I've been playing this map for a while now, basically 'went for it' on a first try and got a textile mill in Perth, a port in Bunbury with a cotton farm sitting right on top of it, but not a whole lot else. I have to say, I appreciate the challenge of this map, but otherwise, feel like it's a bit too extreme. These one horse towns simply DO NOT grow in a lot of cases. Perth started at 4 houses, went to 5, then to 6, then back to 5 (!?) despite me absolutely slaughtering it with every possible resource I could access. I've managed to get Katanning to town status, but outside of Perth and Bunbury, these three are all I have. It's now 1904, and things are slowly coming unglued as my first trains age themselves to replacement. There's nowhere to even move these goods to when I finally manage to make them.
This map is not so much challenging as it is just a long frustrating slog. It's grossly unrealistic IMO....pumping a city full of all available resources should do something, and here it just doesn't do anything. Expanding to adjacent territories is impossibly expensive, and the industries that do pop up randomly are a dairy processor (with only available dairy in queensland), a timber mill with all the logging camps located in Adelaide thousands of kilometers away, and the ubiquitous and useless paper mills. None of the AI companies have managed to expand beyond 2 cities, and 3 of 5 have shuttered ages ago.
I think this map can really be improved a lot.
