Here's a scenario I've been working on for a little bit now. All players receive a salary from their company, but I don't think anyone has ever tried to build a scenario around that, at least until now. The map is the US. There are 15 AI companies as well as your own. Stock trading is forbidden and everyone starts with no stock or cash on hand. You can only get money from what the Board of Directors pays you. The game lasts 15 years. Highest net worth gets you Bronze. If you net worth is also 500k you get Silver as well. Add in 1500 lifetime loads and you get gold.
I've done several test games and feel like I've balanced the scenario pretty decently. Bronze is rather easy but on the other hand Gold and Silver, while obtainable, are definitely a challenge. I do have some other thoughts and observations but I want to give people a chance to play the scenario themselves before I share them.
I've also thought about doing a variant using MrScott's logo pack and with all the AI railroads having historical names and their first station placed so that they start in their historical territory, but I haven't gotten a chance to make, much less test, such a scenario yet.
Chairman of the Board
Chairman of the Board
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Re: Chairman of the Board
Also, here's the briefing:
Re: Chairman of the Board
Interesting concept. 
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Слава Україні! Героям слава!
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RulerofRails
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Re: Chairman of the Board
A couple maps I know of that also have a personal wealth element: Hard at Work and LA & L.A. But it's only in the first few years.
Generally I like to play 1.06 with price islands enabled. There is a thread for that: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 4&start=40 To summarize: part of the code for demand transmission between stations was disabled by milo in the 1.06 patch. This leads to rampant re-hauling with the market acting almost like spot-price trading. It's mindless and means you should spam many trains on routes. Since the AI are virtually mindless, this change helps the AI quite a bit, as you can see from the title of the thread I linked. I used the default 1.06, with price islands enabled most AI will go broke here. In my game the most valuable AI ended up with $534k cash. Maybe it's a fluke, but this meant that the Silver target is worthless because it required slightly less personal cash than Bronze.
What I noticed is that the AI companies were buying up a lot of shares. Highest book value for them was around $10M. My company was $100M+.
It's really hard to connect anywhere in the western mountains. Look at LA area, or Salt Lake City. The problem isn't so much the height but rather the "lumpiness" of the ground. There are sharp edges on the map cells. I would encourage to follow at least one route between each city with the smoothing tool and maybe some minor height adjustment in the worst places. At the moment all we can really do is go under or over this sort of terrain with completely unrealistic super long bridges or tunnels. At the moment, it's too much of a headache to build anything there, and not worth it economically either.
In the ledger, the years elapsed line is a bit confusing. It is missing the work "of". The scenario is actually running for 16 years. For 15 years, the scenario should end at the end of the year when "Years elapsed since game start" = 14. Many maps use a variable as a counter (a yearly event to add 1), for a usage such as "You are in year x out of 15."
In terms of strategy, there isn't much more to do than make sure that your profits are increasing year-on-year. Then to cross-your fingers that the economy wont decline. This is a place where it may pay to build some track in Jan-Feb and July-Aug in case it makes a difference in stabilizing a good economy. It was proven as making a difference in RTII, so possibly it is a factor here as well. I want to believe that it does make a difference. I had Prosperity for an 8 year stretch using this technique.
PS. If you didn't try it already, you might be interested in this mod that tricks the AI into building large stations: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4139. This helps them a bit. Any AI starting with two tiny stations in basically doomed.
Generally I like to play 1.06 with price islands enabled. There is a thread for that: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 4&start=40 To summarize: part of the code for demand transmission between stations was disabled by milo in the 1.06 patch. This leads to rampant re-hauling with the market acting almost like spot-price trading. It's mindless and means you should spam many trains on routes. Since the AI are virtually mindless, this change helps the AI quite a bit, as you can see from the title of the thread I linked. I used the default 1.06, with price islands enabled most AI will go broke here. In my game the most valuable AI ended up with $534k cash. Maybe it's a fluke, but this meant that the Silver target is worthless because it required slightly less personal cash than Bronze.
What I noticed is that the AI companies were buying up a lot of shares. Highest book value for them was around $10M. My company was $100M+.
It's really hard to connect anywhere in the western mountains. Look at LA area, or Salt Lake City. The problem isn't so much the height but rather the "lumpiness" of the ground. There are sharp edges on the map cells. I would encourage to follow at least one route between each city with the smoothing tool and maybe some minor height adjustment in the worst places. At the moment all we can really do is go under or over this sort of terrain with completely unrealistic super long bridges or tunnels. At the moment, it's too much of a headache to build anything there, and not worth it economically either.
In the ledger, the years elapsed line is a bit confusing. It is missing the work "of". The scenario is actually running for 16 years. For 15 years, the scenario should end at the end of the year when "Years elapsed since game start" = 14. Many maps use a variable as a counter (a yearly event to add 1), for a usage such as "You are in year x out of 15."
In terms of strategy, there isn't much more to do than make sure that your profits are increasing year-on-year. Then to cross-your fingers that the economy wont decline. This is a place where it may pay to build some track in Jan-Feb and July-Aug in case it makes a difference in stabilizing a good economy. It was proven as making a difference in RTII, so possibly it is a factor here as well. I want to believe that it does make a difference. I had Prosperity for an 8 year stretch using this technique.
PS. If you didn't try it already, you might be interested in this mod that tricks the AI into building large stations: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4139. This helps them a bit. Any AI starting with two tiny stations in basically doomed.