The Baghdad Railway

[Hawk]

Lama actually logged into the forums on April 8 of this year, although his last post was made on March 19 of this year.
He's still around.

[TheBonobo4]

Just tried this scenario now on Medium as a test. It isn't easy, but it is fun. Got the Gold with 3 years to spare, might have been able to get it earlier with some extra micro management (re-routing, building new routes with unused track, etc). Started in Ankara, found some Mines to the South, so built from Ankara to the mines, then from Ankara to the town just east of it, which had logging camps.

I found that most of my money seemed to come from Industry, by the end I was making about $5m profit per year, about 75% of which was industry (not sure why my trains weren't so good, but I'd guess traffic or low prices of cargo). Also, building a Steel Mill in Ankara helped early on (until it started becoming unprofitable), and Munitions Factories where there was an excess of Steel. The Chemicals didn't help me though, my Munitions Factory in Adana was highly unsuccessful, as was my Weapons Factory (even though Steel and Lumber went there). Also, the excess Oil turned a huge profit with an upgraded refinery in Baghdad, but then I had the issue of getting Oil to Istanbul.

Of course, Lumber and Steel haulage is the main thing early on, but initially there is no Steel (annoyingly). But I found that eventually hauling 20 loads of both was easy, it happened without trying. I also went with just the Shay, as I thought it'd be useful for hills, but it turned out it wasn't necessary, since the S3 and P8 (and later the 2D2, I managed to Electrify the entire network) could handle the grades, and the helper engines seemed more like a disadvantage with the extra loading times.

All in all a great map, and I can recommend.

[low_grade]

Started with a Steel Mill north of Konya, steel priced at $67 from a T&D in Adana, enough for production to commence with coal at $32 and iron near $0 and plenty of it within a few cells. Made another industry investment and that was it for 1885. Next year with a bond and more stock issuing, and now a stack of cheap steel waiting to get to Adana, I build to within a few cells of Adana and place a small station and send a Duke down for $900 (choosing the small station and close placement for haste's sake, didn't want to wait for the steel mill to earn another $250k, which might have been another year with demand for steel so low there...) Once the loco arrived I completed the track into Adana and placed a large station, and discovered a bug. After I'd profited from the steel haul and with the cargo already on the map near Adana, I redirected the train to the new large Adana station and then removed the initial small Adana station from the train's route... and whaddya know the same train dropped off another 8 steel for the same profit in the new Adana station. One train carrying 8 steel, now I have $1.6M and 16 steel in Adana... Well, this accelerated things, used remaining of the 600 to build a short line from Ankara towards Polatli and hauled some lumber to make sure I got some track. Didn't make 10+10 every year, so not always an extra 200 segments, but steady progress, and fat price differentials made for many auto-consist making $400k/year, first Dukes, then S3's, then P8's. Money was not an issue, and if I had been more careful to ensure 200 track per year, I could have ended it sooner, but made the goals on expert in Feb 1911, a few years early.

I used a combination suspension bridge-tunnel to get from Adana to Aleppo, otherwise followed the terrain, accepting chunks of 5's and 6's as need be, mostly straight lines though, terrain was well thought out. There are a few unpolished edges, but nothing that effects play. It would have been nice to have a reason to explore more of the map... Easy to get all the haulage goals once Istanbul-Baghdad connection is made, but I could have shaved a year off by being a bit more proactive about producing my own ammo to ship down to Baghdad. Weapons were done with a catch station purpose-built that carried 7 from the other side of the inlet south of Istanbul where the port had dumped weapons into the sea.

A fairly easy map that rewards dramatic start strategy, I think.

[sbaros]

A pleasant and usable one. The distances also work out largely correctly. For use with this map, I recommend the downloading and installation of a pair of makeshift "mosques", which I had developed for my Balkan base map.
However: After a thorougher search about the region's industrial history, I found out some historical inaccuracy. Petroleum export from the given area didn't seriously begin until the early '30's, and for the rest of the heavy industries, the facts I have recorded with my South Balkan scenario above apply almost identically. For this reason I'd recommend:

• Unzipping my industry data zipfile located in the South Balkan scenario page to the corresponding Buildingtypes folder of a Baghdad-dedicated installation
• Copying the port/warehouse recipes from the downloadable South Balkan base map to the Baghdad map. By the way, it would be interesting to know if warehouse recipes (and maybe other global parameters) can be pasted in some easier way from one map to another without being manually and painstakingly re-copied one by one.
• Upgrading the Baghdad installation to version 1.06 so that it doesn't miss important resources in the area, most notably ore deposits in Asia Minor.

Which brings the broader question if any version prior to 1.06 is worth keeping at all. To the best of my knowledge, there are no features of previous version missing from 1.06, it is richer in every aspect. It doesn't even cost a cent to download, which might provide an excuse for maintaining previous versions. I think that 1.06 and TrainMaster cover about everything conceivable in the RR Tycoon world, right ?