Hotels generate passengers, and they also demand passengers. This makes them a good way to get express traffic pumping, providing that it hasn't been crippled by an editor event (some maps do this to emphasise freight). If you build one hotel for $100k it may not make much during the year (location dependent) but one load of pax can be worth $20-40k by itself, which changes the equation quite a bit. If you build a hotel in every city you will find that a year later you will be rolling in pax, so if you can figure out how to deliver them it can be a very good earner.TheBonobo4 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:20 pmI have gold on expert on a number of scenarios, but I'm by no means a professional. There are still a few game mechanics I don't fully understand, or struggle with. For instance, I don't really know how hotels and post offices etc work, so I mostly don't build them unless I see the city has a large number of passengers or mail already. This is probably a bad idea.
Post offices simply double the time that mail will be held at a station before vanishing. I find this can make them useful at end-of-the-line stations if they are in a decent-sized city, and also at hub stations, but not so much at intermediates if the line is serviced frequently. The post office itself makes a $1k loss every year, but the extra loads of mail can more than make up for this.
I had a theory at one stage that the economy was more likely to tank if the game calculated that this would make you prey to a margin call, but I never tested it thoroughly and it may just have been paranoia.And whilst I'm almost certain the economy is random, I still would like to know if there's anything that can be done to influence a boom or not. And I am prone to going bust from margin calls!
There are several variants of Orient Express, but they are all usually lucrative once you get over the initial hurdle. These maps respond well to a sensible mix of industry and rail, although an industry start is often the best option. A paper mill in the middle of the logging camps just south of Zagreb is a classic opening move. Materials cost is zero for several years, there is plenty of it, and paper prices are high. Initial profits can be quite astonishing.In my defence, regarding Orient Express, I satisfied gold in the last year but I don't think the check triggers until January so I only got silver. But with that one I only ever ran one train and used industry, since it seems far harder to run a normal railroad as the economy is poor (or so I've found).
The express speed goal is easy to get if you run express trains on maintenance spurs. This helps their average speed immensely.
It has some bugs if you are doing things the author didn't think of, but if you are just playing it straight it's fine. Multiple companies can screw it up a bit if you turn them loose under AI management, but I don't recall any other bugs.I'll check out that Australia map of yours. By coincidence, best I've gotten on the default Australia map is silver, on I think expert. Though I have read that map might have a few bugs in it.