Beta test my new scenario Chile please!

[Hawk]

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[RulerofRails]

Yeah, that furnace in Santiago can be cheap and give insane profits in the first year. low_grade set up quite a few things on this map manually. The steep grades on the map may be confusing the computer and the extent of cargo demands on the price map. I think this is simply a bug of the way the game engine runs aided by the maximum of 3 years of map run time before game start. I am really sure this map is winnable with a slower start. I don't think he was buying the Santiago Furnace on a special seed to win.

I am playing along here and I think I am going to take out gold. I have purposely not bought the Quarries in Chuquicatama in case that would give an advantage. I am really curious what prices you are seeing for Nitrates on this map? I don't know if there is a use playing this for a test if it is true that my prices are higher than yours.

I have no idea what happened when you issued stock. Could an event possibly cause this? That said I haven't noticed anything strange when I have issued stock on this map. Weird.

I always remember seeing two Ore mines up in the valley from Santiago. I have never seen an Ore mine giving a really good profit on this map. The lowest price I have seen to buy one is 400k for the ones "built" in 1891 near Chuquicatama and those wont return the 20% I am looking for most of the game. I don't remember seeing one above 60k profit in a year. Nitrates have an event with three lines to increase the price by 20%. (Don't know if that is cumulative?) And in the Nitrate mining territories production is increased a lot (normally a bit over 5 total loads per year). This should be enough to make Quarries very profitable especially with waiting trains in Chuquicatama, right?

ETA: I just had a look at low_grade's save here viewtopic.php?f=5&p=36643#p36633 and he has Nitrates over $600 per load on his map. Because he was hauling them around often he might have stimulated the prices much better than I did. I think it has to do with a game engine bug in event price increase application to a map. low_grade, please don't think that we are trying to diss on your map here, only to learn more about it and the game. If you stop by, mind telling us if you normally see prices around $600 per load of Nitrates on this map?

In light of this I am continuing with my play as my prices seem just fine. I also went back through this thread and saw low_grade's early efforts to fix bad increases in Nitrates. This map is a good challenge and though not being perfect with these issues it is better than I would be able to do. I see that a good increase in the price of Nitrates is intended. And I will just enjoy it for what it is.

[Gumboots]

He did say he was testing it on Hard setting, which is a fair bit easier than Expert (cheaper track, less perks for AI ,etc ,etc) so that would make a difference if that's his baseline standard.

The quarries up in them thar hills are weird. This last play they did get a good price for nitrates before the price drop event kicked in later. It's obvious on the cargo map since the whole quarry area lights up as soon as the price starts moving. When the price starts going up, obviously I buy them (low ROI before then). When they do get going, price at the mine is about $60/load and about $100/load down at the coast. I've never seen nitrate prices anywhere near $600/load.

Other games the price at the quarries just never gets going, and they will sit at around 30k annual profit for the whole game, or even less. This is with me running the same system in the area, so I have *** why the results seem to be so random.

Anyway, I'm cruising along and should get a win. Have eaten the small AI's and am lining the big one up. Already have a big majority of his shares, and 100% of my shares with about $15 million personal cash. The two smaller AI's end up buying back their own shares, so all you have to do is make sure you have more in total than the AI players who also own bits of that company. Past a certain stage, the AI will then very conveniently mop up the spare shares via buybacks and you have control.

The two smaller companies also pay insane dividends in the middle-to-later stages of the game. I was about 15 million in the red for personal cash and the dividends from the two smaller AI's were paying that down for me. I was able to set my company's dividend to zero well before 1910, even though I owned all the shares. The AI's were paying so well (about $5/share) that there was no need to milk my own company, so all of its resources could go into expansion. Their share price was pretty stable with little or no growth. This meant eating them was just a case of deciding when I didn't want their dividends any more.

Since I have 15 million cash to play with I can afford to issue 15 million worth of stock and buy it all, without going into the red. That will be worth a bit for CBV once it's put into growth. PNW was done and dusted years ago. CBV should be doable.

[Gumboots]

Yup, got it easily in early 1920. Could have done it a bit earlier. PNW ended up ridiculous at 326 with about 20 million personal cash. CBV was 335, holding 11 million in low interest bonds. Could have turned off dividends a bit earlier if I'd know exactly what to expect, which would have helped fuel earlier growth.

Thoughts:

1/ Game behaviour seems a bit erratic. Dunno why. This makes it highly dependent on seeding (if going for Gold on Expert level) which I'm not sure is a good thing.

2/ TBH I'm not sure it would be possible to do all the other stuff with PNW under 100. By the time you take care of the other goals like AI takeovers, over 100 PNW is going to be a sure thing anyway. So, really it probably doesn't need to be one of the goals as such. Either that or double it to 200 just for fun. Anyone who gets Gold will still beat that without trying.

3/ Affording the three connections across the Andes is no problem since by that stage your company is making stupid money, and you can always pick up another 10 million with one share issue (which you can afford to buy all for yourself without going into the red). These connections just end up being burn track. Normally I don't like throwing burn track at a problem, but with that terrain even I wasn't going to bother trying to run real track. This means the last AI takeover is effectively the end of the game, since chucking down a bit of burn track isn't interesting. So, given that's how most people are likely to play it, I'm not sure you need to bother coding winter events and other tricks. It wont matter if you can't run trains over it in winter, because you wont be running trains over it at all.

4/ The last few years are just a case of saving up enough for the last takeover. Once your company is set up to make silly money there's nothing to do except to stockpile it until you have enough. This means the game as such really ends as soon as you make the decision to start saving. From then on it's just take train rides, or hit high speed, then eat the last AI and throw three lots of burn track down.

5/ If you want to add something to the connection requirement, you could have a revenue haulage added to it, so you had to haul loads from Santiago to Mendoza (for example). I've done this when I wanted to stop people just using burn track.

6/ You could also set a date for the connection if you want to be really evil.

7/ Terrain painting, beaches and rivers, etc need some repair work, but I assume that's because it's WIP.

Other than that it's rather good.

[RulerofRails]

Glad you got it!

[Gumboots]

Looking back through the thread I found this:

Arrg. Trying to play through a second time with v3 but I got overextended again. Thought to use the bailout cheat but forgot that big increase in revenue would mean increased overhead for a while.

So, not only was he not testing this on Expert level, but he was using cash cheats too.

Moving right along, at least this map got me thinking. I tried something different with this. Normally I just run a caboose on every train as a matter of course, since breakdowns bug me. I like to keep traffic flowing (which is also why I use maintenance spurs). Recently, when discussing possible 1.06.01/1.07/whatever stuff, I took a look at various car weights and found out that the caboose is one of the heaviest cars in the game, which is going to impose quite a penalty on grades, both in terms of speed uphill and in terms of how fast the engine's reliability degrades.

This game requires you to start hauling lucrative stuff on heavy grades with fairly weak locos. Thinking about it, I figured that since the purpose of the caboose is to improve reliability and therefore improve haulage, but since the caboose is so heavy and will therefore slow the engine down more on grades (decreasing haulage) and will also wear the engine out faster due to its weight (degrading reliability faster) it made sense to try running them nitrate haulage locos without a caboose. I figured keep the normal (for me) number of cargo cars and just ditch the caboose, and the trains should go better uphill and probably not be much (if any) worse for reliability. If necessary, just replace them a bit earlier to maintain reliability since these early locos are quite cheap and nitrate haulage is lucrative. This seems to work well, although I didn't keep a rigorous account of breakdowns, but it's probably important to not get greedy with an extra cargo car instead of the caboose.

One other major new event I'm going to add is maybe around 1898 you'll have the opportunity to fund a program for railroad technicians at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago, so that you can take maximum advantage of the limited engine options you have. Initial cost of $500K, then two level increase in engine maintenance(or like 50%, I forget if maintenance uses levels), in return for 10% increase in top speed, one level increase in acceleration, and one level increase in reliability.

Given that this in-game choice allows the S3 and P8 to get very good or outstanding reliability I decided to run them without a caboose for the entire game, even with trains that were running on the flat and would have no grade penalty. Even these trains can benefit from increased acceleration, and decreased wear, due to lighter load. Again I didn't get greedy with an extra cargo car, and just used the lack of caboose to lighten the load for the same haulage. This also seemed to be fine. Breakdowns seemed to be minimal. Most trains were running 6 car auto consist, or 5 on significant grades.

In line with what I've calculated about maintenance cost escalation with age, all locos were replaced at 12 years max even though they were still reliable. It's just not economical to keep them longer.

Final locomotive tip: usually I hate taking over AI's, mainly because of having to sort out all the crappy old trains that get mixed in with my train list. I had a brainwave here (told ya this map got me thinking). Turns out the AI always runs all trains on normal priority. I usually run all my trains that way too, apart from rare exceptions. What I did this time was to set all trains on the coast to high priority, and all trains on the seperate Argentina network to low priority. These two networks weren't connected to each other, and all trains on each network had the same priority rating, so it all worked normally.

This provided a handy way of visually differentiating the coastal and inland trains on the list, and also made it easy (well, less hassle) to sort out ex-AI trains after a takeover. They were the only trains that had the red normal priority indicator, so I just shunted them all to the end of the list and then went through them. This does make things easier and quicker to deal with.

Oh, have to admit, I've used the Editor a few times. Only when wierd stuff happened to make some silly 9 grade after a bridge or placing a station, to adjust the height to level things out to smooth 5's or 4's or whatever. Like when after you go to place a water tower and all the grades change, you know? I'd say slight fixes to keep things smooth are okay on this map...

Although I usually avoid doing this, with this map I did end up using the editor to smooth out any weird track lumps forced by building placement. The terrain is difficult enough as it is, and there's so much other stuff to do, that after a few plays I just CBF'd trying to deal "properly" with stupid things done by the game engine in difficult places. I always made an honest attempt to get away without "earthworks", and succeeded most of the time, but used them when really necessary. This only applied to building placement though, not to general tracklaying. I didn't use "earthworks" tricks for bridges or anything else. If youlre going to use the editor for general tracklaying, you might as well pancake the whole map and be done with it.

I do like this map... demanding terrain, but also very photogenic. And I feel, though I may be wrong, that this is a different kind of scenario. Maybe if you play it and agree you can say why, I have some ideas.

On this same playthough, on hard, in 1904, there's one other company left ($21M+ to offer merger), my income has been in recent strike/recession years $15M, but it's going to be over $20M this year, things looking good, but I'm still micromanaging trains (wish there was an option to pause and look at a train right before it was going to start loading, that's the best time to make micromanaging decisions...)

Here's a screenshot to show how tangled my network has become attempting to avoid congestion... looking at it like this I realize there's some track I could safely bulldoze at this point...


Up to 160+ engines now, and they way the rail is developed is very north-south and bottlenecky in places, this was an attempt to relieve the congestion (painful to watch a stack of 8 trains slowly pull itself apart.)

I agree that the terrain is great, and provides a good balance of challenge and enjoyment. I didn't feel any need to use micromanagement of trains, nor did I run 160 of them. At the end of the game, not counting the trains of the last AI (Great Northern) that I'd just taken over, I had a total of 62 trains on the coastal areas and another 12 in Argentina. Along with a good industry base, and with most maintenance/sand/water done on spurs, these gave good profits without bad congestion. My central network was like this (mostly double tracked).

You can see some isolated remnant track left by the Santiago-based AI company. Even though I had to pay track maintenance on this after takeover (roughly $500/track mile/year, if you want to know) I calculated that this was worth paying since it didn't amount to much and the book value of the track was worth having in a game that had a CBV target. Obviously this will depend on the value of the track (high, in this case) and the time left in the game, but it's worth considering.

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I noticed that RulerofRails' save had very steep gradients for the nitrate run. You don't need to do that, since you can easily keep most of it to a maximum of 4 (may touch 5 in a few small spots). This takes more track, but it's less expensive per track mile and a lot easier on the trains.

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You can also do some good tracklaying tricks around most of the north coast. The Coquimbo to Copiapo run can mostly be done with a 0-1% grade if you're cunning. Putting the Copiapo station over the river on the headland still connects the town centre and captures all the important cargo, but allows for an approach from both directions that is almost flat.

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General walkthrough ideas (combination of my ideas and some nicked from RulerofRails):

You need a good start. If shooting for Gold on Expert level, or just being a bit short of experience, pick a seed that has the cheap (900k) furnace in Santiago and buy that, along with the few placed farms that are showing 0 profits (you will need a bond for this).

Stake a claim to the whole southern coastal plain early on, before the AI's start extending. This stops them from getting too big, making them easier targets later on, and is profitable for haulage. It also means you can run 99% on your own track later, when you need to break the strike by hauling to the northern nitrate mines.

When hooking up the northern nitrate run, have a third intermediate station between the mines and the coast. This lets you start hauling nitrates a bit earlier (just haul from mines to intermediate station, without laying the full line to the coast) and also catches cargo that is already on the way to the coast when you have the full run later on. There's no need to ever miss the 1894 haluage deadline for nitrates.

With this scenario, you need to get serious about margin buying, and pumping up your own stock price, and with having a strong enough company to pay heavy dividends fairly early in the game. You will also need a lot of bonds early in the game. You can't pussyfoot around with this stuff. It's go hard or go home. You will need to go into personal debt way up in the millions, and be able to cover it via dividends to keep that debt stable or decreasing. You will need to use bonds to expand your company rapidly and make lotsa money fast.

With a good start you should get at least a 3:1 stock split at the end of the first year. This gives you good buying power. Use it, use it to the max, and use it immediately. Just keep buying like crazy until you own the whole company. Once you own your company, buy into all three AI's as hard and as fast as you can. Do NOT aim for 51% of any AI company. That will just waste your money and your company's money. Only buy enough stock to give you more than all named AI investors combined, with a bit of a margin. Do not worry about the "other investors" category. The AI company will eventually buy those shares back, leaving you in control of their company.

Big dividends: you need them. Early on your own company will have to pay these. Just do it. Take your personal debt and divide by 10 (call this A). Add up your salary and your dividends from the AI's (call this B). Subtract B from A to get C. C is what your company has to pay in dividends. It will be a big number. Doesn't matter. Has to be done. This is the only way to keep your debt stable in the early stages, and will keep you covered even in a depression, or if you have to buy some more AI stock, or if AI dividends drop.

In the middle stages of the game the two smaller AI's will buy back their "other investors" stock and start paying very large dividends. Most of these dividends will go to you. Isn't that nice of them.

Once they start paying out you can reduce the dividends paid by your own company, and put all that money into growth instead. They'll never grow much in share value, meaning takeover price doesn't change much. The share price of both of them should start declining after some time, putting it closer to or below book value. This should coincide fairly well with a point where you don't really need their dividends any more, and is a good time for a merger.

This means there is a long term advantage (IMO) in not taking the smaller AI's over too early, because they can really help you later on. If you can't take them over early, don't worry. Just milk them as long as it suits you, then grab them. After you eat the two smaller AI's you will have no need of any dividends, or any more personal cash, or any more PNW. Leave your company's dividend set to 0 and expand.

After that it's mainly a matter of getting enough moolah together to nail the third AI. Buying into Argentina will help with this, since there's a lot of scope for expansion there. If you got this far, the rest should be easy.

BTW, if anyone wants to have a go at this and doesn't want to search through a pile of seeds looking for a good one, I have the start saved before I did anything.
If anyone wants a copy, let me know.

[RulerofRails]

Good tips, thanks for the tips about track-laying. Noted. I am always a cheap-skate with it and can always do with ideas to make it better. I may be wrong, but I think that the total cost of direct track is cheaper? My strategy was to only run 3 or max 4 carriages up and 5 or 6 down. On my latest play I was running 8 down off the ridge. I figure that most of the cargo is going downhill anyway.

I think that the CBV goal is just about right for me. There aren't many maps which are difficult enough for me to be challenged, and still be possible with all the seeds I have seen. Even if this was tested on Hard I like how it ended up. I realize that seeding effectively prevents many really, really difficult maps from being made, for the it's not winnable this time reason.

[Gumboots]

I just like laying good track. I like seeing my choofers choofing along nicely. It has to help cargo flow. It probably does cost a bit more in track, but not a lot (could do a comparison sometime) and there ends up being quite a bit of cargo back up the hill later on. At some stages there was more money in hauling nitrates from the coast to the intermediate station than there was in hauling from the mines to the coast. The easier grades will also help reliability. Heavy grades wear locos out faster.

The other thing is that later on, when you want to run strike-breaking trains up from the south, you will need to come over the hill from Taltal and connect into your nitrate line. These trains will probably be heavily loaded and are critical to the economy, and the way I do it not only gives them easier grades but a shorter run. You will also end up running trains over this line even after the strike breaks. Having an easier run for them is useful too. Although the intial track cost for the nitrate run itself may be a bit higher, once it's integrated into the rest of your network it probably isn't any more expensive, and it makes for better cargo flow. All told I think the easier track is worth it.

Agree about the seeds vs challenge aspect. If you make a map that can be won on any seed that's good in a way, especially if it allows various starting options and play strategies. It can add a lot of replay value and general fun. OTOH if you have much in the way of skills it can reduce the challenge, but then relying on one type of seed makes the map a bit of a one trick pony and in some ways less "honest". It's a tricky balance.

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Hey I just had a thought. Starting new companies may be disabled in this scenario, but that doesn't mean you have to stick with your first one. The initial market capital for the AI's is quite low in this scenario. It may be worth trying the robber baron approach and deliberately sinking your first company as a means to a direct takeover of one of the AI's early on. You'd probably want to reclaim and merge the initial company fairly quickly, before the AI board did really stupid things at immense cost to CBV. Usually I never do robber baron, but it's a different approach that may work well since this scenario is basically all about hostile takeovers.

The other thought I had is that really there's no need to chase the merger price of the AI's later in the game. Since you'll have a majority shareholding in the largest remaining AI, there's the dastardly option of swapping chairmanships with the game on pause, ruining the target AI, then playing the ususal short selling tricks, then resuming control of your first company before unpausing the game. All the industry that AI owned will then be available for purchase by you, since you will have sold it all while controlling that company. This is probably the quickest route to a win if you can't grab all AI's in the first few years.

[Gumboots]

Hey this robber baron stuff is fun.

I started with a January 1905 save from my successful play, which is just before the last strikebreaker train gets to the mines. I hadn't tried really evil tricks before, so it took a couple of goes to get the hang of it.

First time out I left the game paused, took over Great Northern, and then proceeded to nobble it big time. Sold all trains, sold all industry and burned up all company cash. I didn't bulldoze the stations and track though, because it was good basic network. With the flat terrain out west the AI couldn't do anything stupid, and I figured I'd want the track and stations for myself.

So, dumped all my stock in Great Northern, resumed control of my original company, then short sold Great Northern as much as possible. Sure enough, Great Northern's stock price dropped dramatically. Bought back the short sold stock, and then bought back up to a majority holding ready for a merger. Didn't have enough cash ready so let the game run until I did, then picked up Great Northern for about 50% more than it's then low book value. I figured this was ok, because it also meant cheap access to Argentina so I was still ahead on that.

There were two problems. The first is that I'd nobbled Great Northern so much that when I took it over it wasn't very profitable. I could live with that, but the second problem was that I'd been so focused on GN that I'd forgotten I didn't have an absolute majority of Great River's stock (the Santiago company). The AI had gone and bought back some outstanding stock and left me permanently short of a majority by a measly few thousand shares.

Lesson number one: when being evil, make sure you have your butt covered everywhere.

Ok, so another bash at it. First thing I did this time was make sure I had an unbeatable majority shareholding in all companies in January 1905. This required margin buying over 20 million, but that was easily stabilised by the dividends I was getting from all four companies, without needing to milk my own heavily. Butt was covered.

Thought things through again and decided I didn't really want to trash Great Northern. What I really wanted was to keep it profitable and just temporarily reduce its share price to a convenient level for a takeover. This time I waited a bit longer, built up my company some more (I noticed that cheap new industries seem to start up when the strike recession changes to a boom) and got some serious cash stockpiled. By early 1908 I was ready to be evil (take 2).

This time it was leave game paused, take over Great Northern chairmanship, laugh at the newspaper that said I promised a new era of prosperity then start nobbling again, but with some important differences. Great Northern had a good industry base, but quite a lot of them were low earners. After thinking about it I sold off all industries that were earning less than 100k/year. This left solid base for income, but sharply reduced over what it had been. Again, sold all trains (due for upgrading anyway) and burned up all company cash with stock buybacks, but left the stations and track. Selling off all the locomotives is good since it means you will inherit brand new ones, and not many of them, when you take over later.

Then, dumped my GN stock, resumed control of my original company, short sold Great Northern, unpaused game, bought back short sold stock when it dropped, then bought back Great Northern stock to majority holding level. After that, unpause the game. I figured the GN share price would go down again so let the game run. Sure enough, it was dropping. I waited until the end of 1908 since I figured the end of year expenses would kick it down a bit more. This resulted in GN's share price being half of book value in January 1909, but with the company having all new locomotives and a solid industry base for recovery, which meant more money for my company immediately after merging.

GN's share price had gone back up when I'd bought back in, but I couldn't risk some AI buying up loose stock. This meant I didn't make much profit on the short selling shenanigans since I effectively lost it on buying back in, but I made a bit so it was still handy. I also lost due to the share price dropping again over the remainder of 1908, but I wasn't really worried about PNW at this stage. After the merger PNW was 114 million (good for Gold). Personal debt had dropped to 10.4 million, dividends coming in from the remaining two AI's added up to 2.2 million, so that meant the debt was still being paid off fast even with my company's dividend set to zero.

Since I'd grabbed GN at half book value, my company's book value had just jumped by an amount equal to the merger price. I'd also gained an immediate 3 million increase in company revenue. I'd call this a success. I think this is a good way to approach taking over Great Northern, or any other company, since it means you don't have to constantly try to catch up with an ever increasing merger cost. The only catch is it does require you to be able to margin buy heavily and still absorb some losses on the deal, but if you have that covered it works very well.

[RulerofRails]

I have said before that I don't like playing in robber baron company-jumping style. I know it works. It's just not for me. I can see the benefits of what you have done. I think it may be difficult to jump companies near the start, as that would require time to let stock prices drop and gain control. Personally, I have enough management chores running a single company well.

If I were to try jumping companies I would probably only sell enough poorer industries over a couple of years to keep company profits below zero. That should be enough to bring the stock considerably down and make takeover a good investment for increasing CBV. There are endless possibilities to these strategies also, the fact that I don't enjoy them means that I will never be good at them, and that's fine with me.

[Gumboots]

I'm currently interested in the possibilities. I haven't tried this stuff before, and it does open up a whole new approach to mergers. I've never seen this particular tactic mentioned anywhere (may have missed it).

I think it all depends on what the aims are. If you're in a situation where maximising PNW is your sole aim, doing it this way doesn't make sense. If PNW is your goal, the best option is obviously to pump the share price before merging, providing your company can afford the resulting merger price.

With this method you have to hold a majority of the target company shares while the price is dropping, because you can't risk an AI grabbing shares you will need later, so you'll end up losing some PNW. Pulling this stunt requires that you have any PNW goal covered (or coverable). It also requires you to have any margin you have incurred stabilised, via wages and dividends, for the necessary period.

So far I only gave this a quick try once, so I don't yet know if the results are totally repeatable or partially random. If they are repeatable (will test it some more) it is definitely a handy trick for situations where your aim is to maximise CBV. If you can be sure to gain a CBV boost roughly equal to the merger price, and absorb a profitable company as well, that has to be a winner.

It's also interesting in another way, because the usual expectation is that you should try to grab other companies while they are small and cheap to minimise the CBV hit to your company. With this tactic giving a large CBV boost on the deal, there's a good argument for delaying the merger as late as possible and letting the target company get really big and healthy. If the CBV boost you get is going to roughly equal the merger price, the bigger the merger price, the better (as long as your company can still pay it).

If I were to try jumping companies I would probably only sell enough poorer industries over a couple of years to keep company profits below zero. That should be enough to bring the stock considerably down and make takeover a good investment for increasing CBV.

There's no need to do it over a couple of years, although you could if you wanted to. I think it's probably better to do it all in one year. I'm looking at it from an ROI perspective for your company. From that perspective dropping the target company's price quick and hard is good, since you get a good percentage ROI on the merger and you get it done fast, meaning you can then get on with expansion earlier.

I don't agree that only selling the cheaper industries is the way to go. Selling all the locomotives has real advantages:

1/ Selling the AI locomotives means their sale helps contribute to the share price drop you want, since they are listed as a loss for that year.

2/ The interruption to cargo flow also helps drop the share price.

3/ Usually the AI locomotives will be due for replacement anyway. If you sell them, you get brand new ones when you merge later.

4/ The AI company wont have time to build up its usual oversized roster, so you wont have to pay for more (unprofitable) locomotives than you really want.

5/ This also means sorting them out after the merge is easier. I really like that aspect of it too.

6/ The brand new locos will run fine for a year without sheds and towers. Since I always use maintenance spurs and the AI never does, I also bulldozed all the inline sheds and towers. I'd have to build my own spurs/sheds/towers anyway, so it makes sense to use the bulldozing of the old sheds and towers to help drop the share price.

Obviously this last one only makes sense if you use spurs. If you use inline sheds like the AI does, it'd be better to leave the existing ones.

Anyway, I'll run this one year test again and see how it goes. I'm also wondering how applicable it is to other companies, in terms of maximising the merger benefit for your own company. For example the Santiago-based company has no industry and some really stupid track, so will require a slightly different approach for best effect. For that one, bulldozing the stupid track and just leaving the good bits is probably the way to go, along with selling off the locos.

[Gumboots]

Just gave these tactics a quick run from the previous stopping point (merging Great Northern in January 1909) up until January 1911. Having done that I thought of some improvements.

First improvement is not to burn up the target company's cash on irrelevant stuff, like buying and selling industries to run down cash, or unnecessary stock buybacks. A far better idea it to use that company's cash to improve your own network, or the network of one of the other target companies (assuming there is more than one).

I should have thought of that before. That's what you get for being a beginner at dastardly tactics.

Since I was starting from the previous save and had already merged the Argentina company, I was thinking about how best to handle the other two.

The Santiago company had hardly any industry, and some of them were quarries that were making a slight loss. These were ideal for selling off since the CBV drop would affect share price but profits wouldn't be affected. That just left a few small-earning farms, which I left alone, and I sold all the locos, for obvious reasons.

Since this company had a reasonable cash reserve but a really crappy rail network, I bulldozed all the crappy bits and built new line to my usual standard. There was a bit of cash left over, so I bought some brand new P8's and set them running. This gave the company a massive CBV drop but left annual earnings effectively untouched, apart from the temporary interruption due to selling the existing locos. The resulting lack of cash reverves also meant the company had to sharply reduce its dividends.

This worked well. The share price of this company also roughly halved over the course of 1909, with the result that I picked it up in January 1910 for a nice CBV boost, and of course it had nice new locos and a decent rail system.

The other AI, based in Osorno, was a bit different. That had a half decent and half crappy network, no industry at all, but rather large cash reserves which it was gradually burning up with huge dividends. Obvious first steps: sell all locos, bulldoze crappy track, build decent track, set a few new locos running. That still left a fairly large amount of cash, so I used that to double track the parts of my company's system between Tecumo and Valparaiso that were still single track. Also double tracked my northern nitrate run to use up the rest. Obviously this company also had to reduce its previously high dividends once I went back to my company.

This gave the same result, with the target company's share price roughly halving over the course of 1909. Since it had been inflated above CBV at the start of 1909 I only got a modest CBV boost on merging. However, there's also the earlier CBV boost to my own company due to using the target company's cash to double track parts of my system, so it still ended up being good ROI from my perspective.

Over the course of these three mergers my PNW dropped by about 10 million, but it's still about 104 so is ok for Gold. It's bound to go much higher since I own all my company's stock and I have to get CBV up to 250. Situation in January 1911 is that there is simply no way I couldn't get Gold, which will probably happen in 1915.**

I'd say these tactics work, and work very well, since they have consistently give the same result: halving of merger cost + CBV boost to your company + good and profitable systems to take over.

**ETA: It ended up taking me until September 1916, but 1915 is probably possible from the same starting point.

[low_grade]

Wow! Seeing some action in here! I've been buried in my own play through of this, still. Now on Very Slow and micromanaging still.

First an aside about micromanaging. I'm not doing it because I think I have to, but oddly, because I'm enjoying it. I never micromanage like this, and I have 220 trains now, after taking over the 3rd AI in 1906. I'm enjoying it because I feel like I'm learning things about cargo flow. Basically, I'm seeing flow management strategies that can turn a profit on any map, coupled with industrial development. I've never appreciated stacking so much before. Letting demand build to stupid levels in a town for something like meat by deliberately depriving it of meat for a couple years (needs some custom consists on trains going to that station to prevent meat shipment in the mean time.) Then shipping all your meat from every other station within reasonable range there, dumping it all, getting a stack of like 25 or 30 meat, or diesel, etc. Let it sit for a couple years so demand plummets at that station, then haul it all away, distributing it back for great profit to the towns that just delivered it at great profit. The trick is to cycle the stacks, so the trains delivering meat to the station found a big stack of diesel already waiting to be hauled away at a profit. Haven't figured out how to work this strategy back into my regular routing playstyle...

And, I see what you're saying about the connection goals, just track burning. I was trying to force a historical experience on the player. There were light rails that ran up from Argentina into Chuquicamata to deliver produce and supplies. As well as fairly profitable rail over the southern Andes between Puerto Montt and southern Argentina. Yeah, the connection between Santiago and Mendoza was made, but it was never profitable (8% grades), and was mostly just a showcase of Chilean technology and pride, heavily subsidized by the government. But I can't imagine haulage goals being realistic or useful, either. Perhaps the connection requirement is just a prod to get you to try laying track through there, just for the experience. Maybe the prod could be reinforced with some light haulage requirements... The snow/winter event could be removed, I suppose, doesn't really add anything except a touch of historical accuracy.

Robber Baron tactics are interesting, I hadn't considered all that. I don't play that way myself, usually, although I appreciate the few scenarios which really expect you and force you to become a robber baron. Yeah, for Gold, this is really an AI takeover scenario, with a few interesting (hopefully) bits mixed in. So careful switch-chairmanship tactics should work well.

I'm currently in Feb 1907, bought out the 3rd AI in July 1906 for $34M, so basically all I have left to do is boost CBV and PNW. I'm at $166M and $68M currently, with last year's company profits of $31M, and 21% growth over past 5 years in Prosperity from Normal in the last 4, so should be easy in almost 14 years left to play, maybe late 1910-early 1911. Went crazy because I knew I could and started electrifying track and swapping over to 2-D-2's, I'm curious to see how that goes, from a fleet of all S3's. I'll probably try out some routing soon to reduce micromanaging strain, and to test how to design routes to build stacks. I'd like to get to some Atlantics to have a better passenger/freight engine routing variation... but that's just how I'm playing this game.

Agree also I wish I had painted the background better, not sure what can be done at this point... And also I can forsee spending 100+ hours on the project if I ever really tried to go back over it and make it look how I wanted, and I'm not sure I want to spend 100 hours on this...

Also, I really like how structural this map is. Straight out of Geodata, true to life, this is what Chile/Argentina really look like (exaggerated a little, tweaked only a little.) The little mountains between Coquimbo, La Serena, and Vallenar are a great demonstration of how terrain can isolate cargo demand/create large price differentials over short distances. I don't know how many loads of meat, clothing, alcohol, whatever I've hauled between them and Coquimbo for over $45 per load.

And I've seen nitrate price differentials of I think as high as $500 per load between stations. This is accidental in the scenario design, but I don't mind it, I pretend it simulates the hysteria that accompanies a boom economy.

And I like to see this as a map where initial seed shouldn't prevent you from winning. I don't like having to load a map 10 times to find a seed I like. Though I usually load a map 2-3 times the first time if I don't like the initial seed just to see...

But I also appreciate a player who wants to destroy a map by exploiting its every weakness, that's ultimate gaming, after all. But I also want a map a casual gamer can win, on Medium anyway.

[RulerofRails]

I have tried the stacking method before also. It can be very lucrative. Especially with a high value cargo like the Nitrates on this map. Let me know if you find a way to automate it. Sometimes I use it with a small company to help get it off the ground, then I ditch it when my network gets bigger, and instead I concentrate on making lots of products for my trains to distribute on auto-consist.

[Gumboots]

Wow! Seeing some action in here! I've been buried in my own play through of this, still. Now on Very Slow and micromanaging still.

First an aside about micromanaging. I'm not doing it because I think I have to, but oddly, because I'm enjoying it. I never micromanage like this, and I have 220 trains now, after taking over the 3rd AI in 1906. I'm enjoying it because I feel like I'm learning things about cargo flow. Basically, I'm seeing flow management strategies that can turn a profit on any map, coupled with industrial development.

I must admit that I've also been thinking this map could teach me some more about cargo flow. Usually the haulage profits on Expert level aren't as good as in this map, so I tend to play industry-heavy. Next time I play it through I might concentrate more on maximising haulage potential.

And, I see what you're saying about the connection goals, just track burning. I was trying to force a historical experience on the player. There were light rails that ran up from Argentina into Chuquicamata to deliver produce and supplies. As well as fairly profitable rail over the southern Andes between Puerto Montt and southern Argentina. Yeah, the connection between Santiago and Mendoza was made, but it was never profitable (8% grades), and was mostly just a showcase of Chilean technology and pride, heavily subsidized by the government.

Since writing the post about that, I've played this map again a couple of times and have changed my mind. The northern one isn't too bad for profitability if you get it in early enough. It's not awesome, but it pays for itself reasonably well. The terrain is quite manageable if a couple of tunnels are used.

The southern one is quite good for profits, as long as you have a decent Argentinian network to feed. I find making Zapala a hub works well. Grades on the southern connection end up being easy if track is laid with some care. Getting up the eastern side of the range can be done at 4% or less. Once you're at the top, the run to San Juan de los Beunos Noches or whatever it's called can mostly be done at 0-1%.

The Santiago to Mendoza run is one I found wasn't worth bothering with, even with a tunnel. Since the event only checks for track segments > 0 in the high pass, I just plonked a very short section of track there for about $30k. With Mendoza being connected to Santiago via Peurto Montt, the Gold conditions were met.

Agree also I wish I had painted the background better, not sure what can be done at this point... And also I can forsee spending 100+ hours on the project if I ever really tried to go back over it and make it look how I wanted, and I'm not sure I want to spend 100 hours on this...

Fair enough.

But I also want a map a casual gamer can win, on Medium anyway.

Should be possible on Medium.

[Gumboots]

Agree also I wish I had painted the background better, not sure what can be done at this point... And also I can forsee spending 100+ hours on the project if I ever really tried to go back over it and make it look how I wanted, and I'm not sure I want to spend 100 hours on this....

Just for fun I took a look at this in the editor yesterday. There are some things that could be tweaked easily. Most of the map is pretty good (the Andes look great) but about half the rivers flow uphill and they just end short of the coast. They also stop quite sharply up in the mountains.

I sorted those in about an hour, and it was a pretty cruisy hour at that. Changing the flow is just one click with the river tool selected. For the river mouths I put an extra square of river down at the coast, then converted that to a "river junction" to get the delta look. For the upper ends, an extra two or three squares of river at the smallest brush size help them look tapered out. I also fixed a few lumps in rivers that I spotted on the way, did a bit of wave blocking here and there, and a few trees could go too. It wouldn't need a lot to make it more polished, but the gameplay is good anyway (although a bit erratic sometimes).

The other possible trick would be to use the "Google sat image to gmp" method, but although it wouldn't take forever that would still be more work.

Another thing I noticed is that the 50% track cost penalty for the Andes doesn't seem to be in the editor events anywhere, but is still in the briefing.

Special Conditions:
Engines cost 25% more since they have to be imported. Track building in the Andes costs 50% more since many small tunnels, rack sections, and bridges were necessary which the grade penalty alone can't account for.

BTW, about your Ecuador map: I did take a look at that one but I couldn't bring myself to play it. It's just too, umm, green. I mean that thing has some serious greenness going on, at least on my monitor, and my monitor is set up very well for colour accuracy. I suspect the one you had when you made the map wasn't that good with colours.

[Gumboots]

I just tried something as a quick test: those nitrate mines that have the highly variable profit. I was wondering why they took off in some games (like $300 k profit early in the game) but not in other games (like stuck on $30 k max).

The seed I was using to get Gold with various strategies had the nitrate mines never generating any worthwhile profit. I started it again (same seed, from a save) and tried a few things. I had been playing it with an intermediate station between the mines and the coast, but I'd set the intermediate station down the hill a bit rather than just on the border of the nitrate mine territory. That never seemed to get mine profits going.

So, thinking that perhaps having the mine station and intermediate station with their capture areas overlapping might stimulate mine prices, I put another large station just outside the border on the mine territory. I wasn't using it, just had it there to see if it would do anything for mine prices. It didn't.

So, tried it again with the same large station just outside the border of the mine territory, plus the usual large station at the mines. This time the two capture areas didn't overlap, but their edges were against each other. I ran two trains from the mines to the intermediate station, and four trains from the intermediate station to the coast. This was starting in January 1902. Later that year, prices at the mines were going up fast. Looks like that's the way to kick off mine profits.

Only catch with it as that as prices at the mines go up, the amount of money the run to the coast makes goes down. Haven't yet crunched the numbers on the total difference in revenue.

[AdmiralHalsey]

BTW, about your Ecuador map: I did take a look at that one but I couldn't bring myself to play it. It's just too, umm, green. I mean that thing has some serious greenness going on, at least on my monitor, and my monitor is set up very well for colour accuracy. I suspect the one you had when you made the map wasn't that good with colours.

Yeah that thing is like a Neon Sign. I might try fixing it myself and if permission is granted i'll upload it here.

[RulerofRails]

So, tried it again with the same large station just outside the border of the mine territory, plus the usual large station at the mines. This time the two capture areas didn't overlap, but their edges were against each other. I ran two trains from the mines to the intermediate station, and four trains from the intermediate station to the coast. This was starting in January 1902. Later that year, prices at the mines were going up fast. Looks like that's the way to kick off mine profits.

That's interesting. I have always had a good increase in Nitrate price by putting a large station right on top of the ridge that forms the basin around Chuquicatama. I always did this to catch any escaping cargo as close to Chuquicatama as possible without having a station with a stop/start on a severe grade. If done right it can also level out the top of the ridge, another win. I never paid attention to whether or not the station was inside the Nitrate territory or not. Also, I never did this in such a fashion that both stations were touching or overlapping boundaries. I frankly don't think it matters.

My guess as to what is happening here is that Chuquicatama is in a basin that suppresses price there, but a station just outside that basin transfers some of the outside demand into the basin. This causes higher prices. Probably it is necessary to have some trains stopping at this station, I don't know for sure.

Yep, I often ignore it, but station placement can have a noticeable effect on demand. I have noticed that a smaller demand triangle can grow and appear bigger on the demand map after a small station is built on its square. This can be useful especially with the Electric Plant or in TM where there are more marginal demands. The number of stations more effectively distributing demand and number of trains can be factors in some cases as well. The job of the railway is on simple terms to equalize prices between stations.

[Gumboots]

Yes, I think it's the station on top of the ridge that does it, as long as stuff is actually being hauled from that station to the coast. If the station on top of the ridge is just sitting there and not being used, it has no effect.

I only tried overlapping the capture areas as a test to see what happened. I was wondering if the overlap would transfer the demand between capture areas without any trains running. It didn't make any difference, but I was curious to see if it would.