Just played this on Expert, chose France to ally myself with. Got gold in 1942, very satisfying.
This is my favorite map of Bruno's so far. The start was very challenging, not many resources and very hard to develop any industries. Also with the increased track maintenance I was having a very hard time making any profit. Had to watch my 8 trains carefully still going into like years 15-20. Only very gradually built up to like 15 trains, extending from Adis Abbeba to ... the city by the lake and down south as well.
Enjoyed the events, suffering the consequences made me focus that much more, and the beneficial boosting events were much appreciated because they were greatly needed.
Really enjoyed the terrain, hard to find good routes, had to use a massive bridge in one place.
Went with steam (still scrapped the Shay) and used P8's exclusively until the A1 came along. Used the Decapod for a couple of resource-to-industry feeder routes. This is my only kind-of complaint, I like to have a reason to use 5-6 different engines for their various specialties, but I didn't really have to think about this at all. But, that's mostly due to the great terrain which forced most routes to include a healthy dose of 3's, sometimes 4's and 5's. But only rarely 6's and never above that, so didn't have to use any real grade-haulers. And since hardly any good flats in the early game, and then the A1 being great later, didn't use the Atlantic or anything like that. Yes, the P8 has Poor acceleration, but it's also cheap to fuel and maintain, which was my larger concern for most of the game.
From the autosave the year I won, you can see what industries did the job for me. Started with a lumber mill fed by like 5 logging camps, way on the edge of the screen but it was the only option... and even though there was a furniture factory in that town, profits dropped quickly after half a dozen years or so, and a couple of the logging camps disappeared because I couldn't buy them because they were in Kenya... you know how it goes. Not an easy job getting things built up, or even staying profitable at times.
![Image](http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/2586/rt3screen2.jpg)