Africa & Middle East - Goals?

[aiven]

Hmm, this is definitely me. Why am I greyed out/unclickable? :o

PM Hawk about it. At a guess I'd say the account was closed due to it being inactive. Admins do that sort of thing sometimes.

Yep! That would be the reason. Most likely no activity for over a year.

I stand guilty, no chance of getting it back then?

[aiven]

Incidentally, I have to wonder why 1829 borders are being mentioned, given that no rail was laid anywhere in Africa until the 1850's.

I guess the scenario is counterfactual, since it starts in 1829.

[Gumboots]

Looks like it. Oh dear, an RT3 scenario which isn't totally realistic. What will the neighbours think?

[Cash on Wheels]

I'm going to do a 1.06 revision of this map. Or to better describe it a mass deletion! I've already slashed the city count by at least 66% and removed their leftover reserve cells. Plus I've started to work on re-seeding the regions. Next is to get rid most of the 165! events! 165! AAnd he used all 24 territory slots. How slow is this game in the later years!? I can't imagine the hours the guy put into this! The river junctions! By the time city placement came he was rushing to finish. Some of these 2-3 star cities are nothing but small villages. Tehran, Iran & other cities were way up on a hill sides. The last 6 or so warehouse/port recipes are renamed but nothing was done to them.

[Cash on Wheels]

Anyone have an idea how much faster the game would run with just 4 territories vs 24? I love the effort the guy put into drawing thr boarders. So I don't want remove it unless it's worth it. Because of its size it will be a limited event map. So no events will be testing against all territories.

[RulerofRails]

I can't call it "fact", but I'm fairly sure that territory count isn't going to slow the game down much, if at all.

Similarly for events (not saying that the present events should be kept, the map is listed as "unfinished" for a reason). The generally accepted "notion" with these is that the frequency of check is more important than outright number. Some maps have over 200 events.

As far as I know, little performance "testing" has been done on the game, just observations/guessing. The bottlenecks commonly mentioned seem to come about as a result of very high numbers of industries and especially large numbers of trains. Info here: viewtopic.php?p=32538#p32538.

The author, thietavu, has spent years on long-play simulation-style TrainMaster maps of China. I played through the TM - Great China 4 once (before I knew about dgVoodoo2, wish I did) and I have 20,000+ buildings on the map. (Can't actually read the exact number since anything over 4 integers gets truncated in the editor read-out.) With dgVoodoo2 the map is still playable (normal speed is a little jumpy, but Slow and Very Slow game speeds work nicely enough to watch trains on maximum graphics settings at 1920x1080. But, loading the saved game takes a little over 2 minutes! (Saving is fine, hangs a little at 22%, but 8 seconds total). Pretty obvious that the game is reaching some limits. I have 213 trains, 28,851 track miles, all cities (230) connected.

For better performance lower building density and fewer cities should help most. This map will be some work to finish/polish, best of luck.

[AT41B]

IMO, there are different reasons to do anything to the map and events. Yes, there are 165 cities and 24 territories, all have a function. I know it is a boring game after a bit, with all the interruptions of what is going on in that time of the era. But hey, I sometimes learn much about world history playing a game such as this.
IMO, I would leave the original game as is and rebuild a sequel to it with less cities and territories and reducing the number of history comments.
That would be leaving most of the events out which has no EFFECT in the event.

[RulerofRails]

For the record I never tried playing this map. It falls under the category of not polished enough. There are too many nice maps to play, I never seem to run out of options. I can imagine that passenger numbers and revenues are insane with all the cities and early start date.

Another comment, with the current setup the AI are useless. There is a practical issue. The only condition in use "AI Ignore Territories at Startup" when the mouse is placed over it causes the game hint-message along the bottom of the screen:

Use this ONLY for maps where newly started AI companies will be granted broad territory rights (like 'New Beginnings').

This condition will never give them any access to territories. That must be done via event. A better name would be "AI will start a company even if he can't find a good route to build".

I also noticed that the territory "Other Lands" has a purchase price of $500,000k. Considering that one of the conditions for the Gold medal is CBV of $500,000k, I think it's pretty unlikely that anybody actually bought the access rights. Unless they want to play the longest game ever! I can only imagine the crash in share price that would ensue from that drop in CBV!

[Cash on Wheels]

IMO, there are different reasons to do anything to the map and events. Yes, there are 165 cities and 24 territories, all have a function. I know it is a boring game after a bit, with all the interruptions of what is going on in that time of the era. But hey, I sometimes learn much about world history playing a game such as this.
IMO, I would leave the original game as is and rebuild a sequel to it with less cities and territories and reducing the number of history comments.
That would be leaving most of the events out which has no EFFECT in the event.

That's precisely what I'm doing. In fact already in the final testing phase. The city count is at least 602! St-louis ID is 626! It is now somewhere south of 200 . The start date (added time, so u can start any date up to 2050.) and cash is the same. The territories will remain as is and so will their access cost. (These high access cost help slow down the player from expanding too fast.) I'm not going to taking the time to script & test new events + that slows the game down. Rivers no longer have trees in them. Repaint the coastlines to matching area. Adjusted reserve cells. etc etc. I did all that in less than 8hrs.

Btw that testing phase is 200 yrs long 1829-2030!
Im not even to 1850 yet, so I'll drop a beta on this thread sunday and send it archives after were done.

Events slashed from 165 to about 25. The event deletion button is kind of clunky, so deleted a few I did not want to, so I still need to find & add them back.

I have not decided weather to change the objectives or not. I guess I wil decide after my test 'journey'

[Cash on Wheels]

For the record I never tried playing this map. It falls under the category of not polished enough. There are too many nice maps to play, I never seem to run out of options. I can imagine that passenger numbers and revenues are insane with all the cities and early start date.

Another comment, with the current setup the AI are useless. There is a practical issue. The only condition in use "AI Ignore Territories at Startup" when the mouse is placed over it causes the game hint-message along the bottom of the screen:

Use this ONLY for maps where newly started AI companies will be granted broad territory rights (like 'New Beginnings').

This condition will never give them any access to territories. That must be done via event. A better name would be "AI will start a company even if he can't find a good route to build".

I also noticed that the territory "Other Lands" has a purchase price of $500,000k. Considering that one of the conditions for the Gold medal is CBV of $500,000k, I think it's pretty unlikely that anybody actually bought the access rights. Unless they want to play the longest game ever! I can only imagine the crash in share price that would ensue from that drop in CBV!

AI is something I have not looked at. To gain access to "Outside africa" I was thinking about denying access to it until they connect cape town to cario. Changed my mind now its just a cheap $15m.

[Cash on Wheels]

This map has been updated! beta version now available!

[low_grade]

In the downloads? Sweet! I always wanted to see a playable version of this map! Hmm... where?

[RulerofRails]

He made a new thread for it: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=4153 .

[Hawk]

Since there is a new topic about the updated version of this map, I'm going to lock this thread.