn't been fixed. It's still in the fourth beta.

We were making v001 in that version bug was fixed, but this version crash our RT3...

And we need to make v004 from v000... But in v000 but wasn't be edited...

Alex.