NSW - North, south & west

[RulerofRails]

Sorry if my wording was confusing. It's not the first time.

I think that it's pretty straight-forward that about +30% is giving a similar rail/industry balance as medium. And I would also suspect that the developers set the "balance" based on Medium (I have no proof). Because industries are stable against difficulty level change, I guess it's expected that whenever things get "tough", a lot of players use them as crutch.

One of the unexplored areas is extra cargoes on a lower difficulty level. I didn't play many Medium games, but from what I remember more industries will seed there. This is part of my thinking when suggesting above 30%. Industries built on red resource stacks can be seen as a "defeat" of the intended lower density which includes lower efficiency to convert resoruces into consumer goods. In any of these suggestions, industry should still be viable. Rail still is.

Anyway, I sort of went off-topic there because on this map we face large rail cost increases over time. That would put the point of balance higher. However, the story is definitely detailed enough to keep the player "on track" without being free to roam into the stratosphere of wealth.

[Gumboots]

I was finding that with the way this map is set up, there's more or less a natural limit to the use of industry. Cash ends up being fairly tight, so you have to put most of it into expansion, which limits what you can do with industry.

[Gumboots]

Alrighty. Got this thing sorted. Events are all working as they should. Eye candy is good to go. It feels like Australia. I'm 99% sure it's free of bugs, but will leave it here for a bit before uploading it to the archives, just so people can check it out if they want to.

Since it's a New South Wales map I decided to use the common abbreviation of the state's name as the new map name. You do have to go north, south and west from Sydney, so it fits, and it distinguishes this one from the original Blue Mountains map.

Now I should get back to finishing the NSWGR locomotive roster...

Updated zip attached two posts down this page.

[Gumboots]

I gave this map another run while I was rained in earlier this week. I found a couple of minor things that should be fixed before this map is archived. Minor typos, and things like that. I'll keep an eye out for any other niggles while I'm finishing this play.

New South Wales is currently having a mouse plague as well as massive floods, which got me tempted to add a mouse plague random event just for fun. Apparently Australia and China are the only two countries that ever get mouse plagues. All the people in western NSW are hoping the floods will drown the mice.

[Gumboots]

OK, I have finally got around to making the changes that were needed. All events have been checked for typos and are good to go.

NOTE: There is now a warning at the start of the scenario, informing you that Clothing production for any Textile Mills owned by your company is reduced by 75% at the start of the scenario. This reduced production was already in the scenario, but previously there was no warning for it, which I thought was a bit unfair.

The reduced production is to stop the obvious exploit of building a Textile Mill out west early in the game. You can still build one, and it will still have lots of cheap wool available to feed it, but it won't make you any significant amount of profit. It is probably not worth building a Textile Mill for your company until you have Yass, Woodstock and Wellington connected to Sydney. Each of those connections will increase Clothing production by 25%, bringing it back to the default 100% once all three connections are made.

Note that this only applies to Textile MIlls owned by your company. Any seeded Textile Mills on the map will always produce Clothing at the default rate.

Updated game map is in the attached zip. This should be good enough for archiving,

[Gumboots]

Now that I have figured out a cunning scheme to restrict locomotive purchases to exactly what the scenario author wants to allow, I am tempted to revamp this map as a 1.06 version. The idea would be to only allow buying the same number and type of locomotives as the real NSWGR bought in any year. This would make things trickier (because you couldn't just spam locos when you wanted to) as well as more historically accurate. I quite like the idea.

Possible drawback: 1.06's haul at a loss option could screw up the map's haulage goals, if anyone wanted to exploit that. OTOH, you can effectively do the same cheat in 1.05 via bait and switch, so anyone who really wants to cheat haulage targets will probably be doing it already.

Haulage goals may need revision anyway, because even if cash flow was adequate the restriction on purchases would mean fewer locos available early in the game.

[Gumboots]

Had an idea re limiting debt levels via credit ratings and prime interest rates. I'm not going to implement it on this scenario, but the concept may be useful elsewhere.

With this scenario I ended up having prime rate increases, and credit rating decreases, kicking in at $2M, $4M and $6M debt. These are locked in once they are triggered (ie: no going back to better ratings). I did experiment with having them reversible, but found that was too easy to exploit. Basically, accumulate cash > pay down debt > wait a few months for better ratings > max out bonds at good rates.

My latest brainwave is that you could have them reversible, but with the catch that it is not instant. If you have to pay down your debt, then wait a year, and not accumulate any more debt during that year, there would still be the potential to go nuts later at better rates - but the delay between paying down debt and getting better rates would make it more difficult to exploit. You could still exploit it, but you would probably have to put a brake on expansion for a year (and possibly on general purchases too).

If you were using $2M, $4M and $6M as trigger points for making things worse, you could even have one year waiting period for each reversal if you paid debt down. IOW, if you rack up $8M debt and then pay it down to under $2M you do not get any benefit for one year, and then you only get the benefit of dropping below $6M (ie: you are still carrying the penalties for $2M and $4M debt). If you want to get everything back to standard ratings, you have to wait three years.

This would not be hard to code, and would allow a bit more scope for playing with bonds if you needed that. It's also more realistic, because in real life if you pay down debt to zero then immediately want to borrow the same amount, nobody is going to give you a better credit rating immediately, They won't be that stupid. OTOH, if you pay down debt to zero and still manage to run a profitable business for three years, they probably will give you a really good credit rating.

[Gumboots]

I've started playing this scenario again (first game in quite a while) and I'm already having a few thoughts.

1. With only four towns in the Newcastle area there is not much going on, so the Newcastle section rapidly stagnates.
2. Gosford can be connected to add a fifth town, but that requires quite a bit of track and cash.
3. That tends to force an early connection to Sydney, since you're halfway there anyway.

This is ok in terms of just playing a game, but is not historically accurate. In reality, Gosford was not connected to Newcastle until 1887. They knew the section between Gosford and Cowan was going to be an engineering nightmare, so it was ignored until most of the rest of the state was connected. No attempt was made to start any line between Sydney and Newcastle until the mid-1880's.

So I'm thinking maybe the Newcastle-Sydney connection could be deliberately delayed a bit, perhaps with track in a Hawkesbury territory being made unaffordable until Yass and Wellington were connected. This could be tied in with a notice about advances in engineering now making the Hawkesbury line feasible (which is pretty much what happened).

To make the Newcastle area more interesting, a couple of small towns could be added. Ravensworth (named Camberwell at the time) would be ideal between Singleton and Musclebrook, and perhaps Wyong between Newcastle and Gosford, with the idea being to prevent total stagnation without making the area ridiculously lucrative. In reality Newcastle was connected north (via Musclebrook) to the New England region well before it was connected to Gosford, and there was quite a lot going on there.

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Most of the rest of the map is ok, but I may also make a couple of small changes on the southern lines. The south coast line to Nowra was not commenced until October 1882 (in reality, Hurstville was not connected until 1884) and didn't connect Wollongong to Sydney until 1887. Again, I'm thinking of maybe using increased track cost to steer people away from building a south coast line until the main inland connections are done.

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Incidentally, I had a look at the events and the map as it stands has 237 of them. This doesn't seem to create any issues. It runs as well as any other map. At the moment I have no idea what the practical limit on number of events is, but it's obviously well over 200.