Haven't been around for a while - non-RT life has been making demands...
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
It's exciting to see Trainmaster out there - but for the moment I'm sticking with RT3, I think, as I can't spare the time to really learn a new game.
I have a question about "ghost" industries. By that I mean the badly-placed, sometimes ridiculously-placed production facilities that just appear on the map, and which you have no intention of buying. For instance, some chancer decides to set up a MeatPacking plant way over the other side of the map from any Cattle. On the GoWest map I'm playing again at the moment, it's Tool&Dies; every Mom'n'Pop in New England seems to love to set up a little Tool&Die in their back yard and hope to snag any Iron that might be passing through.
These industries are annoying, especially when they're not that ridiculously-placed. A big part of my game is micro-management to make sure that all the Cattle goes to the station next to MY Meatpacking plant, and all the Iron goes to MY Tool&Dies (to take two examples). The micro-management is about making sure that trains leaving my industry's station don't take away Cattle (or Iron, as it may be), but do take away anything else that might turn a profit. In the absence of an "any cargo except..." custom consist, this means setting custom consists based on what I see piling up at that station, and excluding the raw resource that I want to stay there. And to monopolise the raw materials, I often have to set up waiting trains, that sit at a station and grab all the e.g. Iron until they've got e.g. 5 loads. That's not a problem, but it's annoying that to get them to load I often have to give them a "spoof" destination (often one of the Mom'n'Pop industry stations), and then redirect them to my industry's station once the wheels are turning.
It's satisfying to see this working, and the income statements of the rival industries show red for the last 4 years. But my real aim is to get the rival industry to die - they do do this, simply disappear from the map, but only sometimes. In my current game the map is littered with loss-making industries, which I have to constantly bear in mind as potential thieves of MY resources. I thought that making them make a loss for long enough would make them disappear, but it doesn't seem to be working. Does anyone know how this mechanism works?
On another topic, I've been trying to use the Railyards that Michael Rountree and Ned Fumpkin kindly uploaded to the site. I'm not having much success, but that could be because I'm using them wrong! What I'm doing is this, using Cattle as an example:
A---------
C-----------D
B--------
A and B are stations that capture Livestock from Cattle Ranches. D is my Meatpacking plant. I don't want 2 trains to go all the way from A-D and B-D. So I make a station at C, a rail junction in the middle of nowhere, with no community and no demand at all for Livestock. I build a Stockyard there, hoping that I can then run 2 trains A-C and B-C (or even 1 train for both), and another train picking up the Livestock from C and taking it to D (maybe among other things). The price at C doesn't seem to get high enough to get the Livestock to be loaded A-C or B-C. Maybe I'm not doing it right? Or maybe not waiting long enough for the price-effect to show?
thanks!
seb