Latvian Republic 1920

[Gumboots]

Awesomesauce. If you're messing with that map let me know of anything else you think should be fixed (or tweaked, or whatever). I might leave repacking it a couple of days, just in case.

[Grandma Ruth]

Two minds with but a single thought! I wanted to ask you to hold off a bit - I've got a problem with the revenue/credit rating event which doesn't seem to be working right. I'll test it a bit more and let you know.

[Gumboots]

Odd. I did test those pretty thoroughly, and they seemed to be ok. Although the game is known to not be that great with temporary event effects, and sometimes it's better to code them as permanent and then write your own reversion events as required. But that's usually when you don't want the reversion applied game-wide, which doesn't matter in this instance since there is only one company.

I should do some minor revamping of territories anyway. The one that's supposed to stop people building daft suspension bridges clean across the Baltic doesn't work, because I forgot that if the border (under the ocean anyway) isn't set to visible it just inherits access from the parent territory. I might just make the entire Baltic Sea territory no access. If that was done carefully around the coast it could also prevent any suspension bridges over the "Livonian border", so you'd only get standard bridges over the river (which makes more sense).

[Grandma Ruth]

I've re-tested the credit score event and it's fine, it's working OK. I think it's just difficult to work out what's happening with the cash, because so much is going on at year-end. Interest will be being paid, miscellaneous income if any will be coming in so you probably won't see a straight increase of cash. And the increased credit score is working perfectly - it goes up, it comes down when it should.
Interesting you should mention the Baltic Sea - I can't see it in editor mode. It's greyed out and so is the "daft bridges" But you can't build anything under the sea anyway, as a player, I mean. You would have to go into edit and make the sea land and all that which I would never dream of doing when playing a game.

[Gumboots]

Oh, what I meant about the territories is that the "No daft bridges" was meant to be a no-access territory hidden under the Baltic, to stop people building long suspension bridges right across. I remember people building that sort of bridge in the PopTop Italy scenario, and a bridge straight from Salerno to Palermo looks stupid. Blocking them under the sea is an old trick that is used in some other scenarios too.

The catch is that although you can't see the territory when playing, it has to be set to have its border visible. That applies to any no-access territory. If you set the border invisible it maps to some other parent territory, and if the parent isn't no-access then the child territory won't be either. So that's the problem: I didn't set the border correctly, so it maps to the Baltic Sea territory, and therefore it doesn't block daft bridges anyway.

Easy option: just make the whole Baltic Sea territory no-access, then I don't need the extra one.

[Grandma Ruth]

Right, I think I get your drift.
I've just completed the autos to Daugavpils and I love what you've done with the status page! I've got spreadsheets and lists and notes on paper but no need in this map!

[Grandma Ruth]

Here's another weird thing for no reason I can see. The player can't build a fertiliser factory. There is one and you can buy it, but there isn't one on the building list.

[RulerofRails]

Are you playing this in 1.05 as intended? The ability to build a Fertilizer Factory was added in 1.06 patch. In 1.05 you can't build one.

[Grandma Ruth]

Yes I am, but it's interesting you should ask that. At the start I had a problem with an event (raising credit rating) which didn't seem to be working. Then I realised I was in 1.06 and started again in 1.05. That cured the credit rating thing.
So we'll have to see what Gumboots says - he must have created in in 1.06 for there to be a fertiliser factory there at all, surely? The one that's there was seeded, it wasn't placed in the map when it was created.
Anyway, I've just got Silver and very near to the Gold so back to the drawing board and see what I can do next time.

[Gumboots]

Right, I think I get your drift.

Ok, let's say you don't want people to be able to build stupid suspension bridges across a stretch of water where they have no right to be. A no-access territory will stop them. The bridge will extend from land out to the border of the territory, then stop. The game will give you a warning saying that you can't go there.

The territory doesn't have to be on land for this to work. It works just as well if the territory is underwater. Although to create it you have to set the water back to land in the editor, mark out the territory, then put the area back to water when it's done. That will all work as intended, providing that on the territories page inside the editor you set that territory to "Border is visible", and you set an access cost that will always be prohibitive.

If you don't set the border to visible, the editor will automatically choose to map your new territory to another territory (ie: visually they will be one if they are both on land) and your new territory (no-access/child) will inherit its name and its access restrictions from the one it is mapped to (the parent). Usually the parent territory will not be inaccessible, so if the child's border is not set to visible (regardless of it being underwater) then it won't block track laying or bridges.

Hope it makes sense now.

I've just completed the autos to Daugavpils and I love what you've done with the status page! I've got spreadsheets and lists and notes on paper but no need in this map!

Good. That was the idea.

Anyway, the map was created in 1.05. Fertiliser factories seed in 1.05 if they are enabled in the industry list, and you can buy them once they seed. You just can't build them yourself outside of the editor. That's what was changed in 1.06.

---

On a slight sidetrack: the pax haulage in Estonia in this scenario originated just as a way to add some extra fun and challenge, without getting in the way of the main goals. When reading around a bit the other day, I accidentally found out that hauling a lot of pax really was an Estonian thing in that period. From Estonia and Lithuania - Rail Travel in Two Northern Republics:

In the early period of the new Republic the locomotive fuel was either firewood or shale oil in its raw state. Oil shale is still used in a pulverized form for goods engines, but passenger locomotives burn oil produced from the shale. This oil is very economical, and on this account the train fares are claimed to be among the lowest in Europe. Much of the railway equipment was formerly purchased abroad, but it is now being made in the country.

Passenger traffic amounted in 1933-4 to 7,843,000 passengers, although this figure is not as large as that for 1929-30, which was the peak year before the depression. The figures have been rising since 1933, despite competition of road traffic.

So that's a bit of serendipity.

The information about them running on shale oil is interesting too:

The development of oil shale began in 1919 and the output rose from 46,125 tons in 1920 to 588,958 tons in 1934. The shale is worked in open and underground mines, operated by the Government and by private companies. Not only do the oil and shale provide fuel for the country, but also considerable quantities of crude oil and petrol, distilled in the country, are exported. Peat, also developed since the war, is consumed at power stations from which the current is taken all over Estonia.

As there is no coal in the country the development of the industry of extracting oil from shale has solved the fuel problem of the railways.

There's probably a way of finagling that into the scenario if I get around to doing a revision. I had no idea that Estonia exported petroleum products in the 1930's.

[RulerofRails]

When I was fiddling with the bridge exploit, I saw that if you go along the water boundary carefully when outlining the no-access territory you can prevent those partial bridges from ever appearing. If you drag track up to them it will stop without ever "starting a bridge." In other words: any water cell will be the no-access territory. The only place where you might still get the effect is if you go at an extreme angle out from the mouth of a river. Of course it's not worth to do this everywhere, but if there are some obvious places it may be a nice touch.

---

Grandma Ruth, do you see that there are two sections for user created maps in the forum, 1.05 and 1.06? The best RT3 scenarios are finely balanced. There are some changes in 1.06 that disrupt the balance of scenarios. Extra engines are one thing, the player can manually restrict himself where appropriate, but disabling price islands disrupted fundamental mechanics of the base game. There is a "fix" for that. I tried to explain it over here if you can tolerate some bad grammar: viewtopic.php?p=46039#p46039

1.06's ship-at-a-loss can be good sometimes, for example moving Coal between Steel Mills. But, I would regard it as a short term fix. Sure, you take cargo somewhere it doesn't "want" to go, but then you run into problems trying to KEEP it where you want it. Many players probably didn't consider this, so will unknowingly drag cargo back and forth uselessly. Any trains set to haul anything will happily take these cargoes away (the cargo you brought in will in a short space of time depress prices further, increasing the chance that other trains on haul-anything orders will haul this precious cargo away).

In this game it's almost impossible to PREVENT certain types of cargo from being loaded (if it were manageable TM would play a lot better, and we would see activity with it I am sure). There are some advanced methods to deal with this, but they complicate gameplay. One that sometimes works would be station location, placing stations with catchment not covering certain buildings, so that their resource stacks cannot be robbed. The other being full-blown restrictions on any trains departing location X in certain directions. For example some trains on Express Only orders at X. We can use custom consists to make some recipes of predicted cargoes, but this will never be exact and can't reasonably catch distribution of consumer cargoes (meat, goods, clothing, etc.).

With custom consist setup as we have it in 1.05 (positive price differential only), and a minimum load order it's possible to take care of every logistics need. There are cases of near-equal price that we want to transfer. My rule: if the volume is worthwhile long-term it will be periodically possible to transfer the cargo. All we need is a little patience. We can setup consists of say 5 Coal and 3 Any Cargo, with wait-for 4 cars. This will ensure that the train waits for some Coal to be loaded. Something that helps a lot is to build small stations as "depots" (resources off ONLY) on the same cell as strategic industries. A "depot" will have the best possible price for the required resource. We can for example pickup from the Main station in another City with a small price differential.

Sure, these things add a little more "work", micro, whatever you want to call it. But, in the long run less effort is required than for the prevention which makes ship-at-a-loss work "correctly" (cargo stays where you are forcing it to go). I think of it as now vs. later. Deal with some custom consists when planning/setting up or have a headache later when you are trying to "make things work." Of course in the short term things "work" when you force them, but for me it's a headache to sift through a lot of trains and routes to rectify things that could have been done right in the first place.

Sorry for the rant. But hopefully this explains why 1.06's most touted feature: ship-at-a-loss, doesn't attract me to play 1.06 whenever possible (cheesing haulage tasks with it is a different topic). I actually prefer proper custom consists. If there was a version of 1.06 without ship-at-a-loss, I would use that.

The price islands disable is the main issue for me though. Balance is affected. The short of it: oftentimes it's quite a bit easier to make money in 1.06. There is a reason that Milo turned them off when implementing ship-at-a-loss. Something always felt odd about 1.06 gameplay. Once Cash on Wheels identified it, we can understand a bit more what is missing. After looking carefully I'm unwilling to accept the side-effects on gameplay. Anyway, I already typed enough here. Look into the info I linked about price islands if you want to understand more about why Milo turned them off.

[Gumboots]

Ok. Probably worth doing at this spot we've been talking about, since the territories need a little bit of revision anyway.

[Gumboots]

Sorry for the rant. But hopefully this explains why 1.06's most touted feature: ship-at-a-loss, doesn't attract me to play 1.06 whenever possible (cheesing haulage tasks with it is a different topic). I actually prefer proper custom consists. If there was a version of 1.06 without ship-at-a-loss, I would use that.

TBH, I regard the 1.06 implementation of custom consists as a failure too, and would much prefer it was reverted to 1.05 format. I know some 1.06 bugs are easy to fix (price islands, and counting of electric track). I wonder how hard it would be to put custom consists back the way they originally were.

---

Edit: Just found that that cars set to any cargo in a 1.06 custom consist will not haul at a loss. That's an interesting touch I wasn't aware of, although I'm still not sure how much use it would be. I can see it being handy for one of my common tricks, where I set an express loco to haul one or two cars of any cargo, with the rest set to any express (or pax only). I use this when pax is a bit patchy, as a way to get useful haulage out of the express locos. The way 1.06 does it, the train should still haul non-express (any cargo) at a profit if no express is available. So that's better than I expected. I might be able to be convinced to leave it alone.

However, it would probably still fall down if no cargo at all was available to haul at a profit, as in that case I think it would default to hauling some express at a loss. And it obviously still falls down if you set a train to haul any specific cargo. Given how many scenarios are based on haulage goals, I think this is near to being a game breaker.

---

I do like the extra scripting possibilities in 1.06. Being able to use maths with variables is definitely an advance. The extra cargoes and industries are also potentially useful, providing that people don't just blindly turn on everything (one of my pet hates). The locomotives, although generally being good iconic examples, are poorly implemented, but that's not that big a deal to fix if there's some incentive to actually play 1.06.

I know it has been talked about and then forgotten about ad infinitum, but it may be worth looking into a "best of" 1.07 with the minimum necessary changes. IOW, no endless arguing about what should or shouldn't be done with industry chains. Just fix obvious "stuff wot r rong".

---

And it turns out I am getting more and more enthused about doing a revised version of this scenario. There's a lot of stuff I didn't know, which could be incorporated into a new Baltic States scenario in the same time frame. For example, Russia could be cut out of it almost entirely (there would still be a miniscule portion, just because of the way borders run) and Estonia would become the main source of oil and petroleum products (the refinery at Mažeikiai in Lithuania wasn't built until 1980 anyway).

[Gumboots]

Hey I just tested the 1.06 custom consist behaviour and it's more sophisticated than I thought.

1/ Trains set to a custom consist of Any Express will not haul express at a loss.
2/ Trains set to a custom consist of All Passengers will not haul Passengers at a loss.
3/ Trains set to a custom consist of All Mail will not haul Mail at a loss.
Short version: all express cargoes are immune to being accidentally hauled at a loss.
And: any train set to haul mostly express, but with the option of one or two cars of any cargo (ie: allowing an express train to haul a bit of unspecified freight) will never haul anything at a loss.

Also:
4/ Trains set to Any Freight will not haul freight at a loss.
Which makes things pretty safe for most haulage, although obviously it can break down if you specify any particular freight. Which is going to be a definite nuisance sometimes (unless you just love cheating any haulage targets). Still, overall it's not as bad as I'd assumed.

[RulerofRails]

FYI, I understood the custom consist behavior you have mentioned, aka only the specific freight loads are "ship-at-a-loss", when I made my comments. I would therefore call it decent implementation. My argument was really that in the grand scheme of things I don't see it being very beneficial. The game does a good job of keeping cargo flowing. In my opinion "ship-at-a-loss" is based around not liking the game's economy mechanics that keeping cargo flowing (traveling toward an area of higher price) and instead trying to take control of cargo flow yourself (I believe fundamentally this is hard to do properly without heavy micro). This can be fine (for example if you like micro), but I will suggest that the majority of players who try to do this don't really understand how the normal cargo flow works. And therefore they wont know where they are fighting an endless battle of trying to put some cargo in one place that the game is trying to take somewhere else (via other trains they have with auto consist).

You can also sort of workaround ship-at-a-loss if you are willing to reserve a whole train for one type of cargo: leave the train on Auto Manage then specify a single cargo type. You can then set min cars. The downside here is obviously that more trains are needed (higher transport costs). And there are more delays due to waiting, traffic, etc..

[Gumboots]

Fair enough. I didn't understand it though.

I've always avoided using it because I didn't realise what it did and didn't do, and assumed it was worse than it actually is. I agree about the "keeping stuff there once you get it there" problem, although tricks with careful sizing and placing of stations can keep the worst of the cargo vagrancy under control.

I'm frankly surprised that so many people wanted HAAL and nobody seems to have thought of Haul-Anything-But. I suppose this is down to them being used to RT2. If I'm not mistaken (never having played it) I think RT2 eats any deliveries instantly, so they would never have had to deal with cargo running away, so wouldn't realise the greater value of HAB with the new economy setup.

About the only time I can see HAAL being useful is when you have zero or near zero demand everywhere and are desperate to meet a haulage goal. The rest of the time it's just not necessary, and generally I quite like the challenge of having to haul everything at a profit. Gets me thinking.

[Gumboots]

Been reading and thinking a bit more. This area could suit the way EPH's old Orient Express scenario was done: have the option to start in different countries, with different benefits and drawbacks. As far as I understand it so far, in the inter-war period it went like this:

1/ Russia hated everybody.
2/ Everybody hated Russia.
3/ Estonia and Latvia were on good terms.
4/ Latvia and Lithuania mostly got on, but had some disagreements over exactly where the new border should go (resolved peacefully, if slightly grumpily).
5/ Lithuania hated Poland.
6/ Poland hated Lithuania.
7/ Latvia doesn't seem to have been too bothered about Poland.
8/ Latvia and Estonia didn't like Germany much at all (although they would still trade with it).
9/ Funnily enough, Lithuania mostly got on with Germany (Germany had helped them against Poland).

That's the political basics in the period, and goes some way towards explaining how the various countries behaved when the next war arrived. Moving right along...

Estonia had stacks of cheap oil, meaning very low fuel costs for rail. That's all they burned. Latvia had no oil or coal, so was initially dependent of wood for locomotive fuel, then started moving to imported UK coal in the 1930's. This seems odd. Estonia was happy to export oil, and the two countries got on well, and importing coal from the UK presumably wasn't cheap. Maybe Latvia had no exports that Estonia wanted. The UK and Germany seem to have been the two big export markets for the three Baltic states. I suppose ships going between Latvia and the UK would naturally be looking for a return cargo, and at the time the UK was a huge producer of high grade coal so...

Exports were mainly agricultural products at first, and stayed that way in Lithuania. it was the least developed of the three, although there was a shift in what sort of products it specialised in (dairy and meat were better value as exports). Estonia had its oil industry once production got moving again, was also big on exporting dairy products and timber products, and oddly enough it was also a pretty big manufacturer of textiles (had been one of the largest in the world in the late 19th century). It has also been in the paper business in a big way for literally centuries.

Latvia's main exports were agricultural and timber products, but it also ended up with a good electronics industry and some other manufacturing (like world famous miniature cameras, etc) and even got into producing automobiles in the mid to late 1930's. So all things considered there's some good scope for economic variety.

There's also good scope for variety in locomotives. The short version is all three countries got locos from the big countries that had been on the losing side in WW1. Estonia ended up with Russian rolling stock. Lithuania had German rolling stock. Latvia got all sorts of odds and sods. Estonia and Latvia also had about as much narrow gauge as main lines, if that can be finangled into the scheme somehow.

Oh and the 1.06 Russian Class S 2-6-2 wasn't actually used in Estonia.* I suspect this is because at the time it was Russia's latest and greatest express choof, so they preferred to pay their war reparations with older stock they had plenty of, mostly the O class 0-8-0 and the N class 2-6-0. Speaking of 2-6-0-'s, for some reason they were the most numerous type in Latvia but I don't know which classes they were (information is hard to come by). Probably one of the Prussian/KPEV classes though, since they seemed to end up all over Europe. The P6 and G5 would be likely candidates.

I do know Lithuania got some P8's, but at the moment I don't know what else they had.

*Edit: I just realised that the "photo of a Russian gauge 2-6-2" on Latvian track shows one of the Class S. Funny that Latvia would get one when Estonia didn't, although it could be a Russian unit near the border. Latvia did maintain some Russian gauge tracks.

The preceding photo on the same page, showing a 0-10-0 being offloaded at Riga, is one of the Russian E class that was contracted to be built in either Germany or Sweden just after WW1 (details here: use Google or DeepL). It wouldn't have been used in Latvia. It just would have used Latvian track to get from Riga to Russia.

[Grandma Ruth]

Thought you might like to see this - it's a Gold win on Hard difficulty. You can see the variety of results for different goals. Not too challenging at the end, which is why there's loads of cash.

[Grandma Ruth]

Been reading and thinking a bit more. This area could suit the way EPH's old Orient Express scenario was done: have the option to start in different countries, with different benefits and drawbacks. As far as I understand it so far, in the inter-war period it went like this:

1/ Russia hated everybody.
2/ Everybody hated Russia.
3/ Estonia and Latvia were on good terms.
4/ Latvia and Lithuania mostly got on, but had some disagreements over exactly where the new border should go (resolved peacefully, if slightly grumpily).
5/ Lithuania hated Poland.
6/ Poland hated Lithuania.
7/ Latvia doesn't seem to have been too bothered about Poland.
8/ Latvia and Estonia didn't like Germany much at all (although they would still trade with it).
9/ Funnily enough, Lithuania mostly got on with Germany (Germany had helped them against Poland).

That's the political basics in the period, and goes some way towards explaining how the various countries behaved when the next war arrived. Moving right along...

That's priceless!! Love that political analysis.

Here's a thing I found out when I was doing my Europe map, probably not useful for this one but into the 21st century, Estonia has the best mobile phone coverage in Europe! Who knew?

I've not been following this thread, I just forgot to "subscribe" so I've just read all your recent conversation about the 1.06 patch. I was part of the team that made it and I think I'm probably to blame for the ship-at-a-loss. I wasn't able to do the technical stuff but I was a one-woman focus group really, representing the "player". My interest in the gameplay is more in the industry side and we made some quite complicated chains with electronics and so forth, as in real life. (In passing, I should say that, although we had tremendous fun, making that patch by committee was probably a mistake - everybody wanted something different and so we had to compromise a lot.)

The ship-at-a-loss was to facilitate the industries, and it is something that used to happen IRL - maybe because we had nationalised railways in Britain? I remember wool trains calling at the mill where I worked, we had a small platform on the premises where they off-loaded the bales. So it was more important to the Government that the wool industry was successful than that the railways covered all their costs for every trip. God forbid we should get into politics or Hawk will be but it's the argument between railways (and water, and electricity, etc) being a general service and being a profit-making enterprise.

Having said that, I do like the idea of a 1.07 !!!!!!!!

[Gumboots]

Yes I get the idea of haul-at-a-loss, and the implementation is better than I thought, but I still don't think it's necessary in RT3. There are almost always things you can do to get cargo flowing if you give it some thought. But given that HAAL is now hard-coded into 1.06 I think the best option is to just reinstate the price islands (which are worth having) and avoid deliberately using the obvious rorts that HAAL allows (like brainlessly acing haulage goals, etc).

Re the complicated industry chains: the only time they would become relevant is if the scenario goals and/or economy set-up forced you to invest heavily in them. Otherwise there will usually be easier and more lucrative opportunities, so things like Machinery, Medicine and Electronics will just be ignored by most people in practice. And of course if the goals require their production and/or haulage, then the economy has to be set up to facilitate that (which it isn't in most scenarios). There is scope for using them constructively, but I can't recall seeing it done yet.

Railways as a vital national service is a good concept IRL, but when playing this game dirty deeds are all good too. At least sometimes, anyway.

---

My interest has turned from pure in-game industry to the historical, technical and geographical side of things. I really like having terrain that looks and feels as much like the real area in question as it can, and I'm fascinated by the technical and aesthetic aspects of the various rosters around the world. I also don't like fast trains on small maps, because you never get a decent train ride that way.