Rikki

Interesting point, JSS, and thanks for the history lesson. I guess it comes down to deciding whether a tactic is historically accurate or if it is cheating the game as it was designed to be played. I'll probably take a swipe at it using the boy scout approach first. I can always become more corrupt later if I don't get my way. :) Rikki

Yes, odd about the way those questions are being asked. But thanks for looking into this. I'll see if I can track down the designer and see what the deal is. Oh, and I appreciate your tip about placing token stations. However, doing that just to keep the AI companies away seems a bit too gamey for my taste. I enjoy the realism of the game so I'll try to win the bronze the old fashioned way, if I can. :) On the other hand if I DO take over both companies and still don't get the bronze I may resort to Gwizz's trick of getting the bronze to fire. :) Rikki

Thanks JSS, you explained it in a way that even I could understand. Sort of. :) Now that I know what the deal is I will try playing the scenario again knowing I have to take over the AI companies that own those stations. Not an easy task, as they jump on Philly and Chicago very quickly and are very profitable all through the game. But at least it's a challenge that I think is within my capability. Silver and gold are for deities far beyond my skill level. :-\ If anyone HAS won gold I'd love to hear how they went about it. Are there any after action reports on games I can look up somewhere? Rikki

Yup, there's a manual. Good luck digging for it. :) Rikki

Hmmm, maybe that's the "problem." I think the AI owned the station in either Philly or Chicago in all the games I played. Does this scenario define a connection as being owned 100% by the player? If so, that would explain my hobo status. :-\ On the other hand, the brief doesn't state full ownership is a requirement, and there are still those encouraging messages/news headlines saying I have made a successful connection. A sidenote... I haven't even touched Shift-E since I bought the game, I like not seeing the matrix as it were. But I'll be curious to hear what you script doctors figure out. Rikki

JSS, Yes, that is what I'm saying. At the end of 25 years the status page (and the newspaper headline earlier) verifies that I have connected Chicago and Philly but I am still not awarded the bronze. I keep getting the hobo video. :( Rikki

Yes, silver and gold are hard, but bronze is relatively easy. You just have to connect Chicago to Philly. I've done that every time, but still no bronze for my efforts. I finally gave up on that scenario. :-\ Rikki

I had a good time playing around with this map this week, but could not win even the bronze -- even though I connected Chicago and Philly way before the deadline. I did get the news headline acknowledging the linkup, though. Any ideas why the game will not award me the win? Incidentally, has anyone gotten gold on this map? Seems ridiculously hard, like not even humanly possible. Even silver seems insane. Or maybe I just have a lot to learn. :'( Rikki

I guess you can add me to the Very Competitive list, though I am easily satisified with just bronze if the scenario doesn't inspire me in some way. I am finally trying out the player-created maps which are great. I tried the Prince of Steel scenario which was awesome! Better than any of the ones that came with the game! I finally got the gold, and I'm not even sure how. (Something about the Personal Net Worth condition confuses me, I somehow lucked into some good stock buys I guess.) I then tried Great Northern, which was also great. Only got bronze (Expert), but I may give it some more tries to see if I can improve. Rikki

Really, I didn't know yours was the "preferred" site. OK, thanks, I'll drop on by. :) Rikki

OK, Hawk, thanks for your words of encouragement. :) Rikki

Phew! I thought I was asking a simple question but now I've been to both sites, registered at the H&B site, read as much as I could find, and now I'm more lost than ever. ??? First I downloaded a pack of logos (Mr. Scott pack 1) and dropped it in my UserExtraContent folder as instructed in the Readme document but they didn't show up when I launched the game. That's when I went back to the sites and did some more searching and reading but could not find out what was wrong with the files, or what I needed to do to get them to work. To begin with, I have a Mac. I did not see any separate download area for Mac files so I assume these files work for both PC and Mac versions of RT3. Is that correct? Second, I am not much of a technoid so I wasn't able to understand the so-called explanations offered. (PK4, which is the type of file that I downloaded, is described as a "packaging format," but I don't have a clue what a packaging format is, or why I need to know about "packaging" to use the logos.) Can somebody just explain to me how I download & install new logos in a few simple sentences, please? Thanks! (Off to get some aspirin...) Rikki

Cool! And I see there are SFX, too! Ah, the benefits of being a latecomer... ;) Hmm. I see the downloads but couldn't find the "discussion" you mentioned. Or am I supposed to search for that thread here at this forum? Rikki

I was just wondering, is it possible to add our own company logos to the game? I suppose it's silly to care about such superficial things but it would be nice to have logos that are a better fit with my names (like first-letter initials, for example.) Rikki

Okay, maybe someone can explain this to me. I was playing the East China scenario. VSeems next to impossible at the Expert setting so to win I really need to plan carefully. After being reduced to a hobo a number of times I finally managed to build a fairly robust rail system about halfway through the game. The cornerstone of my plan in this game was linking the steel mills in the northwest mountains to Jinan, where there was an auto plant, which was key to winning since you have to export a certain number of autos to win. I had planned toward this from year one, and so far everything was going fine. Then, after getting sidetracked for a few years (no pun intended) by some company takeovers and building the toy and clothing industries (also required for victory) I began to notice I hadn't been seeing any autos on my trains for awhile. I kept trying different things like specifying autos for my trains and checking the color overview to be sure there was a demand for them. I finally went to check on the status of the auto plant and to my surprise... it had disappeared! So I had to re-route all my steel to Beijing, where there was another auto plant, but this cost resources and time which ultimately led to my losing the game, bigtime. So what the heck happened to my car factory? Now, I've noticed an occasional logging camp disappear if it was unconnected and thus losing money, but that factory was poised for high capacity production. Incidentally, a few games later it happened again, also in Jinan again. Is there a game reason for this or might this be a bug of some kind? It's rather hard to plan if we don't know whether a factory will stay on the map. Rikki

Okay, so I think I've got the RT3 basics down now, and I'm itching to see what it's like to play against a real human being. 1) Where is the best place to meet people for online gaming? I read the post that talked about gamespy.com but that seems geared only for Windows folks and I have the Mac version of the game. I assume online gaming is cross-platform, correct? 2) What is a good scenario to play for a multi-human game? 3) If anyone here would like to take me on let me know. I have played all the factory scenarios and generally play at the Hard level, with varying degrees of success. Thanks for any help... Rikki

Guess I'm not the new kid on the block anymore. :D Welcome, guys!

Great, thanks for the tip. Yeah, I just recently caught on to the idea of starting the game by not building my railroad but just buying/building a profitable industry and then just sitting back and let the money roll in till my credit rating improved so I could finance a bigger railroad. I kinda felt like I was cheating, though, because I couldn't find a way to make a profit from a small (startup) railroad -- which I thought was the whole concept of the game. But I guess even though it's called RAILROAD tycoon that's considered a legitimate game strategy, so cool. I just replayed it last weekend and won gold, I think I started with a meat packing plant and a ranch or two.

Right, thanks for the reminder. I will keep an open ear to other players' approaches. And my own, as I develop them. And yes, a few days ago I caught on to being able to watch cargo move on its own at the fast speed setting. That was HUGELY helpful. Funny, for the longest time I looked at those little flat lines not knowing what they were. Only after watching them a while did I finally realize that they represented bits of a railroad car and that they seem to correspond to the incremental decimal increase of loads produced at the factories. I generally don't try to haul cargo over a competitors' tracks other than the joining station as it seems too expensive to me. So yeah, I would buy the railroad if it is small but in most games that I play I always seem to be way short of the merging price. I do enjoy the battles for control of the mid-sized ones, though, and often feel myself in a personal war against the other tycoons who have the swing vote. Rikki

Cool, I didn't know I could do that! (The shift-E thing). I understand "events" now, too, so the earlier responses make more sense to me. Thanks. And the words "map" and "scenario" mean what I would have expected them to mean. Somehow I got the sense people were saying "map" but meaning "scenario." My mistake. Now, given my new understanding, and after playing the South Pacific scenario again last night, it still seems to me the way the events are written doesn't jive with the brief, since I am "connecting" to Wichita as required but still end up a penniless hobo. (It was frustrating enough to have the medal conditions changed right when I thought I was about to walk away with the bronze!) Anyone else run into this? Rikki

Um, okay, thanks for those great responses, but please bear with me as I am not a programmer (I am challenged enough by my microwave oven :) ), nor have I investigated the map building feature yet so I don't know what's involved with that. So let me play back what I've learned and please correct me if I've gone astray. I take it the word "event" is a programming term and that the people who create scenarios use this word as part of a standardized syntax. Makes sense, however I would have expected some consistency in the "factory" scenarios and therefore also in the programming. But it seems the people who contributed the original maps/scenarios often had a different code of conduct (if you'll pardon the pun), which would explain my frustration about getting different/unexpected game results. (Hmm, come to think of it, I did notice a distinctive writing style with a few of the briefs that were unlike the others.) Anyway, to work around the inconsistency issue you say I can peek at the code beforehand, but how do us mortal laymen do that? Is there a feature of the game that allows this, or do I have to use another program like a text editor? I don't have the manual handy but I don't recall reading anything about this. While I'm on the subject, I've seen the words "map" and "scenario" used interchangeably. Are all player-created maps also scenarios? Or can one create just the map and let the people who download it figure out what the rules are and write the "scenario?" Again, I appreciate everybody's patience and explanations. Rikki

In scenarios where you have to connect to a certain city by a certain year, does it matter if you are the one who builds the station in that city? I seem to recall that in some scenarios I have connected to a station built by a rival railroad and got credit for it, while other times I didn't. Interestingly, in a recent game of the Southern Pacific scenario (this one is even harder than Mexico!) I DID get credit for connecting LA with Wichita, even though the final third of the distance was all AI track. Well, the newspaper headline gave me the credit, at least. I ran out of time on one of my other victory conditions so I can't say I got the credit for sure. I guess what I'm asking is, how does the game define the word "connect" in the victory conditions? Rikki

Heh, heh... well, I don't know how much that will help me with the scenario but it certainly *sounds* like sagacious wisdom to me, and very poetically expressed. Well done. :) Rikki

Wow, thanks Nedfumpkin! Lots of great tips in that post! Interestingly, a lot of what you said are things that I was just beginning to realize myself, but your post confirms things and will certainly helpl quicken the learning process. There were still a few things, though, like locations of industries relative to stations and rivers that I hadn't yet discovered. The big epiphany was your explanation of train routes and how to optimize them for bigger profits. Anyway, thanks again. I look forward to putting this new knowledge to work and seeing the results! Rikki

Ah. OK. And I assume the wheel configuration has no impact on performance beyond what is shown in the speed charts? Anyway, mystery resolved! Thanks, Hawk! :)