TheDS

This particular scenario is wacky. You're making a LOT more money than you normally would in a "regular" scenario, but that's because there are wacky and sudden losses which come out of nowhere. Pretty sure the designer just threw it together and never playtested it.

Whether or not showing up at their office is a good idea depends on the company, but most likely is a bad idea. Frex, I recall a few years ago some of the Steve Jeckson games people mentioning on their forum how unsettled they are when fans show up wanting to see the place. it's not a store, it's an office, and they're trying to get work done, and I suppose quite a few of SJG's fans are a bit scary in person. Many celebrities are also quite paranoid of their fans (some for good reason). If you can get a hold of someone over the email, that's safest. A snail mail letter would be next choice. The phone would be the next choice if they've published a phone number. Showing up uninvited would be an absolute last ditch effort, and then only if you personally know someone who is there. It's a shame. I still get about a hundred hits a month on my RT2 strategy article (but I can't tell you how many people actually read it and how many reach it by accident or immediately hit the back button), so there's a small market, I'm sure.

I think this is one of those rare instances where it was treated like two right-turning trains. I can't say I recall a pair of left-turning trains in the manner you describe stopping unless one was in fact going straight. But I've slept a few times since the last time I played, so I could be remembering wrong.

Try the Wayback Machine. http://archive.org/web/web.php Sometimes it helps, sometimes not.

Other scenario-specific messages DO often have meanings... but not always. I like to load the scenario into the editor and take a look at the events so I don't have so many nasty surprises. A "toilet paper shortage" may just be a historical event with no effects, or it may be a bump in paper production or price (or reduction), or it may apply to something else entirely.

Thanks! Now I don't feel so bad for holding on to Rudolph Diesel for so long.

Rails Across America is pretty good, except for its game-breaking flaws. If they'd correct the routing algorithms, I'd probably be playing that all the time. You can do a little bit of tweaking. I found out it's not a matter of capacity... well, I suppose I could have made the lines near-infinite capacity and that would have taken care of it, but then there would've been no point to buying extra rails and signals. The game works reasonably well until you create a loop or shortcut, and then everything gets hosed. Hard NOT to. People suggest building ONLY single track, but those people clearly have no idea how the game was intended to be played. And it's well out of development, so no patches since pretty much the day it was released. I gave OTTD a try, and it's even worse than TT. Lots of promise, none of it delivered on. I'm not looking to be overwhelmed and confused, I'm looking to be entertained. TT promises to be RT but with additional types of transport available than just trains. It fails. I gave that railroad pioneer a try. Can't remember why I rejected it, don't have the time to find out again. RT and RT2 were "good games" in that they are easy to learn and understand, but you can still do complex things with them. RT2 does get a bit complex in certain situations, especially if you've grown to over 100 engines, but it's still possible to hit pause and take a few minutes to figure out what's going on. RAA was good like that too, except for that critical flaw in the route-finder. TT, I couldn't even get into. I couldn't make heads or tails of what I was supposedly doing.

Dang; two years and no one has any suggestions.

Some good topics here. I had suspected that servicing a city increased its growth. I know in a scenario I made, delivering food increased the overall city growth rate, and every scenario as a growth rate, but being able to affect individual cities was something I just couldn't be sure of one way or the other since the values are so gradual. I'd be interested in knowing the odds of losing an industry too. Frex, I've been setting up industiral supply chains, and before I can make them profitable, there's no use (or sometimes no profit) to buy up all the industries involved until they've been serviced a while. Then suddenly, a critical industry disappears and now there's no where else for my trains to go. It sometiems also happens when I've been building up to get TO that city, and now that I can reach it, the critical industry is gone and no where else of use. Sometimes frequent saves fix the problem and sometimes they don't. My experience with short-selling is that there's rarely an opportunity to do it. I'm usually trying to buy stock to take over a company, and the only time to short-sell is when I've taken it over, destroyed the company, and sold off all the stock. There SEEMS to need to be about a 2:1 ratio of short-sold stocks to unowned stocks in order for you to short. Frex, you need for there to be at least 3 unowned shares for you to short-sell one. This isn't hard and fast, something else controls it, but I don't know what. I'd guess it has to do with value, and whatever controls how many stocks are bought each time you click BUY (or sell when you click SELL). Sometimes you can get one of the AI players to start shorting you, and then you buy up your stock and a lot of his money goes down the drain. If you buy up the remainder of your stock, he has to do margin calls and rebuy what he sold and didn't own... at a higher price. You keep buying until he's had to rebuy everything, then you sell a few shares to lure him back in. Next month, he shorts you, and you snap up all the stock again. Rinse and repeat. It's expensive for both of you, but him more than you, and you can often dislodge an AI from having a large safety net to having a large debt. But they don't always go for it. Sometimes the buggers buy instead of short, and then you're paying them dividends. One thing I did just find out for sure: when a company gets liquidated, you DO NOT get your shares bought back. That is, the shares and any money you paid (or received from shorting) will disappear. So if you bought up a company, JUST IN CASE it recovers (which they sometimes do), but it gets liquidated, your money is gone. Or, if you short a company, and it can't recover, you've stolen some cash!

I'm pretty sure he's right, that the ONLY place where you can choose to liquidate is in the game options. There's a scenario option that's supposed to prevent players from starting a second company, but it doesn't work the way I want it to. I think it's a bug; if I unseat a player, if he's got enough money he can start a new railroad. Punk!

The game kinda is set with certain values in mind. You can't willy nilly make such huge changes. One thing you could try is changing the scale from years to days in the scenario editor. Then IIRC your clock tracks hours instead of months. This would do the most toward helping the feeling, assuming the change doesn't muck with anything else. Otherwise, just pretend the months are hours. You're not allowing the player to build track, are you? One last thought: the ledger assumes each cell of track is 10 miles. In my Florida map (unreleased so far) the actual scale is about 1 mile per cell; I created a status event to report the number of cells as miles of track (doubling for double-track). You might try that and ignore the other value.

Hi, Littlebee! Sorry about the difficulty. For some reason, a day or two ago Google blocked access to it. I'm trying to ask them why, but they don't make it easy. I'd guess someone didn't like that I used the word "God" or that I called his pet idea stupid or something else equally inane. (Or it could be that one of my stalkers has found a new way to harass me.) Until they deign to tell me what's wrong, or otherwise unblock it, we're a little stuck. I'm kinda in the middle of something right now, but I may be moving the article directly to my site in the near future to allow me to more easily post example pictures and such in the file, and then I don't have to worry so much about it, plus I can then see how many people are reading it! I created a shortcut URL to the document: http://rt2p.mopjockey.com which will always point to the article, or at least to a page on my site that points to the article. Of course, it's not working right this second because of the aforementioned google thing. I know this is a lot to ask, but if you can have enough patience to come back in a few days, perhaps no longer than a week, it should be available again at the link I just gave you. (In fact, I'm going to see if I can change the link in the previous post to the same thing.) Hopefully I'll be able to get it all handled by then. Thanks for your interest, I appreciate that you took a moment to remind me of this thread and let me know you care.

Changing the title was the easiest thing. I'm happy.

I've got an extensive strategy guide for RT2, linked up in my sig, if you're one of these people who'd enjoy a trip down memory lane and amp your skills a few more notches.

Cogeo's list is right, but let me add a little more information. At the end of every third month (March, June, September, December), the quarter ends and your company pays its stock dividends (if any). However, at the START of every third month the game checks to see if the economic condition changes. Thus, if you think the economy is going to go up, buy your stocks before then and you'll get a small boost in their value. Likewise, if you think they're going down, sell before then to save a little money. If your margin buying is tight, a down-shifting economy will kill your player's stockvalue just enough that you go deep into the hole and maybe never come out. At that point, you've often got to issue a bond and use your company to buy back stock, or if you're good, you've got enough stock in some other company and can jump to them and robber-barron them to save yourself. (And hopefully you've got enough money to get back.) MOST of the time, the prime rate will tell you which of the 5 economic conditions you're in, but there are a few rare scenarios that adjust the prime rate a point or two. If you know you're playing one of those, and they bump it down, then when you're in Boom times, you make 0% interest on your cash on hand! Last little tip: When the economy does poorly, track-building costs go down, and when it does well, they go up. I don't know if maintenance does too, but it makes sense. In a bad economy, anyone is willing to work for scraps. I've got a lot more tips in my strategy guide, which is linked up in my sig. (I'm also selling off a bunch of games on Ebay this week; check that out too if you'd like.)