outofmage

Cogeo, read post #5 in this thread. Meglev has answered the same question from me.

cogoe, I also want to know how you did that.

Oh, I forgot we can edit here. Well, the list is a bit long, I can't remember every point of them :P

Maglev, actually you can own a house with some memory change, it worth 100K. Good work about your goodwill. Since you tried to haul every insight, you deserve it.

Maglev, I want to shake hands for our similar reason to retire trains. In a long game, to keep our train list organized is a key to make massive company under management. If an industry change their demand, instead of giving them other things to do, I will retire all the relative engines. Not only it wastes fuel to change from one route track to another, it will also create unexpected traffic jam as you stated. Traffic jams are bad, very bad, it's worse than grade and turning. So I rather buy new engines to assign them to a new place instantly. And for a period of time, I will clean up the whole train list to reroute the whole company. Because a) it will clean the random trains here and there in the list because of the new trains purchased after crashes in the last decades. b) For a long time, cities may develop unevenly, this will change my passenger routes map. c) In the new list, I can upgrade my 2-car trains into 3-car trains or 4-car trains. d) I can put an extra station for every city, and passenger trains will stop once here, once another. This can greatly increase passenger revenue. e) Most importantly, re-route all the trains can refresh your plan maybe months ago. Sometimes I just can't remember what on earth some train is doing on that route, what was I thinking? Edit BTW, didn't our conversation go a little off the topic? OK, I have one, I want to be able to move a train in the train list, or add a search feature to the train list.

Maglev, this reminds me Todd Bergantz's favorite strategy introduced in the Strategy Guide. And I quote "Favorite strategy: Start a company, watch to see where your competitors lay their track, select bulldozer, and then bulldoze the likely major industries before they can put their station down, effectively making their track a waste. Not a very good strategy, mind you, but a fun one." I don't know if they decide to increase the bulldoze cost because of him during development or they just made up some random number for each industry to bulldoze. I prefer to believe the later one.

Jeff, I think in the case of Maglev, his bug is not caused by retiring trains, it's caused by replacing them at the wrong time and then retire them without fixing it. But, replacing bug doesn't prevent us from doing replacement, so it won't bother me to retire trains. As long as we keep our track clean and neat, I don't think this will happen again.

Jeff, in my experience, retiring trains is fine. I retire a LOT of engines, but I never run into any trouble after retiring. I also bulldoze stations very often, it's fine too, no bad consequence. But bulldoze stations may cause a significant delay of 1-2 seconds when I play large companies. Maybe it's because the program needs to check all the routes and delete the stops.

Maybe that's why bulldoze industries cost so much.

Gwizz, I'm confused. What do you mean you got links above your reply? This is a free edition framework, so there will be ads pop out, just close them. When you start your robot, please get into your full-screen game immediately, otherwise it will click on your table. I only posted ONE robot. A forum staff did spam my post because my file is flagged as Trojan, but he enabled it later. But it is the same one. You can control the robot by F10/start, F11/pause or restart, F12/stop. If you feel like you lost control of the robot, press F12 immediately. Edit: Maybe your OS doesn't have Chinese language package, so the characters were shown as squares. I thought because you don't understand the language, you won't be affected by ads, ironically it turns into the exact opposite result. I figured you saw that norm running into a tree and ran away, that's a browser game advertisement.

My English is a bit rusty, can you tell me what does this mean?

Meglev, I believe to hire Twitchell is purely depending on luck in the very beginning of the game, no matter hiring the top or bottom manager applying for your job. The salary of a manager must match the profit of your company. In the beginning of the game while we have 0 or less profits, only several managers under $7K per year salary are available. When we expand our company and get more profit, these low salary managers will disappear. Yes, usually when a station is built, the upgrades should be done right then, in case I forget to do it later. But this is very useful when the large restaurant or hotel became available, because I usually have a pretty large number of passenger stations then. My program can be flagged as upgrade mode, which will build the large hotel or restaurant only when small hotel or restaurant has been built. Another occasion I use this robot is when I build a second passenger station for each city to have some extra demand, that's a huge amount of work, but this robot can do the station upgrades easily.

Here is another robot using Twitchell stock price 15% lower loophole to make $2 mill in the beginning of the game. It works like this: the ask-bid difference and commission of a stock trade is approximately 5%, so using 15% price lower manager can make a 5% profit every hire-buy-fire-sell loop. Hiring this manager with reasonable signing bonus need to save/load the game a lot, and it takes like 50 rounds to reach 2 million dollars, it may take an hour to accomplish such a piece of work manually, so I made this robot. This video only shows a part of the whole process. I want to point out that this cheat feels cool at first, but it actually has no difference between typing Cattle Futures twice and then wasting all the money in the company.

Guys, I have other robots to show you. This one do station upgrades.

Letsdance, how do you want to improve the replacement robot?

Meglev, I can't fix this glitch either. I tried to destroy it with destroy/flooding events, but it led to game crash. I do believe the game will crash too if you bankrupt your own company. Unfortunately, you might have to load the previous saving if you can't stand this piece of glitched track.

I'm looking forward to play on your map. Can you be more specific on what resource names you want to change?

The two companies is adjusted by dividends to close amount of cash, I want to make assets-only companies. Actually they made very different profits. The difference between -25% and 25% is theoretically 66%. But in real games, it seems like the computer has a completely different way of calculate revenue. I did some tests, this figure can various from 10% to 200%. It majorly depends on the distance and type of goods, more distance the goods travel, less revenue increase from computer. It also seems like computer get a much better revenue for freight than passenger. No matter how, computer will get more revenue, but not very much in my games. Edit: The difference of -25% human revenue modifier and +25% human revenue modifier is not 66% either.

Jeff, maybe we should start another thread talking about the robot. We must have more to share. Maglev, in my North America 1870s, I had about 500 trains; in US Center 1940s I had about 200. I found these trains are enough to halt every cargo on the map. How many cargo do you halt a year? I managed to halt 700 in North America 1870s (started in 1830). You were playing US history I assume, I didn't try to halt every cargo on that map, I would like to see your game saving. About that glitch, I think it is triggered by replacing track blocked train while about to depart the station. The cars pulled by this engine will be shown on screen one by one during departing, if it's been blocked by the previous departing train, the show-up will be paused, but the train replacement will force to reload all the cargo on the screen, that may lead to this glitch. I make this glitch happen less often by building more stations and separate tracks, which leads to less track block, although you've already done that. But still, how come you have so many cargoes for 1000 trains to halt?

Yes, diagonal tracks do give more traffic capacity of the whole map. Diagonal track crossing loophole is just one of the many features that designers themselves didn't realize. What I am doing with two companies, it has a lot of purposes as I continued playing. First, as the citis grew and some of the houses were not covered by my stations, and the demand level of all stations drop to 0-1. So I established the second company to buy cheaper trains and stations with lower league managers, I can make these asset even cheaper by dumping 49% of the shares of the new company and merge it. But I changed my mind and wanted to see if the overhead fee can drop if the first company is only feed by miscellaneous, but it turns out not to. But I find it to split the whole business into two companies have a lot of advantages. One will own all the tracks and the other will own the trains and stations. The one owning the tracks can hire the 30% overhead cheaper manager, because it gets most of the revenue and pays a lot of overhead fee. In my scenario, 150 million profit will pay 20 million overhead. The other one runs trains and gets revenue from stations, this one can hire George Pullman. More over, the AI seems to not care that much of cargo disappearing of other companies' station. So I put some raw material stations into the track company, so that the train company won't change my routes even I resign as chairman. This will give me +25% computer revenue instead of -25% human revenue.

Thank you, Jeff. These hot keys should be useful in the future robot projects. Especially the HOME and PAGE DOWN keys. These should save some time in finding a train. I do start with pressing ESC 3 times in the beginning. This will return to main interface wherever you are. The deepest one I can find is the "not enough money" window when hiring a manager. Although I won't change any in my current robot, debugging is painful. Getting the pix color is one of the most important functions of this framework. If correctly programmed, it can read. They also sell some color similarity analysis APIs, they can surely solve the icon inconsistent color problem. Although I won't need this, I just press an extra ENTER after replacing. When a train can not be replaced, it simply moves on to next one.

Thank you for your praise. All thanks to the passengers in 19th century travel across the continent, the cost to pave those mountains can be covered. I have not played to 1935, but I can calculate. I have 140,000 miles of track now. Based on $14K per segment, multiply 7,000, it should cost 100,000K. But it must be more in 1935, since North America has a 1.5% economy growth and 73% starting point. I started in 1830, so cities will be very big then, these tracks won't be enough. The time, well, based on my previous experience, I guess 10 minutes would be enough because most of my tracks are straight.

Jeff, sorry again for getting you nervous. Thank you. The source code is attached to this post, the syntax is based on VB, quite readable in English. But it has its own file format, so I copy it into a .txt file. To answer your brief questions: Delay has to be added while needed. I didn't test if the train detail screen loop back to the first train. Because number of total trains needs to be input in the program control panel GUI. Looping back actually will save a step of dragging the train list box up to the top. I wonder if you are talking about the yellow shadow around the cursor and the red dot while clicking. This feature is actually provided by my video recorder BB FlashBack. It's free and very powerful. Yes, coordinates is actually a big problem, a lot of script developers are struggling to deal with this problem. However, Railroad Tycoon II solve this problem naturally. Since RT2 only has 800*600 and 1024*768 two screen modes. If your screen is bigger, there will be some blank margin beside your full screen game, which can not be accessed by your cursor. My coordinates are based on 1024*768, so it should work unless you use a 800*600 resolution screen. I think there will be similar free open source framework, good luck! Train robot source code.txt

I just made a short video to demonstrate the usage of my robot. You will understand why this is potentially very dangerous.

Sorry guys, but you can relax. This framework is somehow too powerful, because it will take control of your mouse and keyboard, my own computer's anti-virus software will give me a warning when I use it. Since only I can trust my own program, it's a pity you may not be able to use mine. Deleting it should have no affect to your computer, you can relax, jeff. Gobalopper, I have to rely on this framework because without it, the source code is meaningless.