Mongolia

[OilCan]

This is a 1.05 Version game of the real country of Mongolia. No AI. No stock market. No tycooning.

The year is 1992. You have been hired to bring the Mongolian Railways back to life, to expand the railway to all corners of the country and to lift the economy and wealth of this newly formed nation.

There is only one game goal:
To reach an Economic Wealth Status of 400 points within 21 years for Gold, within 26 years for silver or over 26 years for bronze.
An optional company book value goal is offered to the player.

There are three ways to increase the Economic Wealth Status (EWS):
1) Connect to new cities
2) Through your company's yearly revenue
3) Haul coal and clothing to Russia or China

The player will choose whether to align with China or Russia. The choice then determines which country to haul coal and clothing to for EWS points. The choice also determines which goods are imported into Mongolia.

The player is also offered the option to use diesel, electric of both types of engines.

I offer these hints: (Highlight to read)
(1) Build textile mills in the countryside rather than in a city. This allows you to tightly control the export of clothing out of Mongolia.
(2) Build an electric power plant in a city to attract coal to a central location from which you can haul coal out of Mongolia. Sell the power plant immediately after building it since it will never make a profit.
(3) An alternative to an electric power plant is to place stations in the countryside beside coal mines and haul coal from these stations.
(4) Connect to your partner country -Russia or China- as soon as possible for the goods in their warehouses will bring you lots of money.
(5) Work to connect to all three major cities in your partner country, not just one.

Edit: This map is now available in the archives - Mongolia by Ray (OilCan) Albright

[RulerofRails]

Mongolia:
I played this one with bonds and building industries (no Textile Mills spawned). I went for China and non-electric. Import revenue is very good. I maxxed bonds at the start of the 3rd year. Built Textiles then. Assured $10M+ revenue from that point on. I also built countryside stations Coal demand transfered very well as can be seen below, trains set wait-for 3-5 cars and empty return. I was on track for 10 years completion except for a pesky setback or two, until the CBV target came along.

I chose the $150M CBV target. I would have focused a little more on industries early in the game (after year 3, can't beat those import returns) if knew about that from the start (yes, I didn't read the info very well). Overshot the points a fair bit.

Industries are great for CBV. But I thought the setup clever because revenue from rails is before expenses are deducted. Even lower-grade rail options will yield more revenue out of investment than good industry at 30% or so. The city connection bonuses which are a staple on many of your maps do help with CBV from rail, and also encourage more expansion. It's in the longer term where station age causes a slow erosion of haulage revenue (down to -25% on Expert IIRC) that rails suffer eventually. There is also a finite amount of possibilites for high return routes on any particular seeed.

I noticed a couple Dairies that could be bought at $400k, but also a fair few farms built in 2010. These can be purchased at low cost before 2010. In hindsight of CBV target, I would have bought some of these sooner. I am guessing this was to try to prevent them from disappearing?

I would suggest making the monastery/tourist territories a little larger. Or should I say that the houses aren't in center of said territories. I placed stations very close to the houses and still missed 3 of them. I would suggest a 2 small cells out of from house rule.

You don't need the "Don't build Steel Mill/Oil Refinery" notice. Milo shared the secret somewhere. If a SEEDED warehouse/port produces a cargo it will appear on the map. The definition of seeded is that a city/region slider for it is set to 1% or more. There is no requirement that this building actually shows up in the game. You can set it at 1%, and it will probably never show up at all. But you can do more, for example a port set to 1% seed in a land-locked city. The game is fooled and the player will never know unless he hits Shift+E.


Typo/grammar
Russia access
"arrived *in Ulaan Baatar"

Monasteries
"Buddist" should be Buddhist

Dino bones
"archeologist" should be archaeologist

Lose
"more than "a" 150 years have passed"


A very nice map! Will have to replay with the Russian connection later.

[OilCan]

Thanks for the helpful comments.

I apologize for the small territories. I thought about making the boundaries visible, but decided it would attract a player's interest before the event triggered. I will enlarge the territories.

I wish I had known about "Milo's secret" many years ago. It is brilliant.

This particular game began as a simple connect and haul game which then morphed into taking over a railroad which had pre-built but deteriorated lines and disconnected spurs to a game with an economic wealth status index. The existing line is historically accurate. Some of the city locations are not.

Your 543 points in 14 years is almost unbelievable. Believe it or not, on a test play in January I failed to reach gold. A recession hit early and seemed to have lasted half of the game. It returned again in the last part of the game.

[OilCan]

You don't need the "Don't build Steel Mill/Oil Refinery" notice. Milo shared the secret somewhere. If a SEEDED warehouse/port produces a cargo it will appear on the map. The definition of seeded is that a city/region slider for it is set to 1% or more. There is no requirement that this building actually shows up in the game. You can set it at 1%, and it will probably never show up at all. But you can do more, for example a port set to 1% seed in a land-locked city. The game is fooled and the player will never know unless he hits Shift+E.

I must be missing something in the instructions. I created a seeded port which supplied diesel, plastic and weapons in a land locked city. The port had a 1% chance of being seeded. Of course, the port did not appear when I began a game but the steel mill and oil refinery still did on the player's build list. My trick did not work.

I searched Milo's old posts but must have missed the one in which he shared this secret.

-------------- Added later:
I figured it out! It works! Sometimes it helps to turn your attention onto something else and then the solution comes to you.

I needed to disable the industries as well.
Step by step:
(1) Create a warehouse cargo recipe which supplies the cargo, let's say diesel in this case. Rename the recipe to something easy to remember.
(2) Disable the associated industry which produces the cargo in the Industry (Overall) list. For diesel it would be the oil refinery.
(3) Select a land locked city and add "Port" as one of the city's industries. Select a low percentage so the game code doesn't wear itself out trying to seed a port.
(4) Choose the correct recipe for the Port.

Thanks RoR!

[RulerofRails]

Glad you got it working.

Just now, managed to find the link by searching "warehouse" in Milo's posts. viewtopic.php?p=3210#p3210

For each port or warehouse enabled in a region containing at least one building, all cargos it generates are enabled.

As you can see I missed the bit about "containing at least one building."

Maybe my seed was better than usual, idk. Lately, I tend to play without bonds or industry. In this case, because I didn't have a Textile Mill anywhere on the map at the start I decided to industrialize, then I figured may as well do it "unrestricted." By not building maintenance right away (until needed) and having a clever expansion plan to get to all the imports as soon as possible, barring a recession it shouldn't be hard to max out bonds at the start of 1994.

With the Clothing haulage I hauled to the nearest point with a wait-to-fill setup. This meant some "fake" hauls on auto-consist trains Hami-Urumqi or Yirshi-Hulun Buir. I'm not sure how you feel about this. Sometimes I worry a lot about "legitimate" hauls, here I didn't. But at the same time it's not bait-and-switch, just automatic transfer between local cities and no shennagians with multiple/countryside stations. In some cases you basically have to not have freight trains departing a certain city in order to be sure that hauls are legitimate.

Lately I wipe cars to load from a train by hitting custom consist (quicker than dragging slider from 8 cars to 0) before stopping a train. I'm not averse to making a train wait (Stopped) at a city for some months either until I have funds for further expansion or simply to get a better price on some shipments. If a train can't anything more useful at present I make him wait for new opportunities.

On this map I also built countryside stations. I will hint that in general countryside stations have a lower potential for revenue than city stations. They are best used as pickup-only sites (express is fine). Letting a train take consumer cargo there from the city will likely cause that cargo to get lost wandering about the countryside to some remote/unconnected houses and most of it will probably rot. Whereas, a city will naturally "retain" cargo (within large station catchement) even as the price drops. Then it can be rehauled. Natural rehauling represents a great portion of revenue from hauling consumer cargoes. Cargo drifitng aimlessly in the countryside cannot be rehauled.

PS. The economic wealth status here is a very nice concept. When commenting in the other thread I was dreaming a bit for this concept on a larger map.

[Gumboots]

Is this one good to go for the archives?

Edit: Added to archives - 27/9/2020.