Unfortunately, the quickest way to reach a cash goal is to sit and save for the last bit of the game. So as Cash on Wheels said, people are only experiencing a portion of your map. Instead of expanding to the further reaches they sit around and watch their trains run.
Also, the East and South of your map are pretty barren. You will notice on other maps that great care has been taken to provide economic enticement to connect towards the edge of the map instead of hanging around in the middle. I think because you are focusing on Latvia, it's ok. Just to say that in effect the map is smaller for the player. Perhaps a Warehouse in Poland and another Russia could simulate some trade between the countries?
I'm not sure what Cash on Wheels meant about the resources . IMO, they seem much improved from the earlier betas. But I am not a map maker so don't know the intricacies of their setup myself. I will also say there is no wrong way as long as there is enough demand for whatever you supply.
Riga is a major city, right? It could have its own territory (visible). The game enables a test for haulage revenue from/to a territory, so maybe a goal to generate a certain amount of revenue from/to that territory?
This could be extended into an express (passenger and mail) haulage task (turn off Hotels if you do that). So Riga would be a hub for traffic and the player would have to manage that. Once the player connected to Riga, you could raise the cost of station building there to make a player think more carefully if he should build a second or third station to make managing traffic flow more strategic.
Connecting cities is a good goal to make sure that the player builds a better network than just burn track everywhere. Personally I like this suggestion.
A few more "story" events couldn't go astray. There's no need for a complete history lesson, but more choices for the player are good (the choice of faster engines or bridges is good). If he takes a positive thing he may get a negative. Production rate of cargo is powerful, for both good and bad, especially so if the player owns many industries. Maintenance (train, station, track), station turnaround times and company overhead also have solid effects.
This is just me shooting ideas. Use them if you like. Please don't feel obligated to use any of them.
I have started the map in various betas at least 10 times. Only once did I see two ports in Riga. One time there was no port in Riga.juriko wrote:For some strange reasons I had a setup with only one port in Riga - it was a real horror... Any other ideas how to make a map more complex?
My suggestion for this is to turn off the seeding of the port in the city recipe and then place it manually. Just a note here that there are twelve possible ports identified by a number (#1-12) unless you rename. These are buildable when in Editor mode, just like you would go to place an industry. The first port (#1: you used this for "Riga Port") is located about half-way down the list. All other ports are at the bottom of the list just before the warehouses. They are all named the same "Port" so you need to count manually to chose the correct one.