JayEff

Very simple suggestion, but have you tried typing the name in another program, then copy-paste it into RT2? I have done this to get the French accents in both RT2 and RT3.

I have been looking for a French RT3.LNG file for a very long time. Can someone please send me one, soils4peace at yahoo dot ca?

The different components of a railway system have differing levels of profitability. Generally I try to have the most profitable parts in my own company, or the one in which I have the most shares, and have the least profitable, or most costly components in a slave company or two in which I own 50% of shares plus one. Ideally the slave company builds all stations, bridges, tunnels, service towers, maintenance buildings, post offices, and it may also build unprofitable factories to generate demand, if needed. I would buy enough profitable industry for it to stay afloat, so it can help me expand this way too. And of course, it will purchase its own trains. If there is sufficient cash, the slave will pay for double tracking, providing extra track allowance if needed. The main company generally lays single track, runs trains for missions and to feed strategic industries, owns the most profitable industries, and builds hotels. This approach works great in Great Northern.

There is a similar post at Molse's Forum. If that is someone else, maybe you can work it out together. Other than that, good people to talk to would be Pjay or CN_Diesel. Both are at Railroad Tycoon Info and PJay might be found at Hawkdawg's Forum or Pjay's website.

Well I like to win gold, but no biggie. When I create scenarios, I set up bronze or silver to be close to the historical results. To get gold you have to beat history. Yes, POS is a great scenario. I will have to revisit it sometime.

Height maps are shaded so that each shade represents an elevation. When it is imported into the map editor, it makes an olive green map with variations in elevation. You can make them for any part of the world with RT3 Mapmaker which comes with RT3, or you can use height maps obtained from other sources. As they are image files, you can use any image software to edit the height map if you like. Sometimes there are better sources than RT3 Mapmaker, but it is good enough for me. The map ratings I see here seem inconsistent with quality. I say download them all try them out and if you like them keep them, otherwise chuck them. Sometimes I have a third category, that is ones that need fixing, so I tinker with them in the editor until the map works the way I like. Sid Meier's Railroads has a different focus, so to me it is a matter of preference. This game is good for watching choo-choos, micromanaging track layouts and signals. I like some of the additions like the patent and industry auctions. After testing the demo I would say that this game has a place, but not on my computer. I prefer the strategic level, economic and historical aspects, so for me RT3 is the best, and the 3D is easy like and difficult to ignore. I have seen complaints about the economic system and other aspects of RT3, but I would rather see improvements to RT3 than anything like SMR.

I like reliability, then I can get speed by increasing throttle. For Whistle Stops and Promises, give me the Camelback. For Which Way to the Coast? give me the Prairie with the speed option. I will tend to take the speed options when available. For China, forget steam it is the GG-1 except for Hong Kong - Beijing. The acceleration and reliability lets you crowd the track with impunity. - John Bull, American, 8 Wheeler, Consolidation, Mogul, Prairie, GG1 for general purpose. - Camelback, GP9 for short hauls on forgotten lines, with no maintenance. - Consolidation, Mogul, Mikado, MagLev for long hauls, your game winning haul missions etc. For train replacement timing I divide the price by the maintenance cost, and that is the number of years I will normally keep a train. However it does depend on what other locos are available. You know you have a favourite if nothing better comes along by the time you need to replace it.

That offer was randomly generated. You can recognize it because it is simple and is always done the same way. Play again and it will be another city and a different amount, offered at a different time.

Sometimes placing or deleting track will cause a game crash. You might try downlodaing the most recent patch, 1.05 and see if that helps. I still get this type of crash though, and it is not unique to Texas :( Re telegraphy, there is a game event that can increase or decrease load-unload times. Some scenarios offer this for a price, but you have to apply it to your whole company, or not 8) You shouldn't need to track the whole map to win Texas Tea. Buy some lucrative industries, like the coffee farms and oil wells you hook up too. This isn't a big map and a computer should be able to handle it; maybe there is a problem with computer power or graphics ??? Support company? Well Gwizz and I will keep you company and support you ;D

Press [shift]-E to toggle between playing a map and the editor. Click on 'Control Panel'. Click on 'Events'. What you now see are what mapmakers call events. They are composed of the following: - Name: a short name for the event - Dialog: how information is communicated to the player. There are four - Dialog, Newspaper, Choice and Game Message. - Dialog Text: what you are told, or what is in the newspaper headline. - Time: when the program will test the event. It may be start of scenario; start or end of week, month or year; when track or station is placed; when a company is started; after an event choice; or status (appears on the status page in the ledger). - One time only: check box if it happens only once. - Conditions: what has to happen to trigger the event. Conditions also state what is tested - territories, human, computer or all players and companies; and whether the event applies to single player, multi-player or both types of games. - Effects: what happens when the event is triggered. To me, a map is a map, complete with topography, water, regions, cities, territories and paint. It may or may not include events. A scenario is a designed game which includes the map and a specific set of events. Example: PopTop made a map of Central Canada and made a scenario which they in their infinite knowledge of Canadian geography, called Eastern Canada. There are three scenarios on this map, Eastern Canada (PopTop), Warming Trend (JayEff) and War Profiteers (nedfumpkin).

The answer is in your question. But the truth depends on the scenario builder's ability to write clearly to make events. If you look, about half the time connection instructions and the event coding are not in perfect agreement. When I write 'You must...' I mean you and the company that you control. Or 'your company must...', same thing. It means your station at each end, but the game programming does not care along which track, and it doesn't matter whether you have rights along the same route. Or I will write 'A connection must exist between X and Y', which means any station at X, any station at Y. along any track. When in doubt, peek at the coding ^[or be like me and peek at every new map]. Then decide whether you like the directions or the coding better, then change the other to fit. Also check the details of the event coding as it may have a mistake in it. I saw an event that checked at the end of the year for whether gamemonth=3. Well of course, the event would never trigger unless you change it to checking monthly. ;D By the way, for some reason, the Mississippi (also Germantown) map seems buggy about acknowledging connections. I am working on a fix for Mississippi.

Economic State is 0=Depression, 4=Booming There is a lot of interesting stuff in the RT3.LNG file. Just open it as a text file, get a soda and have a good read.

The middle number, the number of driving wheels seems to correlate well with for hill climbing ability.

Hidden beneath the mountains of the north lie veins of gold and silver, highly prized by humankind, in their greed and appreciation of things that glitter. Find these treasures bring them to the surface and take possession of the source before the beginning of the twelfth year. Thence build a temple to Xiutecutli, who will therein make fire to purify the rock into shiny metals. Bring the pure to the temples of Yacatecutli, and there fashion all manner of trinkets for humans to enjoy. And bring these goods to the people, wherever they choose to live. And bring one tenth of this bounty to the summit of Mount PopTopocatapetl, and cast it into the fires of the earth in honor of Ipalnemoa, maker of all that there is. And likewise bring portions north to the people of the tiny dog and those of the large hats. And when this has all been done, honor Tonacatecutli and Tonaciuatl, the Lord and Lady of our flesh, bringers of the corn, and Tlaloc, maker of rain. And if you succeed in this venture, a small portion of the bounty of Yacatecutli shall be fashioned into a shiny medallion for you to wear about your neck.

I just tested the Mississippi Valley map and looked at the coding. 1. You must be first to connect St. Louis & Indianapolis and St. Louis and Memphis. When this is accomplished, it will trigger a one time only headline and change Company Variable 1 to 1. 2. When Company Variable 1 is triggered, the Status page of the ledger will show that these connections have been made. 3. At the end of 25 years, if Silver or Gold have not been triggered beforehand, Bronze will be triggered if you currently control the company that first made the connection. You can check which company this is by pressing Shift-E to get into the editor and examining the Event Debugging page. With the 1.05 patch if you hover over a station, the nearest cities will say Connected, Not Connected, or Connected by Another Station. Also, you should have been able to run trains between St. L and Indianapolis, and between St. L and Memphis. For me, the events work properly, i.e. as they are written. However, they are badly written.

I rename my micromanaged trains. Usually just the name of the cargo in all caps, so that if I take over another company then return with all the prioritization lost, I know how to reprogram the priority status. As for my hub and spoke trains, I just let them run. Sometimes have a third type of train, one that I use very rarely, is one that I am continually reprogramming. These will run around the map hauling cargos that are needed here or there in the short term. They are used to prime exchange ports, correct supply / demand imbalances, or make very lucrative but small hauls. They will also be renamed, and will be the highest performing trains available. They are micromanaged station by station, and may never repeat a route.

Sure.

One trick that would work well in C2C is to merge with one of the AI companies. When you do that you get immediate rights to the middle of the map and don't have to wait. A good general strategy is, having scanned the colour displays and seen where the most lucrative businesses are, buy the businesses, but also haul their products to where they are demanded. It is really important to understand these industries - how they profit, and what implications of color are. Freight moves from red to green. This applies over land, through ports, on your trains, and when being manufactured into something new. The steeper the gradient, the more profitable the industry. Secondary industries must buy their raw materials - that is the materials cost on their books. If they are next to red raw materials and near green and yellow-green markets, they will do awesomely well. Look for gaps. Logging camps and furniture factories but no lumber mill? A board full of sheep with no textile mills? Is there long line of coal laden barges flowing down the river? The most profitable primary industries are the ones that have just been randomly seeded onto the map in an area where their product is yellow or better. A quick way to find it is outlined here: http://www.exdx.net/cgi-bin/Yabb/YaBB.pl?board=RT3;action=display;num=1097807204

1) There are many solutions: a) if C is the destination A, B, E have the wanted cargos, and D is neither e.g. has a competing industry, the stations are near each other, and the topology is A-B-C-D-E, then route the train ABCEC. b) If the cities are far apart it might be best if each source had its own train. c) If you simply want the product or to make money, build your own industry at an optimum location, e.g. where the cargo is flowing anyway, or right beside a couple of raw industries and you won't even need a train except to haul the more expensive product away. I have a strong preference for this technique. Just think of the money you save in shipping costs. d) If they are related to load haul goals, take the materials straight to the destination. e) Monitor the price differences in the cargo display and plan your route so that there are always significant price increases e.g. >=+$5k at the next station in the chain. f) Be sure that the factory really wants the cargo, i.e. it does not have enough raw materials already OR there is a high demand for the finished product. The chain should flow from red to green whether you are talking about the next city or you are transforming into a new product. Make sure you are hauling away the finished product to areas of high demand: that will really make the factory hum. I was able to set things up so that my grain farms were producing 6 loads per year, 2.5x what they were supposed to when supplied with fertiliser. In this example, the grain farms are in part factories because they are processing fertiliser into grain. Read this thread, especially my May 22, 2005 post: http://www.railroadtycoon.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50&highlight=mars Incidentally, for practice on working with industry chains, you might want to play Greening the Red Planet, downloadable at the same website. It has a spaceport where you import chemicals, manufacture fertiliser and distribute it about the planet, make alcohol and export it in a swap for chemicals back at the same spaceport. g) Passengers will get used to not going straight to their destinations, and you can make money on hotels where they disembark temporarily. Troops are finicky: some players report that they want to go direct to their destination. For mail there seems to be no problem, especially if you make liberal use of post offices. 2) Hover over the station you want to find out how to deal with this problem. "Press [shift]click to insert station above currently selected stop in list." 3) AFAIK play over the internet is completely dead and never was. PopTop completely failed to deliver the goods on that one. Some people have made great efforts to set this up on LANs but it is really finicky. My answer to this has been fan-made maps - both building my own and playing others. You can play with events and special conditions to make the AI more of a threat. And the socializing comes in with visiting forums like this one, exchanging ideas on mapmaking and playing. Edit: 3) Bannon posted while I was writing my reply. Looks like you can play multiplayer. Perhaps the problem is there are not enough players around? I never tried really.

Congratulations! It must feel great to finish that.

Why not make a Hungarian scenario? If you are Hungarian, you know the history and geography.

Look at the Overview for Cargo Supply, select the relevant cargos and have a peek at them - the oil, plastic and toys. Hovering a mouse over a square will tell you the price at that location, or you can look at the colors. Red is low price, yellow is medium, green is high price. Cargo flows from low to high price. This happens to a single cargo as it flows across a map, but it also affects whether or the speed with which it is consumed by a factory. So for example, if around the toy factory, the toy display is red, the factory will produce slowly if at all. If the factory is new it may not have had time to create a demand for plastic. Is the plastic display red around the factory? In time the colour should change. It takes time for the new product to be produced. You can watch the plastic be consumed on the plastic display, and toys produced on the toy display. Also you can left-click on the factory and find out if it has produced anything. If there is a tool&die shop nearby, it may be taking the plastic to make goods. Check plastic color and prices around the t&d shop, and likewise check the goods display.

To copy Industry Weightings, when you are on the Cities/Regions page in the editor press "Copy from Another" at the bottom. You can copy from any region or city to the Current City/Region that is displayed. Then make any adjustments, i.e. variations on your Industry Weightings for that city or region, if there are any. Then program the Building Density. Choose a port/warehouse recipe from the 12 available. Whenever a new map is generated to start a scenario, the computer will choose buildings from among those available in the Industry Weightings. There will be variations in overall density and the exact buildings each time a player restarts. For instance, in an historic lumber area, you might program the ciites to produce lumber mills and paper mills, but at a low Building Density, you might only have one or the other, or neither seeded at the beginning of a game. Please don't turn over complete control to the computer or make all cities with the same weightings. There must be variation in the distribution over a map, that is influenced by human and physical geography, that contributes to the setting of the scenario. I have seen fan-made maps where every city recipe is the same and resources are evenly distributed over the map. If the world were like that we would need very little transportation infrastructure.