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.)

I have no idea how you manage to do this. If I'm not directly in control of a railroad, the AI mucks about with the consists of the cars. If, while I'm wrecking the enemy railroads, I unpause, the AI that takes over my railroad while I'm gone will screw up my routes. And even if I take over an enemy railroad to fix a problem with it and make it run more efficiently, the AI player still screws it up the second I leave back to my railroad. So could you please explain to me what I'm not getting? Are you buying their railroads? Because that doesn't make sense that you'd run those parts unefficiently and waste your money. And if you're taking them over for a moment, as soon as you leave the routes get changed. It really seems to be to be a helluva lot more efficient to just wipe them out and destroy all their track and just build your own, much more intelligently laid track.

You should double-track most of the time, but there are times to single-track, which will save you money in building and maintenance. 1. A spur that's only ever going to see one train at any one time. This could be a single train assigned to it or multiple trains that have enough cargo to carry over a long enough distance that they never meet in this area. 2. A shortcut-line that will only ever be traveled in one direction. Be careful with this, because shortcut-lines occasionally get used in ways you don't intend. 3. When you're so strapped for cash that you simply can't afford double-tracking. Generally this can happen early in the scenario when you're overreaching a little, trying to link up cities that either you shouldn't be worrying about so soon or you have no real choice because of the way the map is. 4. If you're feeling tricky, circumstances may arise where you can build a single-track loop and then run trains only in the one direction. You can find these tips and more on my handy-dandy RT2 strategy guide, located at http://rt2p.mopjockey.com. I do occasionally update or adjust it.

Ok, here's my experience, and a way you can test if you'd like. Only a train that has a loaded passenger or mail car can be robbed. You can test by going into the editor and setting robberies to insane levels, use a cheat code to give yourself a bunch of money, and then start running a ton of trains. Count the number of robberies in a given amount of time (probably 5 years is enough to give a good statistical balance), then add a caboose and count. It's POSSIBLE that the number of p/m cars could affect the chances of robberies, so there's something else to test for. Breakdowns are affected by the load. The more the load, the higher the breakdown chance. This gets really noticeable when going up a steep hill. Theoretically, since a caboose adds weight, it should increase breakdown chances, but since they specifically say it reduces them, I would assume it does, but I don't use cabooses. Again, you can set up your scenario and run a bunch of unreliable trains and count the number of breakdowns, then add cabooses (cabeese?) and count again. You'll probably need a good 5 years or so to run this for statistical balancing purposes. So, if you run JUST an engine, there's no chance of being robbed, and the chances of breakdown are small. If you throw a caboose on it, you slow it down a little, but you should also reduce its already small chances of breakdown. (No load means unlikely to break down.) That's my experience. You could read my strategy guide to find out more of my experiences. ;D

Yes, definitely post modding instructions! Since OP has found his problem and this thread is already hijacked, I'd like to comment on the mod that was posted about: Manager costs: By the time you can afford to pay for the big guys, you don't really need discounts on stations, track, and engines. The preponderance of bonuses to passengers means you need to be sure you're hauling a lot of them to make up for the increased costs in other areas. Or, you can grab a cheaper manager while they're available and just hold onto him, whichever is the most useful. Bond amounts: Out-froggin-standing! I'd say you don't need more than a bond amount greater than $2 million, since the maximum you can borrow is $10 million. That's 5 clicks instead of 20. Purchase price for industries: I'm going to disagree with you here. I know what you mean, but you misunderstand the point of buying industries. A given industry is only capable of paying back up to about 25% of its purchase price in a single year, and then only if you deluge it to the point where the station isn't paying much for the cargo. The money you're thinking of is what you get whether you buy the industry or not. According to your model, it would be pointless to buy an industry because it would never pay for itself; you'd only buy one to make sure it didn't go out of business (sucks to have a critical industry disappear). Further, what you've done is prevent the AI from stealing industries from you. You gotta have some reason to hate them! Above, I said the industry pays up to about 25% of its purchase price. (That is, a $1,000,000 Nuclear Plant can earn you about $250,000 a year if well supplied, but the price paid for shipping the Uranium and Waste is likely to go down, meaning you're not really making this much.) When you modified the prices, did these payoffs also go up? I just assumed there were fixed values, but they might actually be percentages.

Using it okay on mine. On previous comp, with a large screen, I could window it. I've got a 1440x900 screen now and it won't window, even though that's PLENTY of space for the window.

That's what the word "usually" was for. ;D IME, buying a railroad only gives the owner money with which to start a new railroad, and this time he'll own more of the stock so you can't buy it from him. I instead get to 50% of theirs and mine, then pause, takeover, destroy, go back to my railroad, and resume. This way, I make money (or buy down my debt) and there's a good chance the stock value tanks enough that the other player sells it for a massive loss and can't afford to start a new railroad. If my company needs money, I issue stock every year, or toss out some bonds. Or I may look for knots that need untangling. Or sometimes I just have to wait it out. But I've almost never gained anything by buying another railroad and using it.

I have never seen a train get robbed that had no passengers or mail on it. Same for an train with all empty P/M cars. (This would also mean you should never mix P/M with other cargo.) Also, it's been my experience that industries produce at a fairly steady rate, with modifications based on economy and if it can be "fed", like cattle being fed grain. There may be a slight variation in there too, but generally, they're as steady as the economic conditions allow. When it comes to Mail, the production rate is low, and it just seems to pop up at random times because of that. I've never done it, but I'd bet that if you dedicated a train to it and red-lighted it (to load it all the way), you'd have a fairly regular-running train. The payoff is so small and the pickup window is too, so I don't usually bother with it; I get so much more out of passengers and regular freight.

RT3 - flop Locomotion - flop SM's Railroads - big flop Transport Tycoon - nope A-Train - flop So is there anything out there which delivers the game play of RT2, but has a less idiotic player/editor interface? Or something that delivers on the promise of Transport Tycoon, but is actually playable?

On the contrary, I feel it makes the game a lot more playable. I could tolerate the occasional breakdown if they had a sensible frequency and duration, but wrecks happen WAAAYY too often, and you get no chance to see exactly what train crashed to know what engine you need to buy to replace it with. As if that wasn't bad enough, when you replace an old train, the replacement typically needs to be replaced IMMEDIATELY 2 or 3 times to get its breakdown chance down to the correct level - for some reason, we're buying old trains at new-train prices. I once got a map to a point that, even with a lot of GG1's (like 100) running about, I was getting multiple breakdowns per year, and a crash about every other year. A real PITA if you're trying for a long-duration map. So I turn that off, and heartily recommend it to all who want to play a game about economics and drawing lines, and not one about bug-ridden crash-code.

Buying another railroad is usually a bad proposition if your goal is to make money. First, their track tends to be laid out much more inefficiently than necessary, second their stations tend to need either upsizing or moving into proper positions, and third, their engines tend to be the worst possible choice - the AI chooses engines based on unloaded top speed and doesn't consider the terrain. All this is because the AI doesn't have to make money the way you do, they just get it. I haven't paid close attention, but it seems to me they get a stipend plus inflated delivery charges and pay less maintenance. The reasons you buy another railroad are either because it's part of the scenario, because you need a ton of track built that would cost you too much to build yourself in the limited time available (again, a scenario reason), or because you just have a vendetta against those dirty cheating AI players. The moment you buy it, that track now has to operate by the rules, which means it's going to lose you a lot of money. VERY rarely is a railroad doing poorly enough for you to buy a majority of stock, THEN doing well enough you can buy it for its large cash reserve that its player is too afraid to divert into dividends. As to the original question, thomasjordan has provided the bulk of the right answer, but there's a little more to it: if you're in the red, you're paying interest on that money. This applies whether it's your RR operating fund or your personal cash, and the interest percentage is huge. This steadily drains your money, so that if you're 10M cash in debt, you need to be earning a considerable amount from your dividends and paycheck just to break even. Also, having a high dividend percentage alone doesn't help. A $50 dividend paid when you own 1% of the company isn't worth as much as a $10 dividend when you own 50% of the company. So you have to own a large share of a given company AND receive a high dividend to make a lot of money. This means you either go into a lot of debt (and risk getting flattened in a downturn) or you buy slowly and run the risk of having your company getting bought out from under you. Complicating it all is that your dividend payments are dependent on how much money your railroad can make. By the time you're M$1 cash in debt, your salary is pretty unimportant - 90%+ of your income should be coming from dividends. A profitable railroad is a money engine. Since AI railroads get unfair bonuses, buying their stock often allows you to make a little money off their work too, so buying stock in them isn't a bad idea. (Complicating THIS is that AI railroad profit seems inversely proportionate to your investment in them, the ba*ds.)