Malawi - BETA V1.05

[Gumboots]

Ok, so I played it. Nice scenario. Very enjoyable to play. Well thought out economy. Great train rides and scenery.

Knocked it off in mid 1990, and could do it faster. You have to be a bit careful at the start, but It's extremely lucrative once it gets going. I was buying everything on the map, even if only marginally profitable, just to prevent the government nicking all my company cash at the end of the year. Eventually I simply ran out of things to buy, and had long since paid off the 10 million in bonds, so lost somewhere between 20 and 30 million to the government in a few years.

Now that I think of it, purely in terms of playing for the quickest finish, past a certain point it would make sense to spend all company cash on building new industries even if there was no chance they would make a profit. The reasoning here is that by this stage you'd probably have five years or less to play, so the amount spent on building the industry (which is what counts for CBV) would always be more than the amount lost over that time due to lack of industry profit. Net result is you'd actually hit the CBV target sooner by taking a loss on industry but still holding more CBV in spite of this.

Which brings up a point, in that this scenario forces a somewhat unnatural playing style due to its restrictions. Not necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to thinking about things in a different manner, but it did feel a bit forced and a bit lacking at times. At the moment I'm not sure what I'd suggest as proposed "fixes" and would have to give it a lot more thought before making suggestions.

By the way, despite the supposed emphasis on passenger/tourist traffic I found pax was a minor percentage of the total, even after trying to prime the pump by mass building hotels and restaurants. This is a very freight-heavy and industry-heavy map. The lack of available track combined with the lucrative nature of the map (once things get rolling) means spending up big on industry is just the sensible option, because there's nothing else to spend your buckets of cash on.

My only real grumble is the shortage of steamers past the last 1970's, and naturally I played steam all the way through, so when I noticed in late 1979 that the "Bullet-nosed Betties" has become unavailable I quickly threw a custom event into the editor to give them back at the start of 1980. And, just for fun, I also made it give me back the Kriegslok, QJ and Pennsy H3. I ended up running a mix of all of those just because I could, and found out that the old H3 is surprisingly good as a late 20th century freight hauler. It's not fast, but it goes and it gets there at a fairly natural looking speed for freight traffic, and does it with reasonable running costs. This was hauling my half-finished cargo revamp packs, so boxcars and flatcars and reefers were default D era but tankers and hoppers and express and the cabooseses were the custom weights and eras, meaning hoppers were up to 48 tons over the default 40. This still played well with default loco stats on most engines, and I do like the extra consist length given by the double hopper models. A freight train should look like a freight train.

PS: Oh yeah, and about halfway through I found myself thinking "This is Africa and it's mountainous. It seriously needs some big and boofy Garratts." Which it does. So someone had better make some.

[Gumboots]

I've been looking through the events for this map to see what makes it tick. There are some odd things lurking in there.

First was that I noticed during play that there were price breakouts (like in the Chile map and others) for some cargoes. Aluminium and furniture were the main ones I noticed. Sure enough, the "Setup economy" event jacks up prices for those cargoes by 20%. So it appears the price breakout bug will start appearing for any price increase at all, although at 20% the effects aren't that large and things tended to stabilise pretty well. My current best guess is that things would start getting hairy around the 50% mark.

I didn't notice breakouts for the other cargoes that had raised prices (cheese and meat) but may just have missed them. I wasn't attempting to exploit the breakouts anyway since there were other priorities.

Second thing is pax production and pricing. The same setup event sets pax prices down by 50%. This is another way of saying that it makes pax insignificant as a cargo, right from the start of the game. Following that up, you have have a "Pax Reduction" event that kicks in multiple times, giving a 15% reduction in pax production in Year 10, Year 15, Year 20 and Year 25. The result of all this is that you start with pax prices cut in half, then after 10 years they lose 15% production, then after 15 years they have lost 30% production.

By this stage there's no point no bothering any more, because at half price and -30% numbers pax is simply not worth factoring in to your calculations. Yes, the setup event does boost hotel profits, but it only boosts them by 20% overall, and in most locations their profits are negligible even with this boost. There is an additional event that boosts hotel profits an extra 60% in a few towns around Lake Malawi and elsewhere, but even that doesn't help much. I found that hotels would only give worthwhile returns in Blantyre, Chipoka, Lilongwe, Nkotakota, and Salima. Hotels in the other towns are not really worth it. If a hotel can't make noticeable amounts of cash even on a well-developed network with its profits boosted by 80%, this gives a good indication of how dire the pax situation really is.

Despite this, the game pop-ups make a big song and dance about tourist traffic, and how good it is and how you should promote it by building hotels, etc. These two things are directly contradictory, and to be frank building hotels and attempting to stimulate pax traffic is a waste of time and money, because regardless of what the briefings are telling you the behind-the-scenes events make the briefings irrelevant.

OilCan: based on this and the Grand Canyon map, I really get the impression that you would like to make express-centred maps but haven't been able to figure out how to balance them so they work. I'd be interested to hear what problems you have found with coding them.

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To anyone who wants tips on how to get a good start on this map: industry. Ignore the briefings, and do not waste your early years cash on hotels. You will get far better returns elsewhere. As just one example: there's a free pile of bauxite over in the east of the map, and an aluminium mill somewhere over to the west, but you have next to no track available. So, ignore the existing aluminium mill, figure out the likely returns on an aluminium mill/tool and die combination, and just go for it by raising cash with bonds and building straight on top of the bauxite. Instant money rolling in.

By the time I got the event telling me there had been a reduction in the prime rate (1982, from memory) I was laughing, because I had just started paying off all my bonds purely to keep company cash out of government hands at year end. I had been holding the full $10 million of bonds and had refinanced them down to 8% some years previously. Normally I would have held them to the game end and used the cash for expansion, but the lack of track combined with government theft made paying bonds off the better option.

PS: That reminds me: when the government knocks company cash back to $3.5 million at the end of the year, they give you a bit of track in exchange for the cash. The problem is they only give you a paltry 100 pieces of track even when they nick $10 million off you. I really did think forking out $100k for one unit of track was a bit bloody much. Any player who gets to this point is obviously not cash-limited and will be running out of things to do. That being the case, I think the game would be more interesting for such players if the amount of track given was increased. Somewhere around tripled for the high amounts of cash sounds about right. Either that or just say what the heck and give an event that allows good players to purchase unlimited track once company cash hits $10 million or so. Let's face it: the only reason company cash will get that high is because there's nothing left to do.

[low_grade]

I went ahead with the hotels just for role-playing purposes, I'd already seen the events and knew pax wasn't going to amount to much, and anyways, I already had buckets of cash from industries and freight hauling.

I just wanna say, for the amount of effort it takes to create a map, no map will be perfect, and any map that makes me think is very much appreciated, thank you very much! But, as Gumboots is enjoying a bit of analysis, me, too, though not suggesting anybody actually goes back and edits this map, it's great as it is (though I like to think at least a few people will still be playing RT3 in 2050, and would appreciate the maps Hawk is archiving, best maps possible for the players that follow?) So...

I like the idea of adding +1 track/week for each village connected, if it's possible to code that. I know there are regions to spare, but is there a "count connections in region" function?

As for pax, I get where OC is coming from with prices, folks in Malawi pay like 50 cents to ride the train today, I'm sure, so realistically, rates should be low. Any way to count hotel profits? And raise pax rates as hotel profits increase? Or else raise pax prices and production as pax are delivered to the tourist cities? Like, despite the naturally poor pax rates, as tourists arrive, operators see an opportunity and raise prices. And while the national railroad has been developing the economy, Malawians(?) can also afford to pay more (events keyed to industry profits to raise pax prices and production.) But for game balance, any improvement in pax profits needs to offset by reduced industry. I'd recommend eliminating the boosts to industry prices. I was making way too much money as it was, focusing on industry. Not as well thought out as Gumboots, but that's my .

[Gumboots]

Check out my comments over in the India thread. It turns out the 50% pax price reduction isn't the real issue. It's purely a numbers game. If pax production is boosted sufficiently, then pax becomes a useful and viable option even with prices cut in half. So yeah, having cheap fares for the locals combined with a boost to traffic could totally work for this map, and it would be much more in keeping with the briefings and the intended style of the map.

About the industry prices: if you mean the temporarily reduced purchase prices for industry at various points in the game, I never found those to be an issue. Often they popped up without warning when I'd just spent a bucketload of cash on something, so really they had no effect on the way I played. Anyway, when you reach the point of paying off $10 million in bonds in one year just to keep the cash out of government hands, a few percent difference in industry prices is not a relevant factor. It just means you have to buy more industries to hold the same CBV.

I still think the track limitation is excessive for proficient players. I'm reminded of the default PopTop Italy map. That one has limited track, but the amounts are well-balanced to the map size and the player's skill, with better skills getting you more track. It's still a bit limiting, which obviously is the idea, but it never gets to the point of grinding your teeth and swearing about it. The "Across the Blue Mountains" map is another good example of how to use limited track effectively. TBH this map could seriously use something like that.

[OilCan]

Thanks all for the helpful comments.

I'm not a fan of limited track. The only reason it is in this game is to add some needed challenge, but I never meant for it to become a source of aggravation. I'll take another serious look at what can be done with limited track. Village connections is an interesting idea, so is unlimited once a high amount of company cash is reached. In my test runs without any limited track, I expanded across the map way too fast for my liking. That's the reason for the limited track.

So here's the background on the passengers: Malawians are too poor to ride a train, even if the fare is lowered 50%. Pax was meant to be a minor source of cargo and an insignificant source of income. Tourists are few in number as well. The increase in hotel & restaurant revenues was never meant to be a serious source of income for the player.

It may add some challenge if there is a requirement to connect Blantyre with a key city every X years...but I'm not sure I like this.

[Gumboots]

Yes I understand the idea behind the limited track. That's fine. I didn't find it all that aggravating. A bit frustrating at times, but then I basically just decided to call the map a sandbox for train rides. Which it's eminently well suited for. Not that it lacks all strategic interest, but when you reach a point where you're stuck for that taking train rides is a good way to pass the time. So it's still a fun map as long as you don't take it too seriously.

If you never intended tourism/pax to be a significant source of revenue that's fine too. Proficient players are not going to be held back anyway. I'm just a bit more concerned about less proficient players, since if they take the recommendations in the briefings they will be wasting cash they may need for more productive things. I know you like to keep your maps balanced for "the average Joe", and I'm not sure giving them recommendations that will slow them down is doing them any favours.

About the larger amounts of track for expert players: one idea that occurred to me while messing around with the India map was an option to import larger amounts of track at a high premium. So if you had barrels of company cash sitting around, you'd get a pop-up offering you a deal on specially imported track. Say something like 1,000 pieces, but you have to put down $2 million in advance to secure the deal, with the actual track arriving say 6 months later. I can see something like that working, because by that stage the player frankly won't care how much it costs as long as it gives them something to do.

[OilCan]

OilCan: based on this and the Grand Canyon map, I really get the impression that you would like to make express-centred maps but haven't been able to figure out how to balance them so they work. I'd be interested to hear what problems you have found with coding them.

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The idea for the Canyon Lands map came quickly after reading about the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, a subsidiary of Union Pacific, building tourist routes to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park. (The marriage between the major railroad companies and the new emerging national parks is a fascinating story in itself.) It sparked an idea for a theme which excluded industry investment and industry profit and focused on passenger transport. It took a lot of trial work to make it a plausible theme.

The central idea was that tourists would arrive in droves at a single station (delivered by UP) and then the player's little tourist railroad would carry them to scenic sites. The map's demand and supply economy was actually secondary: the goal was to connect sites and haul passengers. Passengers don't follow demand and supply.

Finding the right amount of passenger production took most of the effort. I had to run lots and lots and lots of small test maps to figure out how RT3 managed passenger movement - why they would or wouldn't load on a train, why they would or wouldn't go to a destination, etc. - it was a mystery to me at first, but I eventually figured it out. Not readily noticeable is that the scenic sites are equal distance from hub cities: this was crucial to make RT3 better disperse the passenger traffic. Several sites split the distance between cities and thus equally attract from difference directions. Some scenic sites could not follow this rule because they HAD to be where they were.

With industry being off limits, one could not make enough profit at first to keep a railroad company above water. I was forced to use subsidies (supposedly from UP) until the player's company became solvent. It took several test runs to find the right amount of subsidy and, more importantly, when to cut it off. (I noticed that when a player makes somewhere around $3M profit per year, the company is solvent: it can weather hard times and set backs. Has anyone else noticed this?)

Writing the event code for the game was not any harder than most other games, although there was a lot of repetition for connecting 45? sites. The major drawback was that the game became boring after about 10-15 years of play - so I had to add some secondary tasks to keep things interesting. This map required significant smoothing of routes, much more than most other maps.

To me the game is fascinating because I've been to many of those sites and I can 'see' them again on the map. The game, of course, has some fictional elements but that's the license of game building.

[Gumboots]

Ok thanks. Interesting stuff. I must admit I only played one of the betas of that map, and I don't think I ever got around to playing it all the way through. I've downloaded the final version and will take another look at it. I do recall that I played it as a freight hauling game up until about 1940, and basically ignored express, since freight was the only significant revenue in that period. Not sure if that was just because it was beta or not.

RT3's handling of pax is still a bit mysterious to me. I've often had cases where even if a station says it has loads of pax that want to go to another of my stations, they will ignore an express train that will take them straight where they supposedly want to go. This gets pretty irritating sometimes. Passengers appear to be the most unreliable cargo in the game. Anything else will just naturally jump on a train that is going to a suitable station, but not pax, or not consistently. I can't help wondering if the devs accidentally broke something when they disassociated pax from the usual supply/demand code. It certainly wouldn't be the first bug in RT3.

And about the $3 million/year: yup, I'd say once you hit that level you should be pretty much bulletproof, as long as you don't do anything silly. Actually I'd put it lower than that, but this probably depends on player skill level.

I can understand you finding the map fascinating as the area in question is very interesting. Never been there myself, but have read quite a bit about it. Not only is it visually spectacular, but it has a very complex and interesting geological history.