France Rebuilds

[Grandma Ruth]

I've been amusing myself by creating a new scenario for the 1.06 patch. I'm attaching it here for you to have a look at. Any suggestions for improvement gratefully received! I don't know if the target's high enough or maybe it's a bit boring. The player is left pretty much to their own devices.
The map I based it on is "France 1950" by an unknown author. They've done most of the work, I've just put in some different events. I haven't yet played the original game but it looks interesting.

---

This scenario is now in the archives: http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/rrt3_europ ... cerebuilds

[RulerofRails]

Hey,

France 1950 came with the original game I believe (is it in the archive because of the German version?). It has a main goal of electricity production. I don't think PopTop nailed the industrial distribution (especially in the cities)* on their maps. This one especially so. Some of this could be excused because electricity in this game is an odd thing to setup, They have definitely topped up on the Coal/Oil.

*Because of the "unrealistic" way that delivered cargo has to move via cart a square or two to get to the typical industry, I believe that the game works a lot better if neighboring cities have different recipes. If we have Alcohol produced in Paris (Distillery) and Orleans (Brewery) for example there is no need for a railway distribution. The original creators didn't really pay attention to this.


At present these cargoes seem to be pretty inactive:
Aluminum
Automobiles
Diesel
Plastic
Tires
Uranium
Concrete

On the other hand, Ore/Ingots seem to be plentiful.

I would add specification that a medical center is represented by a warehouse to the briefing. It wasn't clear to me. I thought that I needed to haul passengers to/from Paris.

Doing routes with the Medical center as an intermediate stop between two towns while running 2 cars express, 5 any cargo + caboose, seems to get the haulage done without too much trouble. Building a Hotel at a site will help. (I wonder if you could achieve similar effect with a Hospital and a couple houses... hmm)

I tried it without bonds and without buying industries. Like this, the game is long enough. With bonds the game can probably be over fairly quickly.

The gameplay is generally a "connection" type. As you said the player is pretty free to use different strategies. You could keep the format but enhance it with some choices. For example, station turnaround times tied to station maintenance cost, track maintenance tied to engine speed, engine maintenance schedule (less water/oil consumption better reliability). Connection games don't favor electrics. The extra cost for track takes a long time to be "earned back" through cost-savings. There could be some subsidy on electric track (all original scenarios seem to acknowledge this with such an option).

[Grandma Ruth]

Thanks, that's really useful. I've tweaked the cargoes a bit as the original was heavily weighted in favour of uranium - because of the electricity generation I suppose. Maybe I've overdone it on the ore/ingots.

You're right about the medical centres being a warehouse - I forgot other people wouldn't know that! The trouble was that when we were doing the 1.06 patch we never did get round to making a proper hospital. The building called "Hospital" is really a warehouse and very basic - all it needs is medicine. I've tried to make the Medical Centres a bit more interesting/realistic. I don't have the skill to make proper buildings or even to rename them! (My first thought was to rename the "Barracks" and ancillary buildings but I couldn't figure out all the ramifications of that - besides it would probably mean players having to install yet another patch.)

Also I need to make it more clear that the Centres are "near" not "in" the cities concerned. What I was trying to do is to isolate the passenger generation so you aren't getting passengers generated by the cities. This does seem to work - it's easier to get the "to" target than the "from". But of course the way the passenger cargo works is that they're actually going from one city to another. With the medical centre routed in between these two cities, they will just "stay on the train" so will count as one in and one out. Hmmm .... maybe what I'm trying to do is impossible!

I played the game with bonds and it was OK for me but I'm not that good a player so I'll take that on. What I found was that I was making loads of money later in the game but still that didn't mean the passengers were coming, very frustrating.

Another thing I've toyed with is making it a condition to keep the passenger numbers up on existing centres so you can't just abandon those routes and concentrate on each new one as it comes up.

In theory, you could meet the targets without connecting everything: the basic requirements to generate passengers are medicine and machinery and on most maps there are more than one source for these. In practice, I've found myself making the connection anyway.

Should I increase the passenger targets? I started with ten and couldn't get Gold in time but I've got it OK with five.

I'll think about the engine/track/maintenance choices. In fact, in real life, France did concentrate on electrification much more than England, for example. (Where I live still isn't electrified!) Lots to think about, thanks.

[RulerofRails]

By the way I'm using two 1.06 fixes by Blackhawk:
Small fix: https://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... 352#p37352
Warehouse replacements: https://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... 913#p36913

The second one replaces a lot of the warehouses with Trainmaster buildings. This includes the Hospital.

You mentioned Troops. Here's an idea: have the Medical centers produce Troops. And be the only source. You would need to setup nearby demand for Troops to do this though (even more warehouses?).

Then the player might try to haul from one warehouse to another, but once quota is met you can drop Troop production there to near zero.

In regards to modifications to the Barracks etc., my advice would be go crazy with it. You could drop the Troop production value and just use them for demand in the cities. Just use a modular design. If you modify the barracks, include with the map the modded version and the original one. Make a folder "Mods", in it have a Data folder with the correct hierarchy and files that all a player needs to do is paste it in their RT3 directory. And then have another folder "Un-install mods", again with a Data folder, but with the original files.

I wonder if it's possible using the RT3.lng (this can be part of the "Mod", you could rename "Troops" to Outpatients in RT3.lng, finding a new icon naming it as Troops {for the game to see, not us} and using the right files should give a new picture in-game too) to do something in the menu to indicate a certain map is "installed"? In other words, that a set of Mods is "installed"? Maybe it can be a change to the background of the main menu. Idk what's possible. Need to experiment a bit.

When the player finishes playing the map he should restore the defaults which are provided in the "Un-install mods" folder. If we look at Sid Meier's Railroads! they faced issues with that game especially when adding new goods where only one map could be used at a time, even though modding is much more supported. In time they adopted a method of stand-alone mapping, that is to say one map at a time. They swap out installed maps, only ever using one at a time. The upside of this is that it lets them change a lot more than is possible if all maps have to exist together. I really think it's the best way to make use of the possibilities in RT3 that we have discovered over the years (quite a few are work-arounds for issue such as number of cargo limit and many hard-coded features involving passengers etc.).

[Gumboots]

Thanks, that's really useful. I've tweaked the cargoes a bit as the original was heavily weighted in favour of uranium - because of the electricity generation I suppose.

It's historically accurate. France has little in the way of useful coal, and no oil of its own. Going nuclear seemed like a good idea in the immediate post-war period, and it has worked well over the years.*

I can't recall how this map was coded originally, but obviously any uranium supplies would be more sensible coming from warehouses and/or ports, given that uranium is not mined in France. The best way of doing it would be to ship in yellowcake (custom cargo, from ports) and send that to a warehouse to be processed into actual uranium reactor fuel.

*Of more limited use these days, due to other options being more cost-effective in many cases.

[Grandma Ruth]

@Gumboots - look again at the date of the map! The world is not now as it was then - uranium is no longer mined in France, coal is no linger mined in England, steam trains are only tourist attractions. Some may say this is progress.
@RulerofRails - I did originally try to change names in the lng file but it was too much for me. The game kept saying it couldn't find this or that so I gave it up as a bad job!
However, I'm totally out of date anyway. I knew Trainmaster existed, but hadn't realised exactly what it was. Now I know that I probably won't be doing anything more with 1.06. I've persevered with this map, as I've got so far, but now I'll turn my attention to Trainmaster and learn something new!
I'm attaching a revised version of "France Rebuilds" with a few changes as suggested. I've tested it, but haven't actually played it through yet.

[RulerofRails]

On the topic of Trainmaster, might I mention that I have made a small fix for it: https://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... 342#p44342 . The goal with this one was simply to make the agricultural communities match up with the official guide. I came to the conclusion that this was the intention, but for some reason Ned appears to have had trouble hiding industrial chains, or forgot how to do it, so he used an alternative solution without realizing a few of the side-effects that this solution would have. It's nonsense that the effective demand for Steel, Lumber etc. may be 50-100 or so loads per year.

There is another problem with Trainmaster mechanically. This one I didn't try to patch: Small demands of say 0.03 or 0.05 per year as one of the ingredients on a multiple-input industrial recipe.

Such microscopic demands are too weak to draw or even keep cargo via price demand. Even if we specifically set a train to haul the cargo in and drop it on the cell of the industry, the cargo will move away on it's own after a short time if there is any other surrounding demand (including houses). Some players have suggested solutions for this. For example to build several industries on the same cell in an away-from-city special "industrial city". But in practical terms it means that at the moment Trainmaster is playing like a puzzle game. We find the best industries (Ned believed in some golden goose industries, Paper Mill, Furniture, etc..). We set those up, then it's really technical to get the other industries working correctly.

As you get back into the game, and knowing that you are probably a "typical" enthusiast player, I'm interested in your take on, and experience with this part of the design. Really this issue needs patching too. I have a decent idea of how this can be fixed, however, my time gets more limited unfortunately. In the future I might look into it if one or more people are keen to help with testing along the way. I got tired of testing South Central British Columbia map so it has languished for years (an update might be coming soon, but in final testing I found a new issue, some seeds have 2-3x what others have). I think that TM really needs the fix. If you are thinking to make multiple maps then it can be worth the time to fix. But, if you are just going to make one or two maps, I would really lean toward the modular design.

PS. I don't know why you would get a missing file error from editing the lng file. If you want to re-visit that, feel free to post about it.

[Grandma Ruth]

Thanks, RoR! I'll probably get more into it later. Just now the Snooker's on - don't know if you have it in USA but just had a brilliant young Australian player get the maximum possible - very exciting. And I have stuff to do with my own website https://www.my-familytree.net/ . How did I ever find time to go to work ????

[Gumboots]

Just be aware that Trainmaster relies very heavily on micromanagement of industry. It is also much more work to construct an interesting and playable map. Not my cup of tea.

But, if you like that sort of thing, it may suit you perfectly.

[Grandma Ruth]

Finally, the really final version of "France Rebuilds". Looking forward to finding out more about Trainmaster now.
I do enjoy the industry side - in fact I'm partly to blame for the ship-at-a-loss feature in 1.06 as I wanted to feed industries. Actually based on real life. I once worked at a textile mill which had a railhead in the yard where bales of wool were delivered straight from the train - that was before the days of containers.

France Rebuilds.zip

(3.58 MiB) Downloaded 139 times

[Gumboots]

Ok, I'll get that in the archives this weekend.

I should archive my NSW map too anyway (have been forgetting to do that for yonks).

[Grandma Ruth]

Thanks, @Gumboots. By the way, I've found the hospital in Trainmaster now, but I'm a bit disappointed - it's the perfectly efficient hospital with no patients!
I had envisaged passengers (and mail, for that matter) being generated. (I'm fascinated by the weird behaviour of express cargoes.) Very impressive building, though. I might have to have another go at changing the cargoes myself
Later edit: I'm confused now because it does say in the documentation that it produces passengers, but they're not shown when you click on the building itself.

[RulerofRails]

Just because you don't see a supply/demand doesn't mean it's not there. Supply chains can be hidden. Express is a special case though. From RT3 Notes by Pjay:

Code: Select all

FOOTER   (169)
--------------
000 (-169)	:     4	:   int	: buildable (? is a fertilizer factory not-buildable ??)
004 (-165)	:     4	:   int	: buyable (? why hotel, post, saloon, restaurant, ... ??)
008 (-161)	:     4 :   int	: upgrade price?
012 (-157)	:     4	: float	: q2  (0 or 0.5 or 1)
016 (-153)	:     4	:   int	: upgradable ?
020 (-149)	:    61 :string	: building name
081 (-088)	:     1 :  byte	: on-the-rails type
082 (-087)	:     4	:   int	: q3 (1830)
086 (-083)	:     4	:   int     : q3 (1850)
090 (-079)	:     4	:   int	: q3 (1900)
094 (-075)	:     4	:   int	: q3 (1950)
098 (-071)	:     4	:   int	: q3 (2000)
102 (-067)	:     4 : float	: passengers : (commercial 0.5, house 1, hotel museum 2, church cinema deptstore 3, stadium 5)
106 (-063)      :     4	: float	: passengers : (commercial 0.5, house 1, hotel museum 2, church cinema deptstore 3, stadium 5)
110 (-059)      :     4	: float	: mail : (commercial 2, house 1)
114 (-055)      :     4	: float	: mail : (commercial 2, house 1)
118 (-051)	:     4	: float	: troops : (barracks 1)
122 (-047)	:     4	: float	: troops : (barracks 1)
126 (-043)	:     1	:  byte	: is... ?    restaurant(0) hotel(1) saloon(2) post(3) customs(4)
127 (-042)	:     1	:  byte	: isPort?
128 (-041)	:     1	:  byte	: isWarehouse?
129 (-040)	:    40 :	 : zeros
169 (-000)

You can find these things in hex editor. For example passengers are 67 decimal places from the end of the file. I checked quickly the TM Hospital and the numbers seem to match with what is shown in the Supply Chain guide.

As you can see from the notes later in the Passengers row, the default hotel, museum, church, etc.. have "invisible" passenger supply/demand in the regular game as well. So I would say that the concept of hidden express supply/demand is well established.

[Grandma Ruth]

I see. Maybe that's why they behave so inexplicably sometimes, there's hidden demand making them "go" somewhere.

[Gumboots]

Yep. The coding for express cargoes is totally opaque. Figuring out how it actually works (as opposed to guessing) would require pulling the .exe apart and decoding the algorithm(s) behind it.

[Grandma Ruth]

Good grief! Somebody might have fun doing that. Not me in a million years!

[Gumboots]

Ok, this is now in the archives: http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/rrt3_europ ... cerebuilds

[Grandma Ruth]

[Gumboots]

Actually, I'm renaming this thread to match the scenario name, and moving it to the "Version 1.06 Scenarios" board. Seems like the best place for it.