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RSimpkinuk57

Fedaykin
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  1. Jeffry, About mail: 1. I am quite convinced that "300 days to deliver" means only 200 days to put it aboard a train before it vanishes. 2. I am not convinced that having a post office makes any difference in that regard (whatever it may do to protect revenue from what mail IS collected). 3. I would like it to be 400 days to collect. 4. If one has a choice between leaving some mail behind or leaving some passengers behind, then as things are now it nearly always pays far better to leave the mail. I would like the mail to be worth somewhat more than the passengers (until about the 1960s). That needn't mean higher rates for mail than for passengers; make demand recovery as fast for mail as for passengers and the lower production rate will keep stations' mail Demand# at a higher level. On the more general point: my train arrives at a station and unloads. I select it, see that it is scheduled to take 3 carloads of passengers (for example) but there are 4 waiting, so order a fourth car added. In the time it takes to load the train, one carload has vanished. That is tantamount to the game saying, "Ha ha, I lied". Not acceptable (in the ideal version we are dreaming up). When the load is so close to vanishing that it cannot be picked up, it shouldn't be shown. On with the wish list: smaller ports (so as to fit more places on maps). Not 4x4 cells of ocean plus one of beach where the jetty comes ashore, just 2x2 (the platform with crane) with at least one corner on beach, at least one over ocean, and none on anything else.
  2. Ah, now I understand. So shares are there to be bought, defending the price, if the victim can afford them. Fair dinkums. Leave things as they are. Cargo vanishing from trains: the way to prevent that (except for passengers and mail unless from ports) is to buy the industry it comes from, but of course not all maps allow that. My next undesirable: cargo at a station expiring during the time it takes to marshal the cars you've ordered added to a train (a train already there). Related to which: cars loaded at a station unload if you re-marshal, so their cargo can be lost too. Nice-to-have: replace "days to deliver" on car info box with "days to collect" (accurately!), and make post offices and the like explicitly extend the days-to-collect. More work - an indicator bar under each carload waiting at a station showing how close it is to expiring. Another nice-to-have (maybe you know already how to do this by changing data tables): make mail more valuable, and longer lasting. From what I read, government mail contracts were really important to railroads, even before adding the express delivery - parcels to a Brit like me - that RRT mail cars must also represent. Small towns could be satisfied by a daily passenger-and-mail run (one train a year at RRT scale), so the expiry time should never be less than a year (plus some margin for error).
  3. A nice-to-have gameplay change I'd like: in Britain when our railways were being built in the 19th century, there were no sophisticated analysts working out company book values: share price was governed by the dividend relative to the bank rate. A chairman who tried to retain all the profits for expansion would find the share price dropping so the company would be unable to raise money on the stockmarket - or the bond market. He'd also risk being voted out by angry shareholders, if he withheld dividends so as to crash the share price and buy up all the shares himself. On the other hand, George Hudson could take out a bond, pay half of it out as a dividend, then on the basis of the resulting high share value issue more shares and take out more bonds. What is my suggestion: (1) stock price should either depend on dividend rate (mainly or entirely) or be subject to a ceiling dependent on dividend rate (2) the Board of Directors should insist on increasing a "too low" dividend if the company is profitable. regards, Richard
  4. Hi Jeffry, I certainly have caught the original game red-handed deleting cargoes along with buildings, and I think TSC too. Buildings vanish (at random, depending on economic growth and how well a city is being served) at year end only. Losing the odd house from a city happens more often than losing a whole farm, mine, port or mill, and can be spotted by an empty passenger car on what had been a full train. Another undesirable: laying new track connected to old can change the grade of old track - for the worse - even several cells away from the junction. (Sometimes just inspecting grades can change them, especially I think if there is a train on the track, but relaying the track - at zero cost - often gets round this.) Something that feels wrong to me, but would be a gameplay change: I once tried short selling just for the fun of it, and noticed I could keep a negative number of shares in a company for the rest of the game (and had to if, subsequently, the target company bought back, or an AI tycoon bought, the last shares left in the open market). In my opinion when you short sell in one month, and don't cover your position by buying real shares the next, then your stockbroker should convert your shortfall into a cash deduction from your account, at the new share price, at the end of the second month. (Since this is cancelling an attempted sale, as opposed to an actual purchase, it should not affect the stock price.) Separate question arising: can you short sell a company when there are no shares left with outside investors? If so, should it be alllowed, seeing that the target cannot defend its share price by buying shares?
  5. Undesirable: Game Play Trains that stop and wait for others should not "fade out" except for higher-priority trains (whether coming up behind, or crossing their path at a junction). This to prevent the perpetual queue-jumping (which human players can micro-manage, but which can completely mess up the AI on steep hills) whereby train 2 catches up train 1, stops, then cannot restart because train 3 behind, still going, is "treading on its tail". Game Weakness: AI not building stations outside cities to collect from industry out in the country. (I happen to like RT3's solution of the industry arranging its own transport to cities.) Nice-to-have: a zero-cost station type with no coverage, for somewhere to put e.g. extra sand (on steep grades) or water. Or some other way of achieving this with only the tower itself to pay for. Nice-to-have: when replacing a building (hotel, restaurant or the station itself) with a larger one, get back half the value of the old building. E.g. build a large station from scratch: cost 200. Build a medium station 100; upgrade it later to large, pay not a further 200 but only 150 for a total historic cost of 250. Nice-to-have: replace the "50% extra when supplied with X" by a simple, like everything else, "1 X -> 1Y" (e.g. 1 grain -> 1 cattle). Maybe keeping the free 2 a year (why 3 a year for cattle when 2 for everything else?). Maybe a limit (max 2 grain turned into cattle each year, plus the freebies) but then similar limits on other process industries' outputs.
  6. another Undesirable: Game Play If an industry goes out of business, then of course it stops accepting or producing cargo; but cargo from it already on a train (perhaps two years old, two-thirds of its way across the continent to meet a "loads hauled" objective) should survive. (Ditto passengers and mail from vanished houses)
  7. Hi Jeffry, organising my thoughts could take a while, so I'll start trickling a few at a time.... regards, Richard Undesirable: Game Play Builidng electric single track, then doubling it, is cheaper than building double electric. The company must be paying for doubling the rails but not for doubling the wires. % foreign track should be calculated separately for each car from loading point to unloading. In the Trans-Australia scenario I discovered by accident that if I carry loads on the "common" track as invited, but stop to pick up extra loads as soon as I am on my own track, then my company is "charged" whatever % it is of zero payment for the cargo staying on the train. Then when it all unloads at Perth (say), all loads have come on 100% my track since the last station stopped at so no foreign track fees are deducted.
  8. "mxmtech" You can always use the editor to check the victory conditions. If I remember correctly, on that scenario it is an annual test and current personal net worth is always used, even if that is lower than you had it earlier. ... regards, Richard
  9. I'm sure a high-salary manager will never consider applying to a tin-pot railroad. Nor a low-salary manager to a big railroad. 15 million a year sounds like big to me.
  10. PS - as for the TGV, I cannot see the point of having the "1955 electric TGV prototype" in there at all, given that we already have the Shinkansen Bullet train from 1966. What were the game developers thinking? A French BB9200 (1957: dc) or BB16000 (1958: ac) electric locomotive would have been nice, with its ordinary service top speed of about 100mph (equal to the game's GG1 performance: was the latter really that good that early?). A British HST125 as the diesel contemporary to the TGV-Sudest would also have been nice.
  11. Jeffry, just a minor point of historical interest. Yes, Mallard's speed record was a one-off specially-staged event in which the engine was driven hard enough to break down on its way home. The engine itself, though, was a standard production model: one of the LNER's A4 class, of which 35 were built 1935-38 (following on from 79 engines of classes A1 and A3, 1922-35). A further class (confusingly reusing the A1 designation) after WW2, when the emphasis was on slower trains with more passenger cars, controversially tinkered with the design for allegedly cheaper maintenance and/or better reliability. Two of the other three main British railways at the time (LMS and Southern) had roughly equivalent designs also put into series production in the 1930s and 1940s (respectively). The LNER DID have a one-off experimental engine built in 1929, no 10000 (never given a name), with a ship-building firm's boiler giving double the steam pressure of conventional railway designs. The experiment was abandoned in 1937, after which the engine, rebuilt with an ordinary boiler, looked and behaved like an A4 except for retaining its 4-6-4 wheel arrangement. ..regards, Richard
  12. Akuenzi, by "overshoot" I meant that, (for example) having taken logs WEST from camp to mill, I'd look to deliver the resulting lumber somewhere EAST of the starting point...Richard
  13. When people here write about "rot", I've always taken that to include not just loss of revenue but also the way that, if you leave cargo uncollected for long enough, it won't be there to collect any more (most noticeable with erratically-arriving mail). ..Richard
  14. My guess - and that is all it is - is that you have used up all the allowed-for company ids and are stuck .. Richard
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