Beta test my new scenario Chile please!

[RulerofRails]

I got 10 years into this, and then got bored of having it too easy with the price outbreaks. I was making around 25M by the 10th year. So, I have an idea that since this scenario relies on Crystal prices being higher, I should take off the increase events and simply change the cargo .cty file instead (made it the same price as Steel (around $170 per load). There is still a reduction event of 30% in 1906 and those are less buggy as far as I know, so late game the prices should still subside. I have done this to the map as well as fixed the engine cost reductions and by forcing the Connie available at the end of 1912 (end of year check), it wont disappear. I am keen to play the map with this configuration. I haven't tested it thoroughly yet, but I am contemplating uploading it in a new thread if you or others like this idea. I think these are simply bug fix changes, but there are other changes like possibly fixing the AI's atrocious tunnel setup and moving some of the farms out of the rivers (probably need to terraform a little) that probably I should ask low_grade his opinion so as not to offend.

[Gumboots]

I never get crystals prices escalating past $150-200/load anyway, no matter how often I ship them or where I ship them to. It beats me how you guys are getting prices sky high. Personally I've never seen the prices being really buggy, so am not sure it requires a fix.

[RulerofRails]

The price differential between Copiapo and the current highest point (up the hill from Anto) is already about $160 in early 1894, so one full load of crystals would bring in about $1.2 million.

I thought that this was evidence that you were seeing breakouts too. In my game at least the ports start from a price of $170 (which means the game has correctly applied the price increase {+60%} at that point). This made me assume that you were seeing over $300 per load. As I understand it, any price above $200 is caused by a breakout.

Unless it's a side effect of running RT3 on different types of machines, but I have seen enough comments on various maps including Age of Steam Phoenix Rising to believe that it affects most players. Mainly, I think that exaggerating the effect is caused by high frequency service and being as quick to make use of a new breakout as possible (buy new trains because current ones will not arrive in the station before the temporary price differential is gone, etc.). I think I have seen that some of the item in question must be hauled from a station before price will breakout there. The second intermediate station that is necessary for a first year nitrate run (must take some of the profits before completing the line) is far too likely to breakout especially if I haul all the Crystals I can to the new site which in turn transfers this demand to the previous site and somehow puts an increase with it so I end up shipping those same Crystals back for even more. I am tired of this as it makes the game too easy. I wish there was a way to avoid it, but unfortunately nothing so far hence this idea. If the prices at the mines are kept low by clever routing strategy and you don't swamp the port, the Nitrate run has the potential to make $2M revenue a year consistently (a great ROI). I think that the breakouts are causing the Crystals to come back up the hill in the first place. Without breakouts I think there is greater incentive to build the line south along the coast to the other ports as demand in Antofagasta tanks from oversupply. Anyway, I think I will just keep this version for own benefit unless someone else wants it.

[Gumboots]

The only reason I was getting $160/load hauling from Copiapo to Antofagasta hinterland is that early in the game there are piles of crystals coming out of Copiapo quarry, and no local demand for them. As soon as I start regular haulage, profits tend even out to something like half that. Still lucrative and worth hauling, but not ridiculously over the top. I've never seen them up around the $600/load that you guys reckon you were getting.

Edit: I just took a quick look at the game I saved last night. This is January 1894. Price for crystals at Antofagasta port is $164/load. Price at Copiapo (not connected yet) is $21/load. Ergo, haulage profit at current prices would be $143/load. I have no idea what the theoretical base price of crystals is on this map, but those are the actual prices being given during play.

Re bugfixes: I agree $2k Connies, although fun for a rort, are a bit on the cheap side. I also agree that if you deliberately go for cheap Connies all the way through, you probably should be stuck with Connies only until the end of the game. Mind you, it had occurred to me that it might be interesting to find out what sorts of locomotives Chile actually did use during that era. There may be better options available.

Moving a couple of farms would be better than terraforming, IMO. The geography is accurate as it is, and just needs a little tweaking to fix some of the eye candy (river flow directions, river mouths, etc). With the Santiago AI, I think the only way you could stop it doing the stupid tunnel while keeping realistic geography would be to build the line from Santiago to Racangua manually in the editor, so the company can't do stupid things there.

[Gumboots]

I remembered another bug in this map, which I posted about back on Page 3 of this thread but had forgotten about.

Found a bug. Got the first loads of "nitrates" into Antagonidisgusta (or whatever it's called) in December 1894. Game still told me I hadn't hauled any.

It's checking at the start of the month. If it checks at the end of the month instead that will still run before the end of year check, so it would work.

That's an easy fix which won't affect gameplay in general, but would allow someone who barely managed to ship some nitrates in 1894 to get credit for it. Either that or change the briefing to let people know they have to ship before December 1894. Either would work, but at the moment it's a bit deceptive.

I have done a little more on that last game. Up to March 1894 now, and crystals price had hit $233. This is station price, not haulage profit. Max haulage profit is still around 80 IIRC (will take another look later). I'll keep an eye on it and see if I get any wild breakouts this time.

[Gumboots]

I've taken it through to January 1900. Highest station price has escalated to $330-340/load so yes, I am starting to get breakouts to some extent. This may be because of the different station arrangement I used this time.

As previously mentioned, this time I didn't want to build a pack of closely-spaced mopping-up stations to cover every single load of crystals in the northern area. I found that led to rapid stagnation of crystals prices between stations, with haulage profits frequently dropping to minimal levels. It also became boring. This time I just ran the main line I wanted between the halfway-to-Anto station and Copiapo. Since there were a few farms on the way, I picked those up with a couple of extra medium stations. The idea here was to run some low priority trains, stopping all stations, to deal with whatever express and farm products could be hauled between Anto > Chuqui >Taltal > Copiapo, and to gradually get the produce haulage for strike prevention from the local area, while the main high priority trains dealt with the crystals and ingots haulage direct from Copiapo.

One of these medium stations was placed to pick up a dairy farm at the top of the ridge between Taltal and Anto. As it happened, this station started generating a demand for crystals. The result has been the maximum crystals price jumping around between this station and the Anto port, Anto intermediate, and Chuqui ridgetop stations. Haulage profits between the best stations have consistently been in the $40 to $80/load range. I don't know how repeatable this is, but at the moment it seems like having a randomly placed station some distance from the others helps to keep crystals prices moving.

Once I noticed this station becoming more important I obviously upgraded it to a large one. This station and the usual Anto intermediate station haven't covered every single load of crystals. There are some drifting outside the capture areas, but I haven't bothered trying to chase them. The way I figure it, crystals seem to have a slow rot time and the stray loads will gradually drift back into circulation as demand shifts. In the meantime, having them sitting out of circulation should help to raise prices. Basically, I'm treating them as a potentially useful reserve stock rather than as something I need to get manic about grabbing. There are still stacks of the silly things in circulation anyway.

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The economy has dropped into recession the last couple of years. Despite this, I've just had a stock split and profits have just topped $15 million. I'm also holding $14.25 million in bonds at an average interest rate of 7.3%. IOW, I am paying approximately $1 million/year in interest on the bonds and am still making shedloads of profit.

This came about due to merging the three AI companies back in early 1896. To get them moving again I had started running some of my trains on their track, since they were stagnating and not running any of their own. I figured I could live with half a dozen Americans running at more or less break even due to the track fees, since the up front cost was trivial and I had plenty of profit rolling in. By running my trains and paying the track fees I wanted to get the CBV of the AI's to a reasonable level before merging. This worked well. It only took a year or so before the AI's bought a few trains of their own. I would have left the merges longer to get them to pay down their debt more, but stock prices started heading a bit high and I wanted their track by now, so I just bit the bullet and merged all three. I had roughly 80% of their stock, so dumped down to just over 50% to drop the stock price since I wasn't worried about PNW and the loss was only a few hundred anyway.

Result was I got all three AI's for about $500k and with a modest CBV boost, with new Connies even, but had to take on $4.25 million worth of bonds at an average of 13% (my own bonds were already maxed out at $10 million with a minimal 5% interest rate). Since my company is still in the expansion phase it makes more sense for now to just keep holding the $4.25 million in high interest bonds, and to use the capital for new stuff which will earn more. Once opportunities for expansion taper off I may repay those bonds and just sit on $10 million at 5%.

Personal debt is currently just over $3.3 million, but purchasing power is over 24. The personal debt is slowly being paid down by a modest 40c dividend, which equates to about 3% of profits. I mention all of this just for anyone who is still scared of holding bonds and buying stock on margin. Like we keep telling you, both can work very well as long as you do your maths first.

[Gumboots]

Found another bug. I made the southern connection across the mountains in December 1908 when I looked at the ledger and discovered that I'd just edged up over the required $250 million CBV. By this stage I was bored, so I did something I'd never normally do. I issued one lot of stock and threw down burn track between Osorto and San Juan de Bariloches. Yes, you heard right. Gumboots actually used burn track for an easy connection. Oh, the shame of it all.

Anyway, despite all requirements being met before the end of the year the medal wasn't given until the end of January 1909. This is obviously another bug like the nitrates haulage deadline, where things are being checked in the wrong order. Should be an easy fix after sorting through the events, but I couldn't be bothered last night.

This time I did see significant breakouts in crystals prices in the northern area. The peak price I can remember was $417/load. I did manage to land a few loads at around $180/load haulage profit (when some just happened to be available at the right station at the right time) but more commonly in the $80-120/load range, which is still fairly hefty profit. Peak yearly profit was just over $40 million, but averaged a fair way below that.

Now that I know what to look for regarding the really lucrative breakouts I could probably manage to start exploiting them earlier. I think it wouldn't be that hard to knock the win time back to 1907, or possibly 1906. Economy variations were following a standard cycle, so nothing exceptional there. Also, due to the vast amount of cash being generated I gave up trying to figure out new industry options (most of them seem to have been taken already) and just resorted to buying up any primary industry that was priced for around 10% ROI. By this stage you can just buy any dairy farm or cattle ranch anywhere whenever you feel like it. This is easy, but there were probably some more profitable options that I couldn't be bothered looking for.

The only problem with deliberately playing crystals price breakouts this way is that it rapidly becomes boring. It's exciting the first time you catch a breakout occurring, which happens very quickly. The price at one station (which has had high demand) will suddenly drop and another station will instantly have a demand at a very high price difference. The high difference is extremely unstable, and will rapidly drop back to a lower level. This means that to fully exploit these differences, the entire game degenerates into constantly watching the price of one cargo in one small section of the map. There is some interest in seeing how these change at first, and in figuring out how to use trains to fully exploit them, and in seeing unheard of results for your company's bottom line, but after a few years it quickly gets dull. By the time December 1908 came around I was glad for the game to end, which I why I went for the stock issue/burn track combo. At this point the breakouts seemed to have finished anyway, due to the crystals price drop event that simulates the collapse of the nitrates market.

If anyone wants pointers on how to do this, AFAICT it goes like this: for the first year or so of haulage the crystals price will start by being highest at Antofagasta port, then the highest price will move to one of the intermediate stations (either the mine basin ridge top station, or the half way down the hill one). This seems to be where it will stay for a bit, then after a couple of years you can expect random breakouts to start happening.

These seem to occur even at randomly placed stations in the northern area. There is no apparent reason for it. You have to constantly watch the cargo map for crystals and pause the game as soon as you see a new breakout (obvious by the few squares of intense green on yellow surrounding terrain). At this point, get rid of any trains that are going to be in the way (ie: ones that are carrying no load, and/or are at the wrong stations but will clutter the line) and buy new ones that will instantly load right at the best stations for profit. This will obviously cost you in new locomotives, but when you can instantly stack up $10 million worth of haulage in one go (yes, it is possible) the cost of the locomotives becomes immaterial.

I have noticed that building stations with overlapping capture areas seems to rapidly stagnate the price differences. The breakouts seem to work best when there is some separation between capture areas, even if it is minimal. At some stages I even resorted to building temporary stations, and then bulldozing them as soon as the trains had loaded. This was just to instantly capture all crystals that had drifted outside a station's capture area. IOW, let them do their own thing until you spot a sudden massive price breakout, then drop line and stations to capture everything, then delete the temporary stations once the trains have loaded (to maintain separation of capture areas). When this stuff is going full bore, you won't care about the cost of a few large stations or a few hundred k worth of track.

One thing that may be worth trying is an early connection through the hills to Bullaranga in Argentina. I made this connection fairly late, even though I could have afforded it earlier, and Bullaranga spontaneously developed a crystals price higher than the mines. If connected as early as possible, it may become another centre for breakouts. This may be less efficient in terms of turnaround times, or maybe not, but at least it would add a bit more interest to the process.

[RulerofRails]

Completed a run of the map I modified to remove the breakouts. The result was a 20 year medal with 274M CBV and 213M PNW, but I bungled a few things, including getting a bit too aggressive with margin so that book value hadn't caught up to support share price in a down-turn which meant that I had to turn on dividends for three payments to avoid a margin call as share growth wasn't outpacing interest costs at that point. I also underestimated how profitable the nitrate quarries would be so didn't buy them at first, and regretted deciding to try something that different, leaving the remaining two fast-starting AI for a last minute merge. I then missed timing when saving up for the Argentine one before the Copper market improved as I spent 5M on new mines which then caused the economy to jump (paid 48M when the cost before was 34M, but still just below CBV). Should have stopped expansion a little earlier, but there's always next time. I enjoyed the experience a lot more without the breakouts which are so artificial. I enjoyed having much more stability on the nitrate route, and focusing expansion effort in other parts of the map.

The breakouts can escalate very quickly. As you are discovering, the main key to make enormous profits with them is to quickly catch the initial jumps to a higher price. The way I had it setup, once the lower intermediate station broke out all Crystals congregated there. Then I simply waited until price there dropped back down to the level of the port. Once the price at the port was slightly higher, some of my many frequent service trains quickly emptied this station. Then I watched carefully for the next couple of months to catch the next new outbreak at this second intermediate station, and most of the time at least some of the trains that arrived at the port had 50k+ loads to haul back up to this station so I didn't have to buy that many more to cover all the loads available. I repeated this process quite a few times in the early game and it was quite repeatable without too much effort. Confining the outbreaks to this run certainly makes the process less tedious in my opinion. Mid-game I started getting stronger outbreaks and these invariably spread further up the hill and even to the mines themselves. On the last play with outbreaks I connected down through Argentina, but didn't see any outbreaks at Bullaranga even though it's nice to feed its mill with some of the Logs that often seed near the top of the ridge. I wasn't running frequent service on that route, though, so that doesn't mean that it isn't possible.

I improved my route slightly more. Now it only has 11 pieces of 5% grade, is 306 cells and costs 1,679k. Also included is a view of an alternative southern connection solution, I like it because it makes more sense for the local trains in the long term as this is about as direct between cities as is possible with low grades. It has a minimal amount of up to 6% grades but the vast majority is under 4 and the long climbs are mainly 3%. This stuff sort of gets a little addictive, with a couple of terrain following curves I am surprised how well these routes can turn out. My strike breaker train from Osorno took 2 and a quarter years to make the run with 4 cars. Did you consider hauling the strike demands to the small part of the mining territory by forcing the cargo with haul-at-a-loss? I thought about it, but still sent everything the long way. Next time I will use spur maintenance in Talcahuano as I was suffering from congestion there this time.

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[Gumboots]

I had another go, but this time I wanted to try two things. First one was starting to exploit the breakouts as early as possible. Second one was deliberately not concentrating them in one small corner of the map, just because I found that so boring last time. It may be efficient in a sense, but it's no fun.

What I did was connect the Copiapo quarry and furnace down to Coquimbo before I connected Copiapo over the hill to the Chuqui/Anto nitrates run. I figured if I did this at the start it might get the crystals market moving around some more. I don't know if this actually worked, or if the results were just random, but for whatever reason this time around the game played nicely IMO. There were breakouts, but they were bouncing all over the place. Sometimes between fairly closely spaced stations up north, then suddenly way down south with a higher price than ever before, then back up north again. You never knew where the next one would occur. This, combined with the fact that longer trips were possible this time, actually made it fun. At some stages I had about two dozen (can't remember exactly) trains just hauling crystals all over the place with 8 car loads. Since just about all the crystals were on trains, I only had to worry about breakout changes when a train unloaded. All I had to do was keep half an eye on the ticker for arrivals. All crystals haulers turned big profits when they unloaded, so I just had to watch out for those in the ticker, then check where the next best price was from that station. Meanwhile I could just play it like a normal RT3 game. IMO this is much more fun than scrunching the crystals insanity into a tiny corner of the map.

I still turned in a personal best time, with Gold requirements met in November 1905 and no personal debt (and proper track, with trains, for the southern trans-Andean connection). This was just with the usual three quarries up at Chuqui. No extra ones seeded. Peak crystals price hit about $900/load and peak haulage profits were around $200/load.

This was all done on the same robber baron start I had saved before (January 1894 save). I merged the Santiago company when I started the strike prevention trains running (sometime in 1900 I think). The AI track around Santiago would have been a bottleneck in my runs, and I just wanted the strike trains running at higher priority than all others. By this time the Santiago AI had paid off its debt and had a CBV slightly above stock price, after I dumped some of my stock at a high price, so that went well.

My original company was merged a bit later when it started to stagnate. This still had a $1 million debt, but had refinanced down to 10% interest. Since I thought it was about to take a slow dive I figured merge it first.

The southern company was left until last. Since I held around 80% of its stock it turned out to be a good earner. If left alone this company always just pays off any debt, then sits on its short line (Valdivia > Osorto > Peurto Montt) without trying to expand, and puts almost all its profits straight into dividends. By 1900 this company was paying me over $800k a year in dividends, and this escalated to close to a million just before I decided it was time to merge. I used this to pay off my personal debt without needing dividends from my own company. When I decided to merge I just dumped some of my stock to drop the merger price below CBV, and still did very nicely out of the deal.

This brings up one advantage of a robber baron start. Going robber baron means you'll own the vast majority of the stock in any AI company. Once the company is healthy enough to be worth merging its price will usually be inflated above CBV, due to it coming out of the major downer that you started it off with. However, since you can easily afford to dump 25% of the company's stock at the top of the market, this will have a large and immediate impact on stock price, and therefore on merger price. It ends up being good for both personal debt and CBV.

And no, I don't use haul at a loss to the small mine territory for the strike prevention trains. I hadn't actually thought of that. I always just run them up to Chuqui on normal haulage, usually with 8 car loads on each train (and at least one surplus load of everything just to make sure).

[RulerofRails]

Played this one while testing reinstated price islands. I was reminded of the effort and many hours of testing that low_grade has put into this one. Good re-playability here.

When looking back through the thread, one time Gumboots had the Class Ye available. This map uses events to control loco availability. When those are used, it's safest to play the map with only the standard 1.06 locos installed (no extra ones).

Realized that hiring the technicians increases engine maintenance by 50%. More strategy in that decision than I previously realized.

PS.
Will be nice to play this one without the default quantum leap in car weights at 1900. New weight scale here we come.