CrownVic95

Thank you. Somewhere along the Columbia might be a good compromise at that. Lot of towns like Hood River that I've never given serious thought to. I'll check into housing options and do some mulling on that.

Apparently this story has been out there for years, but I just never heard it before. Never got the media headline that it did just a few days ago. At least not to my knowledge. Yes, I think Portland and Seattle will weather it OK. Some earthquake damage, but little to no tsunami. But Portland and Seattle are not my focus. I really would like to be on the coast. I mean, like this.... http://olympic.craigslist.org/apa/5138292394.html But the tsunami from the one they're saying is inevitable would wipe out the coast. So one day you're enjoying the good life and the next, you're homeless with all your belongings destroyed and perhaps no way to escape the devastated area. Followed by weeks or months of near complete isolation with no home, no power and no new supply of food or anything else if ground transportation links are destroyed. I don't know, I guess maybe they'd send rescue boats if there was no ground access. But talk about losing everything. Even if the risk within my lifetime were know-ably (which it isn't) tiny, it's hard for me to truly envision going forward with that plan. Maybe it's time for me to look at Maine. I really do miss the 4 seasons I grew up with. :)

This story is everywhere now, it seems....out of the blue. At around the same time that we hear more and more grumbling and bemoaning about Californians moving to the PNW. Coincidence or sociopolitical engineering strategy? The way people are manipulated these days, it's hard to rule anything out. I just have to grin and shake my head at the timing that I hear this - for the first time in my life....almost to the day that I start to really focus on the coast as my destination and away from other options. It's hard to know what to believe. Like you, I'm inclined to think it's a small threat. But, on the coast with the Tsunami, a threat so deadly that it might be impossible to truly forget about and truly relax. And if there is anything I want to do in retirement, it is relax. In any event, it will greatly behoove me to work a few more years (part-time), so I wasn't going anywhere right away and will be in the planning phase for a while. This story is the reset button in that process.

So I'm sitting here this morning contemplating the road ahead a few years and I stumble upon this, upon looking at another news story. I guess the other one finished and here comes....... http://video.foxnews.com/v/4356513070001/report-mega-quake-could-kill-13000-in-pacific-northwest/?intcmp=watchnow&playlist_id=trending#sp=show-clips Everything west of I-5 destroyed in a monster quake decades overdue. How 'bout my timing? :D Iowa has some nice features, after all....

I wonder if they don't vote for the same reason(s) I don't. Satellites? Not sure what you're referring to in that context. I've been mulling over retirement options and I keep getting drawn back to the Pacific coast after considering other options like New England or Great Lakes settings. The more I think about it, the more I know the coast is where I need to be. But I would consider most of the multitude of Puget Sound waterway settings to be in that category as well. My top 2 priorities, after the cool summer temperatures and scenic beauty of the coast, are people quality and cost of living. So from your experience, where am I going to find more attractive options....Oregon or Washington?

So I take it you don't really live in Seattle, but in the metro somewhere? I'll have to check out Sequim when I come up someday and I probably wouldn't have but for you mentioning it. With all those seniors, will I find it closer to Midwest clean-cut conservative? Or more PNW style tattooed, tattered, and toothless? :D

Thanks for that info. I looked and looked for Squim and almost gave up. Then I stumbled upon Sequim on Google maps and figured that's what you meant. Fascinating that it gets so much less rainfall than nearby areas. Based on the data at City-Data.com, Sequim's mean resident age is 57.9, compared to Washington state overall at 32.2. Clearly a magnet for older folks. I haven't seen much of Washington - only what you see driving through the eastern part of the state from central oregon up 395 to Spokane, then on the Coeur d' Alene. One day I'll make the trip north and get a first hand feel for how much I like it. From what I've heard about the sociopolitical culture up there, my expectations will be low. San Francisco, Berkeley, and, to a degree many other Bay Area cities are social cesspools as well - uninhabitable, but you don't have to go far in this area to be a world away form that. It's been a decade or more since I've been to SF and that was probably a decade later than my previous visit. If there is ever another one, it will only be to cross the Golden Gate heading north. As living standards continue their downward slide in the US, more and more towns have a dirt-bag or 3 on every corner. I've heard the homeless are everywhere up there (Oregon and Washington), particularly on the coast. If I see that in place after place, I'll likely give up on my dream to escape the heat and turn my focus to other possibilities in the mountain west or northern plains. Again, thanks for the info - very helpful.

It was 99 here yesterday, 103 the day before. Today it "cools" to 91 with tropical moisture. One nice thing about living here, though, is that I don't have to listen to people saying "how nice it is" all day. Most people here hate it and say they hate it. In stark contrast to the Kansas City area (where I lived for 11 years) where most are overjoyed with their steam-bath of a miserable summer and they all hate the smidgeon of winter that KC has. I loved the KC winter. The older I get, the more I hate this time of year. I hate the heat and I hate the sun burning into my windows until nearly 9:00PM. My (pipe)dream is to retire and live on the coast and, if I had my druthers, to never see 70 degrees again. Next year I'm hoping to take a leisurely journey north, along the coast, and investigate.

Is it an optical mouse? I used to have that kind of problem with the old ball-type, but never with optical.

I've never seen this, but would love to play such a map. Example, please?

I haven't had much time to play lately, but not long after my last post I found myself getting bored with Railroads! So went back to RRTII and resumed a Heartland map game I had started a ways back. The main reason boredom sets in for Railroads! is that, once you play a map a couple of times and learn best strategies for success, it will always be the exact same game every time you repeat it....right down to the smallest detail. That's because its industries are all pre-planted in the same locations and I don't recall ever seeing new ones appear during game play. Correct me if I'm missing or forgetting something here, but I don't think I've ever seen anything but city size growth in a game. This is a huge game-play limitation as compared to RRTII. Ironically, that makes RRTII a much more dynamic game for long-term game play, despite Railroads!' much more lively game interface.

I'm enjoying it, too, a lot. I guess I'm to the point now where I'm less aggravated by its infamous quirks....because its strengths are extraordinary. The game is so alive. While RRTII has more depth and nearly endless variety, its interface pales visually and audibly compared to SMRR. Still, RRTII was incomparable in its time and has attractive features that would improve SMRR if incorporated. What a new game we'd have if we took the best from both, with a sprinkling of RRT3's days/nights/weather, and rolled them into one. Yes, money seems to grow on trees for the AIs. And it is the same in RRTII. Impossible sums generated within 2 years from two smallish towns connected with no industry. In SMRR, my strategy is to buy them out as quickly as possible, then liquidate them clearing their mess. In the last couple of games I've played, I've focused on buying their shares earlier than usual and it seems to have worked well.

Well, the California map is my going-away favorite of the SMR maps I've played, so today I finally got around to modifying it to my liking. I replaced all of the cattle ranches with oil wells and replaced the stockyard in San Diego with a refinery. Removed the remaining stockyard(s). So now I've got an industry with which to grow San Diego and, at the same time, the respect and heartfelt gratitude of the cows. :D I also upped my RAM from 512MB to 2GB. It is amazing to see the game close in a instant now, whereas before it took a half minute or so of hard drive grinding to clean up all the virtual RAM files. It is generally faster and smoother now, but to my disappointment the New England map still crashes. Must be something besides size wrong with that map.

:D Lol! Some of those cattle told me that they were Railroad Tycoon players in another life, but for the luck of the draw there they were in the middle of that herd. Thank you for letting them live. They told me they would return the favor when that fate befalls us some day. :) So what did you do to grow San Diego? With RRTII's editor, it is so easy to customize your map with exactly the industries you want. And I always eliminate the cattle ranches and meat packing plants in maps I play. They are automatically replaced by others like grain silos, which is all the better. On some maps, like Australia in particular, I never seem to have enough grain. In Railroads! it's an entirely different matter. For me, it's editor crashes every time I attempt to use it just trying to save the new map name at the beginning. I looked at modifying the XML files themselves and it is clear that, for industries, that would take time and effort to learn that is more than I'm motivated to spend. It's interesting how different people enjoy different aspects of the game. You said in an earlier post that you never liked starting poor - that you like to start well established, something to that effect. For me, it is the start of the game with next to nothing and growing from there that is by far the most fun. Once I'm well established and accomplishing little beyond increasing wealth, I'm bored and ready to start a new game. And I usually do. That is particularly true with RRTII because its mature games are so tedious with the continued need for micro-management on a massive scale. Railroads! does much better without that continued micro-focus, but nonetheless I enjoy starting a new game with limited funds from one city much more than managing a large, established RR.

Wow....1.5 million scraping trains? That's a lot of trains. Still the California map? For whatever reason, I've never had....I guess never needed....very many trains playing Railroads! Nowhere near as many as I have in RRTII. One factor is that I always liquidate an AI's railroad when acquiring them. I don't like what they build and don't want to deal with it. Anyway, I'm not sure I've ever had more than 10 or so trains in a Railroads! game. I just finished another California game at Tycoon, so now it's time to start one at Robber Baron level. I ended up as President of the US again with a score of 225 - slightly short of my highest of 231. Robber Baron should be higher if I can achieve all goals. The only real challenge I've found on that map is growing San Diego. And that is only because of my own personal ethic which prevents me from taking advantage of the cattle ranch around Santa Ana. As I have gotten older, I have developed an increasing empathy for animals that man raises for slaughter. So I have become (nearly) completely vegetarian and I won't haul cattle to their deaths. Last game I built my own refinery in San Diego and routed oil from Bakersfield to it once I'd grown LA enough. Worked, but I made it with just a couple years to spare. At Robber Baron, I'll no doubt have to be more creative. Maybe I'll open the map's XML files and see if I can replace that industry with something else in San Diego. I think I've tried that before and ran into problems, but don't remember what they were. Best of luck in your race.

I'm enjoying it, too. After my problems with crashing while using the New England map, I went back to my modified Heartland map in RRTII for a while. Got bored fairly quickly. Railroads! is so much more alive. That "live" feel is RT3's sole advantage over RRTII, but Railroads! is a much better game.

That sounds like a plan. My first thought was that I should try that....my second thought that soon followed was that I'm accomplishing the same thing more simply by selecting 0 computer players at game start. As to your water question, yes - we are pounded every day with water conservation pressure. I don't get the impression that Hetch Hetchy is in as bad shape as some of the other supplies, but not totally sure about that. Seems certain that, if we go through yet another year of drought, consequences will be dire. Without water, we will be Phoenix. However, from what I hear, el nino is expected to break this cycle this winter with abundant rains. That's exactly what happened after the '76-'77 drought years. They were saying that we'd never have enough water again - ever - and every drop used was guilt, guilt, guilt. Then in '78 we had more constant heavy rain than anyone knew what to do with. The reservoirs were all full and overflowing well before the season ended and suddenly all the hand-wringing was about flooding. This year, of course, the eco-fanatics will move right back to "climate change" drama once the rains return.

Well, I just scrapped a couple of trains in order to answer that. It appears that you lose all of the cargo value and get only half of the normal trade-in value for the engine. I knew there seemed to be something different about those tenders, but hadn't given it much thought until you mentioned them. :) I've had more trouble running the New England Big map after the game grows. Seems to crash every time once I reach a given level of growth. So I'm thinking about getting a USB stick like you mentioned above. So, is this USB stick a flash drive? Do you have to do anything to configure it for virtual memory? So I'm going to go back to the California map for now. But I'm not sure how long it will hold my interest. Because, at least for me, it seems that once you've played a given map in SMRR a couple of times, it is always just about the same every time you repeat it. So it's kinda like replying a movie that you've just watched. That's in stark contrast to my experience with RRTII. You can play the Heartland map time and time again and it will be a different game altogether each time. With different resources, placed in different locations, and all those choices of start locations, each new game is truly like a clean pallet ready for you to paint your latest unique masterpiece. So perhaps what I've long said is still true. I always end up returning to RRTII....sooner or later.

I've never tried to make a map, and the only thing I know about map building tools is the game's terrain editor. To enable it, add this line in the settings.ini file in the main game folder.... EditorEnabled = 1 Then the terrain editor will appear in the game menu. I don't know, though, whether that feature encompasses everything you need to create a new map.

The added SAM maps go in the UserMaps folder that is found with this path.... D:\Documents and Settings\(Your Name)\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Railroads!\UserMaps On most machines it will probably be drive letter C: Mine is D: because I dual boot and use C: for Windows 98SE. Over at SMRsimple, I read way back when that you can only put one map at a time in that folder. Don't know why, but if you put anything else in that folder, it will likely crash the game. I've also tried putting a map in the main game folder where the default maps are and that won't work either. Again, don't know why. Yesterday I reviewed the map database over there and see that my version of New England, "New England Big", is no longer there and apparently replaced by one called New England-SAM. Same author, I believe, but definitely a different version. So I downloaded that new version just to compare and can't get it to load at all. Crashes every time. New England Big crashed on me a couple of times after there was a lot of AI bridge contortions on the map. So I upped my virtual memory to a little over 2GB and so far, so good. I've pretty much concluded that in Railroads! the AIs very often ruin the game with their aggressive expansion and absurd track configurations that destroy your plans and just leave you shaking your head. I've started a new New England Big game with just me and so far enjoying the freedom from the AI nonsense. :)

I've got more to say about Railroads!, so I thought a new thread is in order. The more I play this game, the more I like it and I may have to eat words I said just days ago about always going back to RRTII. Earlier today I attempted to load the NW scenario and the game crashed. Exited and tried again....and the game crashed. Attempt after attempt, with other scenarios....and the game crashed. I went back to SMRSimple and re-read the info about playing SAMs and surmised that my problem was that I had installed both the California and San Francisco user maps in the user maps folder and you can't do that. I don't understand why, but you simply can't do it. So I deleted both maps and the problem was fixed. The game then went back to trouble-free play. So then I remembered having problems with the New England Big map....years ago. At the time, I concluded that it was just a problem map and noted the file accordingly. Much as I wanted to try it, it was apparently not to be. But after my experience today, I wondered if back then I had done the same thing and installed it in the user maps folder with another map. First evidence is that is exactly what I had done. Because I re-installed it by itself this afternoon, fired it up, and it works fine! Great map, too, and it is already my favorite of those I've played so far. It's early goals are strictly monetary and that's the way I like it. I dislike having to haul a specific number of loads of a specific cargo to specific cities by a specific year. I want the freedom to build and grow the want I want to.

My apologies for another Railroads! post (not the thread topic). But since we had the dialogue about Railroads!, I wanted to ask if you have ever played Lama's California map. I downloaded it a couple days ago and just finished with better than double my previous high score, again as President of the United States. It covers San Francisco, LA, and San Diego and most major towns between. And has you build east to Salt Lake City through Carson City, Winnemucca, and Elko. And down south out to Palm Springs, Death Valley, and Flagstaff. Definitely one of the better maps I've played in Railroads! and lots of fun.

Not for me. I can only reiterate that I find that threat as enjoyable as I find the sudden explosion sound of a breakdown in RRTII enjoyable. My game would have neither. You asked earlier whether the game should be named Railroad Tycoon. And my gut reaction was that it doesn't matter to me. But on deeper reflection, I realize that the "tycoon" aspect of the game is not at all what draws me to it. In fact, more and more as I age I am repulsed by the idea of financial manipulation conceptually. It is far too often a tool used by those short-changed when scruples/ethics were passed out for obscene personal gain that hurts lots of others in the process. Therefore, since I'd like to see a game with at least the option to play with your railroad privately held, I vote to take "tycoon" out of the name.

Thank you for that insight. Makes all the sense in the world and explains exactly what I've seen. I'm so glad you popped in here and I'm excited about your project!

My view on the stock market may well be that of a small minority, but here's my 2 cents worth. I don't like the stock market and would rather see a new game without it. When playing a game, my participation in it has never been for any purpose but to prevent being bought out. And I have always considered that threat to be an annoying distraction from the true enjoyment that the game otherwise provides. My vote is put the financial manipulation in a different game altogether for those who enjoy it and leave RRT to railroaders just wanting to make an honest living building and running the best railroad.