- Kansas City Fertilizer.jpg (88.43 KiB) Viewed 196621 times
Just completed a play of this starting with a line from Springfield to Kankakee using 8-car Ten Wheelers which gave me a beginning average speed of as low as 26mph some years, but it was greater than 25, so I got the access. I built minimum possible industries. I did build Hotels, Post Offices, Restaurants, and Taverns, otherwise, I built a Lumber Mill in Memphis, an Aluminum Mill in St. Louis, and I found it necessary to build a Rubber Bauxite Supply warehouse in Kansas City Kansas to get a fertilizer demand there. I could have forced everything, but my goal here was to only use force loading at supply points (using the seeded warehouses as supplies for Fertilizer). The warehouse in Kansas City Missouri that supplies Fertilizer meant that prices were really washed out otherwise. I got the Grain goal "naturally", I set up my routes so that Grain would travel through Kansas City and when it left it would count towards the goal, as opposed to last time when I was building lots of warehouses when I hauled Cotton into Kansas City to be converted into Grain at my warehouses. This time I chose access to Memphis first again, followed by Chicago and then Kansas City. I had no problem with the Oil and Cattle goals as there was a demand for oil in Fort Worth (National Shipping Warehouse, which disappeared just as I was finished the hauls). This served as a suitable collection point, so I had trains on auto-consist collecting Oil to Forth Worth and then for the hauls that counted they would naturally be shipped out to the Goodland Oil Refinery. In order to control the Livestock demand gradients on the map, I approached Dallas/Fort Worth from the north and purposely didn't connect to some of the cities to their east. Of course, I didn't run trains between Dallas & Fort Worth or any of the other double cities as that would have inflated my load count, IMO, unfairly.
It turned out that Cheese from Chicago (there was a Dairy Processor in Chicago itself that never decided to upgrade) was about equal with Goods to Memphis (most of these came from the River Boat port across the river from Greenville) in loads hauled and were the last hauls completed in 1935, just after 100,000 loads at 42mph average overall. However, I was used to all the cargo that the warehouses I used last play were producing, so I bought too many trains, and built too much track. I limited myself to 300 trains here. This helped boost the load count, but some were only marginally profitable and I lost around 93M off my book value in the great depression. In 1922, the commodity investment had paid out for the maximum bonus, this isn't good from a testing perspective, but is fun anyway and helps CBV. This meant I had savings of around 50M, but it wasn't enough and I ended up about 30M in the hole. It took a couple of years to get CBV back up. Wsherrick did a great job of crippling the economy for the great depression, and I was tempted to simply pause all trains as there is no revenue for them to get by hauling anything. Also, industries stop functioning as demands don't draw cargo properly anymore. Without building industry, it would be very difficult to get 1Bln CBV by 1945. I wouldn't say impossible, but it is definitely easier to do the hauls.
Ok, enough about strategy. I didn't see the special Instant Gold ledger. I am not sure exactly how the ledger works, but did you intend to make it visible if your average freight speed is above 40mph? It seems that the events are only set to happen once, maybe it was there once and I missed it, but whenever I was looking for it, it wasn't there.
It's a minor thing, but do you understand how a, city connects to territory event works? I seem to get the notices after placing a second station, for example, I place one in Fort Worth, but not after also building one in Dallas do I get the newspaper.
There are quite a few spelling mistakes, I have seen maybe half a dozen that I can find again quickly. Gumboots noticed them also. I can make a note of them or try to fix them last thing.
I'm interested in how your key city deliveries/pick-ups are coming.
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Something in the game loader is messing up the order of the events.
I had events 2 through 6 one less than I should have. So was adjusting Event 2 (+5) to 28% without checking this out. So all my math is put off by this.) I removed my inaccurate math from above, the principle is still ok, but the numbers are all over the place, so are useless.
Even when I load the map from the Extras->Editor menu all the buildings are already seeded! 
