I wonder if the gods of the net will forgive me for bumping a 2 year old thread? Ah well....
I loved this map, thought it was really well created, thank-you Ned. Took me two goes to complete it on Expert, hobo'd the first due i think to being sidetracked by making oodles more money than was in anyway necessary, and not actually noting how long I had, a common failing on my part
.
Having read Oilcan's excellent manual (can there possibly be anyone that hasn't?), I nearly always start maps with industry, and on any map that explicitly states its about industry that goes double. The first thing i did was spend every penny I had on Dairy Farms since these will continue to make money sat on their own in the middle of nowhere, and will only be improved upon (never go negative) should you get around to putting a Dairy processor somewhere nearby (and again are pointed out in the manual for just that attribute), they are ridiculously cheap at the start of this map as there seems to be no 3 years of run-time before you enter the game which there often is which makes things more market value so 2.5kk spent early on is a no-brainer to me. This generated an income stream that was useful the entire game.
I also bought every single share I could up to the max credit I could get, again before I even took it off pause, since PNW is a target and from my first play I knew I was unlikely to run into broker problems on this map after buying the dairy farms... well, unless i was really unlucky with economic status or just acted plain daft with company profits.
Reduce dividend to zero and go. after a year or two and having bought a few more dairy farms and started a lumber mill near the logs, I then spent a couple of years buying back all the stock so as to own 100% (I'm a maniac for this, even if its not a scenario goal, not sure why....heh), then increase the dividend little by little, with no money going to other tycoons/anonymous shareholders.
Figured out the targets as I went along from the messages, and although some were (I'm certain, deliberately) a little obscure it all seemed simple enough in concept. It was really then just a case of standard, build a bit of rail, join the dots, add industry as you go RRT3, obviously it's not quite that easy, but we've all done this before so I'm trying to keep the word count down a bit :). You need to keep a close eye on steel, lumber, oil in particular, but this is sort of made clear by the things that do have a target in the requirements that "are" shown.
The things I found most tricky in chronological order were, getting coal and iron together, getting the market prices to move, since a lot of things start and stay at 0 until you build the industries, and sometimes even then until you create the next level of demand (like a tool and die to get steel price up a bit), getting lumber and steel together for weapons, and possibly hardest of all, cars, since for tires, you have to move diesel to ports that don't create rubber 'til later on in the game and then they are miles from the steel to make the cars.....
The AI's seem aggressive on stock, and on buying industry, but much less so on building rail, so I only bought out the ones that got in my way, (although having set a small but increasing dividend after getting 100% of my own company, I do tend to buy their shares on the basis that you never know, and money sitting there doing nothing is something of an anathema to me.)
As a slight aside this is the first map I've ever had to actually knock down an industry that I built myself, that hurt a bit as they were profitable.....(tool and dies that were put there to create demand for steel, but used too much of it when i wanted it later for weapons and cars, also a furniture factory so I could make more toys instead and also weapons)
Finished in about 1908. And all in all great fun.
NB, I had a quick look in the editor after playing (mind you I'm no editor master, and also don't like 'spoilers' so try not to look until i have finished the map) and I think that one of the event messages is wrong, event is for hauling 25 auto's but it reports that you moved 100 ammunition.