Latvia (beta)

[Hawk]

This map is now in the archives.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/rrt3_europe2.php#latvia

[Wolverine@MSU]

After a lengthy haitus from RT3 I finally got back to playing RT3. Looks like you guys have been busy for the last two years with new locos, maps, and other mods. Glad to see that there are still at least a few diehards out there.

Played this one over the last couple of days, and it's a really fun one. No doubt because of the back and forth between the author and reviwers. Got Expert Gold with a year to spare.

I did find one bug in the events. The test for haulage to Liepaja for fertilizer is set to count LTD fertilizer "from" territory and it should be "to" territory. Couldn't understand why I wasn't getting my medal when status page showed all goals having been met.

I did several starts from scratch and got seedings of from one to three ports in Riga and only once a steel mill in Daugavpils.

[Gumboots]

Must admit I didn't get around to testing the last version, as I was pretty much Latvia'd out after all the beta testing and scripting. That one must have snuck in when Juriko was tweaking it. Medal was firing ok last time I tested a beta. Should be an easy fix anyway.

[Gumboots]

Edit again: I'm finding this one is very variable with regard to seeding. I have me a suspicion here. When this was in beta Juriko was saying that he didn't have the skills to win on Expert level, and therefore didn't test on that level. I had set it up so that most seeds were winnable on Expert, but the impression I'm getting from this version is that things are much more disjointed and random. IOW, I think some the changes were only tested for playability on lower difficulty levels, and are making it all a bit hit and miss on Expert level, so that its winnable if you get a particularly good seed but otherwise you're screwed. I'll have to check the whole economy to see what changes were made.

I am finding I'm consistently getting two ports seeding in Riga, with a third coming in later. Riga port settings may be a bit too high.

One point is the additional Expert level haulage requirements for Liepaja and Ventspils. Hauling Fertilizer to Liepaja is fine, although I don't think the game needed it, but the port there is set to convert Fertiliser into Aluminum. This is only going to be marginally profitable at times, and unprofitable at other times, so won't be a reliable source of demand. It would start being consistent at around 2 Fertilizer > 3 Aluminum. This was the same problem the early betas had, when he was trying to get ports to do unprofitable conversions.

The other eastern port, at Ventspils, is also set to demand Fertilizer for a 1:1 conversion to Aluminum but also does a 1:1 conversion of Paper to Aluminum. It has to have Paper delivered for Gold haulage but the Fertilizer conversion is going to conflict with the Paper conversion. There is a production limit of four loads, so if some Fertilizer ends up there it could (depending on relative prices) screw any Paper demand for that year. And then that conversion is going to be marginal at times anyway, so demand is likely to tank.

I can't see the sense of this port recipe.With such a tight production limit I think it would be better to drop the Fertilizer > Aluminum conversion. That way Liepaja becomes the hub for Fertilizer and Ventspils becomes the hub for Paper.

[RulerofRails]

Wolverine, good catch. Yep, when making corrections/improvements, small errors can slip in. The possibility of fixing the scale was discussed and you will likely notice that nobody reported a successful test run of beta version 018.

As far as the Riga ports, yes they will appear more frequently because the suggestion that I had made early on (no meat packers in Riga since Meat needs to be shipped there) was put into effect. This means more room for other industries, and in this case that's the ports. So would make sense to decrease the port slider.

I was aware of some variation in seeding all along. I don't think that much was changed, just tweaks, but I didn't analyze anything. Surely the variation is good for replayability. If you find a seed that is "unwinnable" send it my way. Steel Mill in Daugavpils is unnecessary. There is a large enough starting area (Latvia covers approx. 50% of land on the map) pretty sure to provide enough opportunities even for no-industry personal restrictions. IMO, the later betas actually became a little easier thanks in part to the pre-placed Meat Packing Plant in Siguada.

I didn't play the map through, but from editor forays and testing out the "Science in practice" event I noticed that said event has the text "I want better the locomotives". Also, event "Baltic Rails" for Choice 3 has a temporary effect: 30 years. Neither of which affect gameplay, but thought I would mention anyway.

Yes, the ports could be tweaked a bit more. These are low volume (20 loads) haulage in comparison to the Riga demand which I harped on about. Nevertheless can't hurt to improve. I don't believe a 2:3 conversion in a port/warehouse in a port is permissible without hacking the gmp file (don't know if any one who tried/succeeded). As far as I know we can only do 1:1 or 1:x where x is a positive integer. The side effect of any 1:x is obviously multiplication of cargo on the map. Personally, I don't have a problem with unprofitable port conversions, per se.. IMO, would probably be sufficient to double the max on the production (both Liepaja and Ventspils ports) and drop the Paper demand at Liepaja.

[Gumboots]

I played it right through and it sort of came together after a while. IOW, the seeding looked bad in the early years but ended up being winnable.

Had two Riga ports from early on, but then no third port seeded this time. Two ports in Riga is what it should have IMO, so sliders may be ok the way they are. If it occasionally gives three ports or one port I think that's acceptable. Although I think one Riga port would make the game extremely difficult to win on Expert level, maybe impossible, while three ports will obviously make it easier. It had occurred to me that the best option might be to forget the sliders and just pre-place the Riga ports, if consistency was wanted.

The Daugavpils steel mill only appears in some games, which I think is fine. The game is playable with or without it, so I'm happy to leave that coding the way it is for a bit of variety.

I spotted the dodgey text in the SiP event and the temporary effect in Rail Baltica. Have fixed those along with the Silver haulage trigger on my desktop as a sort of personal v19. Haven't found any other bugs.

The Liepaja and Ventspils port conversions ended up not being a problem. They never produced a lot of Aluminum, but it wasn't needed anyway, and getting the required haulages to those ports was fine without getting into bait-and-switch or other silliness. The overall price gradients were such that the port conversions weren't really significant one way or the other. They can probably be ignored, but if doing a v19 to fix a few small bugs I think it would make sense to tweak the ports a little bit.

The other thing that would be good is to give it a bit of bmp2gmp magic. The coastline graphics got hammered pretty badly during the beta testing. A replacement with the bmp from the first beta should be the trick.

Anyway it's still a fun game. Meat and Lumber to Riga still ended up being the limiting factors for time. I topped them both comfortably, but only early in the last year. Could have done it a bit earlier if I'd given more thought to hauling Meat and Lumber out of Riga for redistribution. That would keep the prices at Riga higher, and encourage more incoming shipments via auto consist.

Edit: Oh and I was playing this on my test installation, which obviously has the custom double cars for some cargoes (boxcars, hoppers and tankers). The resulting longer consists definitely increased congestion in the area around Riga. I had to get a bit cunning to keep things moving. A good little challenge, IMO.

[Gumboots]

Had another go at it. The port recipe at Liepaja didn't matter this time, for one simple reason. No port seeded there, at all.

Which made things a bit dicey for shipping stuff to Liepaja, since the usual demand was missing. Still managed to get Gold, and still in first half of the last year, and about the same for CBV (although I could have gone higher on that if I wanted to).

So with no port demand at Liepaja it's the Cheese and Fertilizer haulages that are the limiting factors for Gold. I was well ahead on the other haulages, having worked out a good system for Riga. If there had been a port at Liepaja the game would have been faster. Ditto if I had the same seed for Chemicals and Milk as the previous play.

I managed to stop Riga being a bottleneck, by developing a layout in a test sandbox and using that in the game. It looks like the screenshot, and allows the two Riga stations to operate independently, even with very long consists, while still allowing each side of the map to connect to the other side. There's a complete bypass as well, for trains that aren't stopping in Riga. This setup looks a bit overkill but worked really well. Riga never got jammed up. It was one of the smoothest flowing sections of the map.
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The third station at Salaspils was me trying to run a Fertilizer Factory there. It seeded and was going cheap, and I thought it would do well. If that factory hadn't seeded there I would have skipped the Salaspils station.

[low_grade]

Tried this today. First try failed to produce profits with a pair of Class 500's burning too much fuel. I think I'm going to need the economy of the P8 on my next try... Exceedingly slow rail start, profits under $200k for the first 3 years, issuing stock and bonds as available to keep expanding the network. Riga-Tukums first, then a few more spars out of Riga, each with a single P8 servicing two towns besides Riga. Finally in 4th year economy began to heat up, and bond-fueled expansion could begin in earnest. Issuing stocks and the little boosts helped along the way, with expansion complete by year 10. At this point I'd only hauled 50 or so lumber to Riga, so I got serious with lumber mills and dedicated hauling trains. Similar attention to the other haulage goals, but I wasn't sure I was going to make lumber in time. Fortunately in the third to last year I hauled in 50+ and was sure of meeting that goal. Paper to Ventspils was lagging, so I redirected a few trains that I noticed had loaded paper... a way to get around no haul-at-a-loss and a cheat, I suppose. Would have been nice to have a few more commercial buildings seeded there to generate sufficient demand. Also no port in Ventspils. Gold on Expert in Dec 1938.

Very quick play and mostly engaging, though the last few years required little interaction. I'm wondering if disabling issuing stocks would make the scenario too hard?

Ah, the briefing states the haulage goals incorrectly, so I was working against myself for a bit, until I noticed the ledger, which gets it right. Briefing says cheese to Ventspils and clothing to Liepaja...

[Gumboots]

That briefing glitch is another bug that needs sorting then. I suspect that one has been around since early beta and people have only been paying attention to the ledger. I've played this map umpteen times and never noticed the briefing was wrong.

Good that you found it playable with no port in Ventspils. I figured it probably would be, since the Ventspils haulages are common cargoes that are easy to move around. A missing Liepaja port doesn't kill the game if it doesn't seed, but things do become a bit artificial. I was having to rehaul Cheese from Liepaja to the other side of the map just to keep some price gradient to Liepaja. Too much of that sort of thing is a bit irritating, but it's ok for variety if the map only does it occasionally.

Edit: When fixing the briefing I checked a few other things. The port sliders for Ventspils and Liepaja are set to 100%, but from what is happening in the game it is obvious that 100% on the slider does not mean a 100% chance of a port seeding. There must be some more weird RT3 "logic" behind how the sliders work.

The first port at Riga is pre-placed, and the port slider for Riga is only set at 60%, but for some reason a second port almost always seems to seed there.

Had some ideas too.

1/ Given the between-the-wars timeframe of this scenario, I couldn't help thinking that I'd expect to see more barracks and military depots around the place. I've had games with only one barracks in them, which feels a bit wrong. Might be worth increasing the barracks sliders for some towns.

2/ Maybe an additional bonus event to encourage connection to Saaremaa. It's a tourist spot in real life, and has a cultural connection to Kolka/Livonian coast.

3/ No-access territory under the Baltic and Gulf of Riga, to prevent crazy suspension bridges if anyone gets carried away, with a clear patch to allow access to Saaremaa. I usually connect to Saaremaa anyway, just for fun.

4/ Haven't tried it yet, but since this scenario allows multiple companies there is obvious scope for cheating on territory access costs, as well as fleecing the initial company to get a better start. Perhaps multiple companies should be disallowed.
*NOTE* Just tried this. Turns out that there's no advantage to it anyway. With the way the game is set up you can't do an effective robber barn start. You can fleece your first company down to the point where you own all shares (only 1,000 remaining by that stage) but since there are only 1,000 shares left the game will not allow you to short sell them when you resign from the company. This obviously cuts your gains considerably, since even being able to short sell 1,000 shares would give you around an extra $200k.

Anyway, what happens is that your PNW goes up a lot, but then investors won't put as much into the second company, so you end up with less company cash than the first company. Not only that, but the interest rate on the first bond jumps from 12% to 15%, and taking out that one bond sets your credit rating from BB back to F. Not a good position to be in, so not worth doing. Also, the second company will still be restricted to Latvia, so there's no advantage on territory access either.

[Gumboots]

Tried another run. This time I didn't take the option to reduce load/unload times in the Riga territory, which is funny because the event for it was my idea. Thought I'd see how it went for congestion with normal settings, and it was pretty good. The split network+bypass arrangement makes a big difference to congestion at Riga. OTOH the extra cost for the faster load/unload is quite reasonable so it may be worth doing anyway.*

Generally the game flows pretty well, but the Automobiles to Pskov always feels a bit artificial. It needs rehauling to make it work, sometimes straight back to where they came from due to the low margins. This haulage was a bit of an afterthought ("Hey we should give them a reason to go to Pskov") and it still feels like one.

*Although it says load/unload times are reduced the event also boosts pulling power within the Riga territory, so trains get up and over the bridges near the stations a lot easier.

[Gumboots]

Tried another one. Decide I'd see about a all-rail-no-industry start for a change. Well, that didn't last long. Definitely not the seed for it.

Started the game up again, and this time I got a really unusual seed. Masses of unused pulpwood and logs around Daugavpils, and stack of milk all down the river to Riga, and a seeded Dairy Processor just outside the border of the Riga territory. This was just begging for an industry start, so I went with that. Paper Mill at Daugavpils initially (good returns, no bond) followed by Lumber Mill, then bought the Dairy Processor, and followed that with shipping the milk and lumber down to Riga.

Stayed out of Meat Packing Plants this time, due to competition among them, and just shipped their product. The whole economy in this seed was unusual for this map. Automobiles shipped to Pskov fairly easily, which is really weird. There were logging camps near Ventspils, so a Paper Mill on a short line to Ventspils took care of the Paper haulage while I was sorting everything else.

The Dairy Processor at Riga was a gold mine, and made the Cheese to Liepaja easy to accomplish. Milk supply was so consistent that I ended up running two, upgraded, Dairy Processors right next to each other, and they were both consistently returning annual profits in the $600-700k range. That is unprecedented for any map, in my experience. Usually it's a struggle to run one and get good returns.

Didn't bother buying into Estonia at all, since I figured the bonuses for those connections weren't really enough to justify the diversion. Kolka is worth doing though. It costs about $400k from Talsi (where you need to go anyway to get to Ventspils) and the $1 million connection bonus means you make an instant $600k on the deal even if you never use the line to Kolka. I did buy into Poland fairly late in the game, due to its cheap access cost and some good haulage there.

Ended up with a Gold in December 1936, which is the earliest I've managed to finish this scenario since the v18 changes.

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Speaking of access costs: Lithuania is pointless. There's never any need to go into that territory. The Oil Refinery at Mazeiki, if it seeds, will make good money if you ship oil to it from Oskov. The problem is that when you add the territory access cost to the price of the refinery, you end up with an "asset" that will only give minimal profit in the time remaining. It's always pretty late in the game by the time the refinery gets going. First you have to buy into Russia and build rail there, which will set you back about $4 million even if you already at Russia's border, then you have to get trains all the way from Oskov to Mazeiki, then the Oil has to get from the station to the refinery. The better opinion is to just let the refinery do its own thing and ship the product.

However, I think the best option in terms of quick returns would be to just build your own refinery at Oskov. I haven't done this before, largely because I think the oil trains are fun, but it would be the smart option. It would be cheaper than buying into Lithuania and then buying the (cheaper, seeded) refinery there, and production would start instantly with zero oil shipping time. The resulting diesel can be shipped anywhere you like, so haulage on Diesel should be just as profitable, but you won't need specialised Oil-to-Mazeiki trains. You'd miss out on the haulage for Oil, which is very lucrative for the first four or five loads, but OTOH you'd get refinery profits and Diesel haulage profits almost instantaneously.

Furthermore, by the time you get into Russia there will usually be a stack of about 30-32 Oil at Oskov, and the warehouse makes another 8 loads per year. Put those together and the result is enough Oil to run an upgraded refinery at full capacity for four years. If you are four years or less from game end, you can upgrade your refinery as soon as you build it to maximise your profits. If you are (hypothetically) six years from game end then you could either upgrade the refinery after two years, and let it run at full upgraded capacity until game end, or you could upgrade it immediately for fast profits and let it run at half capacity for the last two years.

Edit: Just tried a quick test of this idea. I forgot that with the Oil price at $0 at Oskov, the warehouse only runs at 50% production. That means 4 loads/year instead of 8, so an upgraded refinery will start running out of oil in less than three years in a Depression (what it was when I tested), and probably close to 2 years in a Boom. This means it's not worth upgrading the refinery until the last year or so, if then. Better to take more consistent profits from a basic refinery.

However, the upgraded one returned 41% ROI in the first year, and 39% ROI in the second year. Since the upgrade doubles production but only requires 58% more cash up front, ROI for a basic refinery should be in the 30-32% range, with Oil price remaining near $0 for some time. The only thing to watch is that Oil will be worth $20 or so a load in Riga, so you have to be careful to not use an auto consist if shipping direct from Ostov to Riga. Trains from Ostov are fairly lucrative, with much faster turnaround than shipping to Mazeiki and back.

[Gumboots]

Ok, this scenario is exploitable. Big time. Presumably this same trick would also apply to a lot of other scenarios.

Having discovered that "sweet spot" for investor cash vs personal cash when starting the first company, I started playing around with robber baron ideas. The short version is that once you are over the initial hump, you can keep trashing companies one after the other and boost your personal cash by 30% each time. It works like this:

Start the first company with $90k of your cash and only $720k of investor cash. This is important. It has to be $720k of investor cash. If you use $810k it won't work, and if you use $630k it won't work.*

Do NOT take out any bonds or issue any stock. You won't have enough purchasing power to buy more stock yourself, so this is an easy one. All you have to do is use the company's money to buy back stock until you can't buy back any more. Nothing else. Once you hit the limit of the company's buyback ability, simply resign from the company, sell the stock you hold, then short sell an additional 1,000. It will only let you short sell 1,000, so that's what you do. Now un-pause the game for an instant, then pause again. Stock price will have crashed. You will need to clear your short before you will have enough purchasing power to start a second company, so buy 1,000 to settle that. Your personal cash will now be about $260k.

Now you can start a second company. The game will offer you $780k of investor cash to go with your $260k. Take all of it. Now for more dirty deeds. Once again, do not take out any bonds or issue any stock. This time you will have enough purchasing power to buy some extra stock for yourself, so buy as much as you can to boost the stock price. Don't worry about margin calls as they are not an issue. Keep alternating between buying back stock with company cash, and buying more for yourself as your purchasing power increases. You will eventually reach a point where you hold all the stock but the company can still afford to buy some back. At this stage, sell 1,000 and get the company to buy them back. Repeat until the company cannot buy back any more. Once again, resign from the company, sell all your stock, then short sell as much as you can. Un-pause the game for an instant, pause again, and settle your short sells so you are back to 0 stock. Your personal cash will now be about $720k. Yes, you read that right. $720k.

Ok, so now you can start a third company if you like. Might as well. If you're going to be evil it's worth doing a thorough job of it. Since RT3 now knows you are evil it will only offer you $360k of investor cash to go with your $720k. This proportion is stable from now on. The game will consistently offer you investor cash that is 50% of your personal cash every time you start a new company. At this stage, by using the same procedure that you used with the second company you can consistently leverage a 30% increase in personal cash for every company you start and trash. As far as I know, the sky appears to be the limit. For this test I only went as far as a seventh company.

I decided to go for 100% ownership at the start, so only took $400k investor cash instead of the $1000k that was on offer to match my $2000k personal cash. I then bought up all the stock I didn't own, then issued stock twice and took out the one available bond at 11%. I also set the dividend at a level which would just cover my personal debt regardless of economic state. Alternatively, since there is still a massive margin on purchasing power you could afford to run no dividend for the first few years if you wanted to maximise initial ROI, then easily catch up later. This method gives you total ownership of your company, with manageable personal debt, and with an additional $1.5 million compared to the maximum starting cash you can raise with the first company. The result is shown in the screenshot.
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As you can see there is only one company. I didn't want to leave six trashed companies lying around to do stupid things. I used my purchasing power to buy up the stock of the trashed companies (didn't cost much at all) then did mergers on all six of them. This cleared the board nicely at minimal expense, and is the reason for not messing around with bonds or anything else on those companies. If you don't saddle them with debt, it's cheap and easy to get rid of them when you want to without your newest company taking on a large liability.
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*Note: It is possible, although I haven't tested it, that you could use $710k or $730k for investor cash and still get this trick to work, but so far I have only tested even multiples of $90k. Since $720k works so well, I probably won't bother testing small amounts each side of that.

[Gumboots]

Found a use for this stuff. Although PNW is not a goal for this scenario, there are other things that can be done with dirty tricks. One obvious one is territory access costs. I experimented with this, just for fun, and it's possible to get your main company access to any territory for a few hundred k. Even Russia only costs that much, and Poland obviously costs less.

Say you want access to Russia. Start a company that has the maximum amount of investor cash (usually 1/3 for multiple company trashing) and the minimum of your cash (2/3 obviously) and with the total set to the territory access cost of $3 million in the case of Russia. As soon as the company is formed, spend its entire $3 million on buying access to Russia. Now resign from the company, sell the stock you hold, and short sell as much as possible. Un-pause the game briefly, then clear your short sells and buy all the (near worthless) stock in the company.

Resume the chair of your main company (you will need >50% stock for this). Your personal debt will have increased, but due to the short selling you were able to do it won't have increased by anything like the $2 million you put up. It's more likely to be around $400k. You then use your main company to do a merger on the trashed company at the maximum merger price. This will reduce your personal debt by another $100k or so.

Result is that for not much increase in personal debt on your part, your company gets access to Russia almost for free. Even if you use dividends to clear the personal debt you incurred with the dirty tricks, it will still only cost your company a few hundred k.

[Gumboots]

Had another shot at it. Gold in late 1936 again, but with a far less spectacular seed. This one was middle of the range, neither good nor bad.

I was using robber baron tricks just to get a better handle on the possibilities. Started the game by company-jumping until I had a substantial majority of stock (75% IIRC) but with the company's starting cash for the game being almost the same as default (around $1,020k instead of the default $990k). Also used company tricks to get cheap access to Estonia and Russia. Other than that I played it all straight.

The cheap access to Estonia and Russia appears to have knocked at least two years off the game. Stock price was constantly rising right from the start, with no flat spots due to access costs, and obviously there was an extra $5 million that could be put into expansion. This stuff would be worth trying if you were a less proficient player who was having trouble getting the goals on your chosen difficulty level. It should also help you learn something about the way RT3 handles companies.

It turns out that the access to Estonia and Russia can be done without hitting your PNW at all. By the time you want access to those countries, and if you leave a few years between them, enough time has lapsed that the game will offer you a substantial amount of investor cash if you play around with the sliders. By putting in the minimum amount of your cash to get enough investor cash to cover the relevant territory access cost, you can make yourself a tidy profit on the deal. If you only take enough to cover the access cost then you simply have to sell all your stock, then short sell as much as possible, after resigning from the kamikaze company. Sometimes you can get a large extra chunk of investor cash by putting in a bit more than your minimum. This is usually worth doing, because the extra cash will allow you to pump the stock price with buybacks before you resign and short sell stock. Naturally, this means more cash for you.

[RulerofRails]

I gave this another run too, single company of course. IIRC, many of my test plays were without industries (except Hotels), but it was awhile ago. This time it was definitely no industry, Class 500 exclusively (except two P8s later in the game), no special effort to go after connection bonuses, and starting with a low pax potential routing (Tukums-Jelgava-Bausaka) partially conflicting with the river. I thought this was a good indication of the potential for a first time player. Was playing quickly (about 3 hrs game time), just doing enough to hit the CBV, which I did in December 1940. It is a fun map. And playing well, IMO. I recommend we give a fixed copy to Hawk for an archive update. You mentioned fixing a copy, are you planning on posting, or should I fix a copy and post that?

Start the first company with $90k of your cash and only $720k of investor cash. This is important. It has to be $720k of investor cash. If you use $810k it won't work, and if you use $630k it won't work.

You obviously did a lot of runs with this, but I still question it. Having a "sweet spot" conflicts with my understanding of the game, so I thought I would investigate a little.

My take:
The reason to take less investor money is so that you have enough purchasing power to short the raided company. There are two PNW costs involved before that point:
#1. When starting a company you get a 1/10 of the company, but have only put in 1/11 of the money. At the moment of the company's inception your personal account is debited for this.

#2 When selling your single share block you must pay a transaction fee. I guesstimate this at roughly 2% of the present share price. Obviously, without more complex math at the start you can't predict exactly what this share price will be, so better to leave a little extra to be safe.

I tried successfully with $780k which appears to just leave enough purchasing power to complete the process. Of course, there could be something I missed. What was the reason that it didn't work for you?

[Gumboots]

Why exclusively the Class 500? The P8 is cheaper on fuel, cheaper to buy, and is reliable enough to run well for over a decade hauling full freight consists with no caboose. The only advantages the Class 500 has are acceleration and top speed on flat terrain (admittedly most of Latvia is flat).

[RulerofRails]

Just for challenge.

[Gumboots]

Ah. Fair enough then.

Oh about the fixed version: yes I'm happy to post it. Although I was thinking that really I should do a BMP2GMP on it first, using the BMP taken from the original version before all the editing and saving borked it. That would greatly improve the looks of the coastlines. I also think the trees in the middle of rivers should be removed.

[Gumboots]

Start the first company with $90k of your cash and only $720k of investor cash. This is important. It has to be $720k of investor cash. If you use $810k it won't work, and if you use $630k it won't work.

You obviously did a lot of runs with this, but I still question it. Having a "sweet spot" conflicts with my understanding of the game, so I thought I would investigate a little.

My take:
The reason to take less investor money is so that you have enough purchasing power to short the raided company. There are two PNW costs involved before that point:
#1. When starting a company you get a 1/10 of the company, but have only put in 1/11 of the money. At the moment of the company's inception your personal account is debited for this.

#2 When selling your single share block you must pay a transaction fee. I guesstimate this at roughly 2% of the present share price. Obviously, without more complex math at the start you can't predict exactly what this share price will be, so better to leave a little extra to be safe.

I tried successfully with $780k which appears to just leave enough purchasing power to complete the process. Of course, there could be something I missed. What was the reason that it didn't work for you?

Oh and about this: I only tested with even multiples of $90k. If you can still short sell with $780k of investor cash then that's even better. I know I couldn't short sell with $810k investor cash.

Edit: Just tried it with $780k investor cash and yep, better result. $790 is worse, but $780 works.

Also, when trashing the first company you just buy back stock, because you don't have enough purchasing power to buy any for yourself. However, when trashing the second company you have a choice. You can either just start buying back stock, or you can buy as much as possible for yourself before starting the buybacks.

The second option is the more lucrative, because by the time you start buybacks they are starting from a higher baseline. Even better if you only sell your stock off 1,000 at a time while doing the buybacks. This keeps the price as high as possible. The difference between doing it this way and just buying back without purchasing first is $37k in purchasing power when it's all done and dusted. IOW, you will end up with $768k if you just do straight buybacks, while if you jack the price first by buying stock yourself you end up with $805k. These two figures get rounded off to $760k and $800k when starting the next company, so with investor cash thrown in (50% of your cash, at this stage) the next company is $60k ahead.

[low_grade]

How about adding one more goal? Pax to a territory including Kolka and Saarema, not sure but 50? pax for Gold. And if there's a warehouse slot left a 10 supply/demand pax warehouse in each upon connection.