jeffryfisher

The game is unbalanced, especially in the early 1800s. Maybe it's just too easy to raise big bucks and build inter-city long lines decades before they emerged in real life. Still, you can make money on freight if the distance is short and the locomotive is cheap. Income shifts somewhat in the "2nd century", and then pax & mail dry up in the 1960s after the announcement of air travel. In my US History map, I gave certain freights some added value: You can reduce the costs of building rails by producing lumber and steel. I created some fuel cost triggers as well. And yes, I separate freight depots from passenger terminals in all but my lowest-traffic towns. It's also a good idea to keep slow freights on their own tracks where they won't be frozen out by a steady stream of express trains overrunning them. Carefully placed diagonal crossings can allow a network of freight lines to be completely isolated from an overlapping net of express lines.

I hear that -- But then we'd definitely need some visual compression on all map scales larger than Metra. Otherwise the trains look to be hundreds of miles long 😮

I just wish the source code had been kept by someone, but between Take2 and Sid Meyer's follow-on company, it was lost

Especially since all we have are old threads now -- But I still look for new messages every day. Open RT2 isn't being worked on, but the wish-list remains for the day when somebody figures out how to launch such a project.

I've enabled it in TSC, but it appeared as a mono-colored model without a skin. Given its cost, dates and effectiveness, it is never the best engine for any use case unless a bunch of other engines are left out of a scenario. I deactivated it again because I was never going to buy one. It's my understanding that it was a switch engine in RL, a use-case that is lost in a game about main line hauling. That may be why it was deactivated by the time RT2 upgraded to TSC.

Try pausing the game while building track and managing trains.

I don't know what you're trying to do. You can't play in an unchanging present. The best you can do is to clamp down on the start year. After that, history happens. You'd probably need to edit the game EXE to alter engine retirement years.

I was unaware of that limit. It sounds like a limitation in the program, so it's probably baked in.

There's also one unused loco in the data, but it's not skinned with this, It might fit though. As I recall, it was a switch engine not well suited for mainline service.

I've never played campaigns, so I don't have any good solutions. 😮 But one brute-force tactic would be to open up your saved game in the editor and see if you can avert the ending (turn off the "campaign" setting or some such). Be sure you save it only under a new name so you don't mess up your saved game. Good luck!

Aha - You're missing a vital factor: underlying terrain. Just as ports need sea terrain squares, logging camps need wooded terrain squares. W Australia is a desert. It doesn't make any sense for logging camps to be there. If you must have some, I suggest doing a little research on real-world logging in the Outback. You might just convince yourself to zero the logging and sawmill settings of your econ regions. If not, then be careful about adding forest (unless your real aim is to create a fantasy Australia that is wet and forested). An alternative is to import finished lumber via your ports.

They also hold space for adjoining stations, and if you have a company build a small or medium station in the editor, extra cells will automatically be reserved on either side of it so it can expand into a terminal later.

My memory is fuzzy, but I think there's a data table in every map that has rows for all building types, even those not placed or allowed, so my guess is that you can "fix" the port data even on a map whose port data has no actions/transactions.

Yes, I that's what I must have meant, since I never bothered to play maps where major cities failed to spawn at the start. I wonder how reserved tiles can keep land clear without spoiling city-spawning, but an industrial building on top of reserved tiles still ruins everything. I really expected my combo to work

You should be able to go a long way with monthly triggers that produce events (consequences). Do some low-effort experiments. By fussing with players and companies in the editor, you might be able to separate ownership from player-management. In addition to stopping stock sales, I think the editor can also set a company dividend and then lock dividend rates. The trick is to allow everything while editing and later block the actions you don't want players to do. Let us know how you do. Good luck! Jeff

Sadly, after placing just two ports near two cities, I have discovered that even when I reserve all of the cells under the ports, both cities fail to generate houses (or anything else other than the ports). The reserved cells looked so promising, but alas they're just another mirage. Planting pre-set industrial buildings is hopelessly bugged

Discussed deep in several threads specific to individual maps, the "no-house" glitch is when a map-maker manually places buildings near a city (or town or village), and then when the map is started, that city fails to auto-generate houses (or anything else). The glitch is actually more general than that; placing buildings not near cities can disrupt auto-generation of rural buildings in an entire econ region. Back in my map-making heyday, this glitch caused me to give up on plopping predetermined buildings, forcing me to skew some industry parameters to almost guarantee that certain important features would generate "randomly" where needed to make a scenario work. Well, I've recently started tinkering with the Amtrak West map (naming my version "CalTrain"). My aim is to have three major private companies on the map at the start, complete with track and stations. As I was happily clicking away to reserve tiles for the track and stations, a thought hit me: What would happen if I plopped an industrial building inside a city radius and then reserved all the cells under it? Would the auto-generator then steer clear, thus avoiding the glitch? I'm going to test this hypothesis by plopping a bunch of buildings in various sized settlements and then starting the map a few times to see how often they fail to generate houses. Then I'll set the reserved X's under all of them to see if that cures the problem. If this works, then it opens up some fun possibilities thought long lost

When I activated refineries (a diesel producer) in the Amtrak West map, passengers appeared on houses again. Apparently the game really is that sensitive to cargo dependencies even if it's just a booster, not a factory input. I've now sunk my teeth into the map, calling my version "CalTrain". I'm going to lay some pre-existing mainlines of SP, UP and ATSF so Amtrak can start by running on their tracks. In order to make it work though, I'll need to hamstring the AI somehow so it can't use passengers. It has been a decade since I was into this, so I can't remember whether that's easy or not...

I'm currently deriving a "CalTrain" map from the "Amtrak West" map to solve a cargo problem in my modded EXE. I want to make it more historical (of course), so I want to build a couple freight companies' pre-existing track. Unfortunately, I'm up against this starting a company problem. I can switch among players, and I have already removed all stock and company restrictions (for the moment), but I still can't find a place to click to start a company. EDIT: Today it finally showed up in the company list box under the original pre-existing company. Maybe because it's a new day and I had reloaded the game and map? Interestingly, passengers had been missing from houses, which I had modded to be affected by diesel after 1958. When I activated refineries (a diesel producer), the passengers were displayed again. Apparently the game really is that sensitive to cargo dependencies even if it's just a booster, not a factory input.

OK, I had a look at both Amtrak West and my spreadsheet. Indeed, it looks like I added a negative booster to house production of passengers, and it appears that the game won't display the passengers as part of "House" or available at stations. It's probably because the map disallowed diesel. This is surprising to me since a lot of boosters could do this to their underlying cargoes on maps. The original map makers must have been careful to always allow fertilizer and grain even if they weren't supplied anywhere. I wonder if any player-mappers ran into this snag when disabling things like fertilizer. One fix you might try is to open Amtrak West in the game's editor and allow diesel in the options. You don't need to put any oil or refineries on the map (although California does actually have both). I'll give that a try next time I have time to play.

Looking back at this, I noticed that your "removing" the '30' caused passengers to boost passengers -- That tells me that you replaced the 30 with a zero (zero is the code for passengers). If you want to have no booster at all, use code 127 like you see in so many lines in that table.

Yes, editing the EXE is tedious, and yes, I'm the one who did so to produce a version described by that spreadsheet. Others have created other versions. It's okay to describe a bug in baby-step detail, because that's how a subtle coding error can be uncovered (and how guesses to cause can be eliminated). Right now, my guess is that there's something about your maps that is causing pax to vanish. Edit: Looking back over the "Small Edits" thread, I am suspicious of whatever you did to change the weight of the post-1958 passenger car. Since you edited the EXE after it left my hands, it's possible that something you changed made those cars vanish (though it's still weird that they only vanish from some maps and not others).

I still don't understand what you saying. Passengers are never "produced" as an output from diesel input. At most, cities could demand diesel, so city growth could be helped if one delivers. However, "removing diesel" from a map does not remove its cargo code from the underlying game data, so its absence won't bugger the game. At worst, players simply lack a tool by which to stimulate city growth. A better path would be to read through the events in your map to see which ones have effects on passenger supply. I have more time these days, so if you have one map in particular that you want to play, point it out and I'll take a look.

I'm pretty sure that the bonus would be granted to a company by ID, so it would cease to function when that company ID was retired.

I don't think the modeling is that sophisticated, so demand for coffee and demand for produce should depend only on the building's parameter and what you deliver. Likewise, delivering lots of aluminum will not boost demand for something to put into the cans, nor does a lack of contents put a lid on demand recovery for aluminum. Something else fun: If a dual-input building gets only one of it inputs, credits for that commodity pile up in the building. If the building then replaces that input with something else, the credits carry over, becoming credit toward the new material (e.g. decades of wood could become aluminum). I can't recall if there are any examples in the vanilla game; it may only be one of my modded buildings that can create that condition.