North American RR Sim

[Orange46]

Warning.

This scenario is designed for someone who either wants to do a lot of train and industry managing or just wants to run a railroad for the full length of the game (1829-2010). You can't get a medal until 2009. It is different from its predecessor, North America thru the Ages in that there is a lot more cargo and that cargo wants to be shipped by rail. Industries are also now available to buy or build but they are expensive. Actually, everything is expensive and the early years can be frustrating. Expect some starts to fail and others to succeed only if you are patient enough. If you don't play on expert and are willing to accept government charity, then anyone should be able to make it - at least until the handouts stop.

I never had more than 120 trains running at one time and you can keep an engine running for 20 years or more, so it is not a game of constantly having to buy new engines. The Planets you might want to dump a lot sooner and in the final years keep them expensive engines running til they drop. Maintenance sheds are way too expensive to buy for Planets. You spend at least $10,000 a year just to maintain the shed, so it can be cheaper just to junk the planets and buy new ones when the oil runs out. Running on empty, however, can be quite expensive and dangerous.

You shouldn't have to micromanage each train, but it is advisable to do so in the early years when you don't have too many trains running and you are on the edge of failing. Mines and farms produce enough to make it worthwhile to run spurs to them; but these lines need to be watched.

[Gumboots]

I never had more than 120 trains running and you can keep an engine running for 30 years or more...

You can, but it will cost you money to do that. In a very long scenario, it's actually cheaper to replace the locos regularly.

Spreadsheet that tells you the optimum replacement year for any locomotive

[Hawk]

Thia map is available in the archives.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/map_arch/r ... ailroadSim

I've also moved this to the proper forum.

[ricanuck]

Hello Orange,

just started your scenario. Fantastic map!

I have some observations/questions:
1. The ledger shows that my lifetime profits are negative and decreasing (in the goals section), although I am profiting every year, and the income statement shows a good lifetime profit. What does the inconsistency mean?

2. I started the scenario with 9 AI players, and only one of them is in the green, all others are in the red and big time (to the point of a seemingly impossible recovery). Is that normal, or is this scenario not meant to be played with AIs?

Thanks in advance for any hints,

[Orange46]

Re engine replacement: In this scenario engine maintenance costs have been reduced by 75% in order to increase the number of years of profitable service. Further, at a variable point early in the game engine safety is drastically increased with only a small increase in service costs. These two changes keep crashes and breakdowns very low and maintenance costs low. With crashes being low, don't be tempted to let trains skip maintenance entirely as maintenance costs increase significantly when the engines are running dry. I found it boring having to constantly upgrade my engines over the length of the scenario and also unrealistic. Real engines are kept even longer than the lengths I have recommended. Also note that I winged my replacement times by just looking at increased service costs X age of engine and when that amount went over the cost of the engine, it was probably time to replace. Cash shortages and other important things to do usually resulted in engines being kept in service longer. In the future, I will look at the optimal replacement times Gumboots developed as they seem to be much more precise, esp for scenarios other than mine.

Re Lifetime Profits: Lifetime Profits is something that the game keeps track of and I am just printing it in the ledger and using that value for victory purposes. In my tests the ledger profits tracked with Net Worth until the dividends started and then increased each year thereafter by the amount of the actual profit, while the Net Worth increased by (the actual profit - the dividend).

Re AI: I did not test with AIs but in the original version I noted that my AI RRs never seemed to get very far so I stopped using them. One other player back then noted that his AIs never built track. I debated taking them out, but decided to keep them in as they shouldn't ruin the scenario and might offer new twists.

[ricanuck]

Hi Orange,

thanks for the quick answer. With your a posteriori permission I decided to start modifying your scenario, I hope you don't mind... what I did so far is to take out all the government handouts and its consequences on the game and the winning-losing states. I also reactivated all disabled special conditions, and reduced the max number of players to 10 (9 AIs). I gave each player 100K to start with, and made the AI Aggressive.

Ran a first quick test for the first 8 years, and the scenario is fluid. 8 out of 9 AIs immediately founded companies, started borrowing and game on. Some of them went bankrupt, some are doing well, and one that bankrupted is now bouncing back. Very interesting...

I think your map and setup is wonderful for an ALL-Capitalist game of RR3, so I will try and tweak the setup until I get a variant of your masterpiece that is both fun and challenging. I may have to give more initial capital to the players, and see what happens (200-250K max).

If you are interested, once I have something more definitive, I can share the variant with you and/or the community, ALL credits to you of course.

Regards,

[Orange46]

Hey ricanuck

Sounds good to me. I design scenarios to do things that I want to do and no one else has done (that I know of). Since I always start from someone else's map, I am happy to see designers like you start from mine. Good luck and have fun.

[Gumboots]

Re engine replacement: In this scenario engine maintenance costs have been reduced by 75% in order to increase the number of years of profitable service.

Nice touch.

In the future, I will look at the optimal replacement times Gumboots developed as they seem to be much more precise, esp for scenarios other than mine.

Actually RoR deserves most of the credit for that. I basically just gave his spreadsheet some slicker presentation, to make the output easier to visualise.

[RulerofRails]

Fun fact for playing this one: Beware of upgrading stations. It's better to bulldoze the smaller one and just build a brand new large one. Otherwise you still pay station maintenance costs for the smaller one as well as the costs for the new large one. A minor game bug.

Fuel cost also increases with age. The percentage of increase for a particular year is Engine Age/44. Fuel costs will be double for a 44 year old engine. The replacement spreadsheet takes this into account when generating an optimum engine lifespan.

The sheet stops at year 22 when fuel costs are up 50%. Something to consider when trying to hold onto engines for much longer than that.

[Orange46]

RulerofRails: Next you are going to tell me there is no Santa. At least Glenn came back from the apparent dead. Could Jon Snow be so lucky?

It is a pain replacing stations if you are using long routes to conserve maintenance sheds, but the losses of paying for up to 3 stations instead of one overwhelms the savings. Aargh. When deleting a station you have to make sure that no trains that use that station are in the process of loading because the value of their cargo will drop to zero. Freight can be reloaded, but Express is gone forever. In this scenario you probably don't incur a loss for upgrading a station (the book value of the upgraded station equals the sum of the new and old station) and since maintenance costs are based on book value that is why you pay extra maintenance. Also, track maintenance costs are also based on the cost to build so depression tracks have lower maintenance due to the superior quality of the work? and doubled single tracks will have a higher cost than originally built double tracks. In a long scenario it might then make more sense to rip up the single tracks before doubling. You do get a tiny reprieve in this scenario when ripping up or destroying smaller stations - the loss generated by this reduces the dividend, but that is a small consolation.

Let it be known - I only destroyed stations when there was no room to upgrade and rarely double tracked and never used the destruction method before doubling. Have you noticed that if you double track over a moving train while the game is not paused that train will get confused and go to the wrong station!?

I just noticed that fuel costs seem to be flat for 6 years and then start to go up in the 7th and later years - at least they did for a Camelback that I observed.Fuel cost didn't seem to vary by cargo size.

[RulerofRails]

Sorry to spoil your fun.

You are right, an upgraded station has a book value of both the original and new stations and the costs are based on that. I agree that it's awkward to add stops to lots of trains again, but meant to point it out more as a strategy thing of how far you expand with Medium stations before switching to Large. There is a cost saving down the road when building Large whichever way you look at it.

You are right about the track upgrade as well. However, my strategy tends to be to double up the track in Recession or Depression. It's roughly a saving of 10% per level lower than Normal. I.e. Depression is 20% lower track costs. Track will end up costing you something to bulldoze as well. I did a quick little test and it seems to be almost as much as the cost saving of laying double track versus double-tracking existing single track. That's for a normal economy. In the poorer economy, the bulldoze cost didn't really seem any different (probably it's by cell???), so the bulldoze cost was then more than the immediate saving. In the long term, it's all about the cost of the track on your book value sheet so bulldozing is always going to be a saving in the end.

Yes, the low-points are the cheapest track which will cost you the least to maintain. It's all based on the cost to lay. I didn't study the events of your map, but an idea for this would be to decrease the mountain building track costs, otherwise it's a pretty iffy decision to have a big presence in that jagged western portion of the map. The track maintenace for routes there will be killer.

I always double-track with the game paused to avoid any train direction/stoppage issues. Observed fuel costs can vary quite a bit because they are based on distance traveled, engine and tender weight and consist weight. That's why I tested them in a very controlled enviroment. You can always do that too if you want. I welcome anyone checking over the spreadsheet and the formulas used.

[Gumboots]

Sorry to spoil your fun.

You are right, an upgraded station has a book value of both the original and new stations and the costs are based on that. I agree that it's awkward to add stops to lots of trains again, but meant to point it out more as a strategy thing of how far you expand with Medium stations before switching to Large. There is a cost saving down the road when building Large whichever way you look at it.

That's interesting. I'd never noticed that before. So if you build Medium first, then upgrade to Large, your station maintenance costs will be 50% higher. Which means that if you go Small > Medium > Large your maintenance costs would be 75% higher.

The reason I've probably never noticed this is that I tend to just build large stations right from the start in most places. I find the larger capture area is usually worth the greater cost (which isn't much in the scheme of things). If I build a medium station, it's usually somewhere that will never need upgrading. I rarely bother with small stations at all.

I always double-track with the game paused to avoid any train direction/stoppage issues. Observed fuel costs can vary quite a bit because they are based on distance traveled, engine and tender weight and consist weight. That's why I tested them in a very controlled enviroment. You can always do that too if you want. I welcome anyone checking over the spreadsheet and the formulas used.

Same here with double tracking. I always pause the game first. And, to simplify the description, fuel cost is basically (distance x total train weight x constant fudge factor).

[RulerofRails]

I cruised through my first attempt at this one. I had the $600M profits in 1907 with 80 cities connected, but then had to save for the most expensive mountain ones and the $10M access to Mexico. I expected this to take 10 years, but in fact it took 14. If I had been expecting that I would have done some more engine replacements. So finished in the end of 1921 with 736M Profits. Obviously didn't have the industry to rails balance right. I also played super conservatively in the early years because I saw heaps of notices about passenger prices falling and cargo prices dropping. In hindsight, I should have gone in full expansion mode. Anyway, it's an interesting balance trying to maximize profits while also paying the least tax/dividend.

I complained about the jaggedness of this base map (USA made by Kraelin) before, but with a few more creative ideas and using all the tricks in the book, it wasn't so bad. I got away with only using one short tunnel between Spokane and Billings. I used wooden bridges to run across some particularly bad terrain such as down the coast between Eugene and Eureka and I also snuck San Diego and L.A. stations up onto the nearby mountain tops.

The seeding over time on this map was quite good in my opinion. It works well for this long time frame.

Gumboots, this map has double prices for most things. This makes it a difficult strategy to only build Large stations from the start of the game. With normal pricing, I always build Large stations too. Here I built the first six as Medium and the rest Large except for two I cheapskated on for the final two connections. Because cargo prices are -20% during much of this game, one must be more careful than normal with the costs. In fact, in my game I had $60M worth of track before entering the mountains. Just laying single track all through the mountains to fulfill the condition of having all cities connected increased this to $114M worth of track. So that's an extra almost $3M of track maintenace just for the mountain track. It's not a game breaker, but without some industry padding I expect it would be a slow finish to the game.

[Orange46]

So finished in the end of 1921 with 736M Profits.

Do you remember what your industry profits were? What level were you playing on? In the original Mexico cost 10 or 100 times as much, making it impossible to win before NAFTA came in. I am currently playing with this scenario using the Coast to Coast map. It looks friendlier in the west, but I am only in the age of the Duke, o the west coast is just a dream.

Re Station Upgrades: There is also another factor. Express cargoes do not recognize the new station for a while, so I am not sure if or how much revenue is lost if you delete or stop loading trains heading to the old station before the new station is fully recognized. Also, express dropped off at the old station aren't picked up by the new station as far as I can tell. There was a scenario where I built stations on both sides of a river (Old Miss?) hoping to get around not being able to build a bridge, but I never seemed to pick up any thru express cargoes; just freight snuck over. Any thoughts?

Re Fuel: my simplified tests were done on a test double track with no cargoes, comparing different engines running in opposite directions. It got boring after a while but did convince me that the fuel costs increases for older engines were real. In the first tests, the cargoes were whatever happened to be there and I didn't notice any differences in fuel costs based on the number of cars being hauled. Based based on prior comments, it sounds like my empties should use less than full trains. Edit: the post below tells all. Thanx Hawk.

[Hawk]

There's a couple lengthy discussions about fuel consumption in the Railroad Tycoon III < Letters to the Editor < Rollingstock forum, as well as some other interesting topics.

viewtopic.php?f=67&t=3950

viewtopic.php?f=67&t=3935

[RulerofRails]

I was playing on Expert difficulty. As far as industries, yes I bought a fair few. I built a few Hotels early on. My best Hotel in Chicago (built in 1838) gave $8.35M profit over the course of the game. Next best, Cincinnati (built in 1835), gave $8.05M. I did make an effort to buy the newly placed resources, so got a few Dairies, Ranches, etc.. At first I was concentrating on buying Logging Camps as I was really conservative thinking that I would be running in the red for extended periods of time down the road.

Another good investment was to save to buy a Furnace in Atlanta with a Concrete Plant beside it. That investment was worth $65M in revenue between 1858 and the end of the game. I tried to monopolize Steel production on the map, but goofed up by not buying up the Coal Mines that were in the red before 1862 when the first Steel Mill appeared in Pittsburgh. I could have had higher Steel production if I had bought the Coal Mines up earlier in the game. I ended up owning 3 running Steel Mills. They were good for $66M or so revenue before I finished the game. Book Value for all my industries including those I bought just to save them from disappearing was about $80M. Overall, they were returning $7-12M revenue per year depending on the economy.

Here's a screenshot:

Notice that I paid $5M of interest. Obviously, I was buying industries etc. near year end when I got the opportunity and not bothering about the interest I would pay during the next year.

I had an idea. To help prevent spending all your money before year end, you could have an event to raise the prime rate at the start of each year if your cash balance is negative. It could check each month to see if your balance is still negative. Once it finds that your prime rate is above $0, then prime rate will return to normal (it could even drop, negative rates in Boom times?), preventing someone trying to sit on a little cash to earn interest money. FYI, the split between Interest Paid on negative cash (for example 13%) and Interest Received on any positive balance (for example 2%) seems to stick to 11% difference even when prime rate is changed a lot.

[Orange46]

Thanks for the screen shot. Your game makes me glad that I allowed industries as my intent was to provide more options for playing this scenario as opposed to North America thru the Ages, where industries seemed to ruin (make too easy) the game and thus were not allowed. Too bad you didn't get to suffer the problems of the 707 or the extremely long recession that also occurred around then in my game, causing me to actually lose money for several years. (But your industrial development would problem have insulated you.) In the RT2 version, industries were critical to surviving the first couple of decades (at least they were the way I played). I had the same coal problem as you in my final and only complete play but I am not that aggressive in buying new basic industries, so I didn't gold until 2002 or so. I never could get my furnaces to make money in any playing so clearly I am doing something wrong. When smelting ore, however, they didn't lose money. In my current CtC version not a single quarry has appeared and I am in the 1880's. In my first tries, which l aborted early as it was too easy, tons on rocks came. It seems that industries spawn in packs and in some games I have too much rock but no furnaces, next game lots of furnances but no rocks! However, I can't imagine that new industries would be created using something other than a pure random selection based on the city/regional weights as that would take more lines of code. Speaking of which, that is how they should spawn - using global adjusted weights to spawn industries based on global need and the current availability of the necessary inputs.

Shown below is the latest screenshot I have from that game. Pathetic.

[Gumboots]

FYI, the split between Interest Paid on negative cash (for example 13%) and Interest Received on any positive balance (for example 2%) seems to stick to 11% difference even when prime rate is changed a lot.

I was just looking through the RT3.lng file last night. According to that, interest paid on positive cash balances is prime rate - 4%.

Code: Select all

	1310 "Interest expenses paid on bonds outstanding.  You also earn a small amount (the prime rate minus 4%) on cash balances you have."

I haven't tested this yet, and due to the various changes that were made during development the RT3.lng can't be taken as infallible. We already know that pax appeal bonuses were changed after the .lng file was written (ie: they're actually 10% increments instead of the claimed 15%).

[RulerofRails]

I didn't explain myself properly. I built the Concrete Plant at the same time that I bought the Furnace. The Concrete Plant ensured that the Furnace was profitable after that point. I had 4 Quarries near Atlanta. I didn't try other seedings.

Undertoad recently started a thread: Altered Price Bug. The bug when raising prices is well known. He does mention events that lower prices. I know this map uses them. Since you no doubt tested this map a lot: Does an event to lower the price of a cargo get applied only once when the event triggers? Or, have you observed subsequent, unexplained drops in price long after the event fired?

Gumboots, good info there. Yes, that holds true. By inference, the rate of interest paid on negative balances is 7% higher than the prime rate.

[Orange46]

Re Rocks: My furnace was in Portland Me and I bought a cement plant down south, so I was doomed to failure. There was an electronics plant nearby but I didn't have much ore until later in the game.

Re Price Bug: I have noticed weird price islands but they don't spread and go away. Steel has never been a problem in this scenario. I did discover early on (v 1.01 or so) that you can only drop express prices and volume so far before weird things begin to happen.