lly

Pretty sure those of us who are still playing have the most up-to-date version available (and if they don't, they can pick one up if they're just dying to build the Transafricain). This should be perfect, so I'm so glad I stopped by here. =) Thanks, guys! edit: Oh... it doesn't work with the Steam version of the same form of the game? That'll make it harder for newbies. If I get really hung up on that, though, I can always ask for pointers in what to look for in modding that version. (I'm old enough to have the originals.)

That might very well be it. Re: Ethiopia, no, I didn't make that map. It's a very fun one, even though it's missing any events and some of the names are off. If I finish editing it into a proper treatment of the Imperial Ethiopian, I'll post something here. [i've actually gotten distracted trying to make an 1880 map of the Dakar to Djibouti run, but that's a 100 x 500 area and I'll probably get distracted again—e.g., by that RT3 scenario—before I finish. Besides, the way the scenario would make sense would be to have enough troops carted into Mahdist Sudan permitting a rewrite of Fashoda. I don't think, however, that there's a way to force the barracks to produce troops any earlier than 1905, by which time everything's over and the path is blocked.]

Recently picked up RT2 again and started banging around on the old unfinished Ethiopian map. Given how interesting the actual French project was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rail_transport_in_Ethiopia), I might turn it into a proper scenario. I was curious, though: There are Africa-long maps in the base game and a few player-made corrections of those maps, but I can recall another scenario that only had the still-unfinished middle stretch of the Cape-to-Cairo railway as its objective: it was probably colonial-period but covered eastern Zaire, western Tanzania, southern Sudan, and Uganda and Rwanda and Burundi between them. Can anyone remember what I'm talking about or link to it? (Fair notice: My memory might be off and it might be a RT3 map. That said, I can't find it at the usual map sites or via Google-fu, so I thought I'd ask the guys who still come by here.)

@Normally I had two or three AIs that I couldn't control. There's always one who does it right off the bat. The others, it's just a matter of destroying their companies before they can build up any equity. But again, it seems weird to me. Unless you can find a way to mark them as nationalized (which would fit their horrid planning and track-laying skills,) having autonomous companies seems to buck the wallowing-in-socialism the game seems geared towards. Atlas can shrug, but he can't move the rails he already laid or keep them out of public hands if the government has a mind to them. @I goofed more then once in accumulating too much debt. @My AI's debt doesn't count against my RR for a win. Only the debt of my RR counts against me. Again, should be more of a feature than a bug. Unless you present it more as fending off the Commies, there's no reason to keep your company books clean. In an Enron scenario, the daughter companies eventually explode so badly they bring down the mother; that can't happen in-game. In a Taggart Transcontinental scenario, you may have full ownership of your own rail (and somehow won the PR battle keep it yours,) but the market should be closed: you'd be fighting the moochers, looters, and liars, not buying them out. (Appropriate events as they drown in their own overhead and mismanagement, though.) Taking advantage of the government trough through a subsidiary would seem to offend her moral rectitude.

Meh. 'Illegals' and Acorn running around in the 19th century seems more like a wacky conservative scenario than a socialist one. It's hard for me to see why the period unionizers & concerns about the Chinese / Polish / Irish / Italians / et al. don't fit the exact same bill. The 'Illegal' one is especially hard to understand since right now in the scenario Mexico -doesn't exist-. Played through it: the AI who always starts his own fully controlled company somehow managed to interrupt my electric rail into California, requiring me to break out the hex editor on the saved game to shift his stock to me so I could merge and bulldoze it. Afterwards went like a breeze until I realized I couldn't repay the debt accumulated from other companies. Shifted the 100s of millions the company was making to the dividend, but could only start a fully controlled company worth $100m tops, so I did a second one and merged them only to remember there's a haul requirement. Still had a decade+ to go, but meh... can do without relaying all that track. Personally, even keeping the scenario topical, the premise doesn't fit. Socialists would simply control all the companies from the beginning; if it's socialism lite (populist oligarchy) and there's stock market manipulation, you'd have to share the wealth around (events bumping up overhead in exchange for political favors and access; is it even possible to require the AI also be rich?) and no one would be allowed to exempt himself by keeping his railroad privately owned (-including the player-: unless the rails are fully nationalized, there should be antitrust events breaking the company up into regional companies; maybe the player gets to choose which region to stay in control of and loses control of the track in the other states to the AI.) Debt should be a -good- thing. I see that the AI companies are rewarded for bankruptcy, which is a good start, but massive, unservicable debt (which is currently a scenario-killer) should be one of the goal requirements. The player should -have- to figure out a way to accumulate 200m or so in debt. The whole point of the way financial conglomerates have been acting for the last few decades has been using political connections to shift risk onto the taxpayer and profit into their own pockets. If their debt doesn't affect everyone else, they might allow the company to fail, but if everyone's already bought into them, society has no choice but to bail them out. Should also be more protectionist jingoism (possibly affecting ability of the player to invest south of the border; I think you could make Mexican factories more profitable, but at the same time use events to punish the players for taking advantage using an American-incorporated company (ie, one with track or industry north of the border.))

>In my own scenario, I have a choice presented at company start: pick a nationality. Territory access will follow from that choice. Could you print it? or link to the scenario that has it?

With period English names, more accurate intro (;D), and the Bavarian Georg Platner v. the perennially overreaching Napoleon III. This is a .rar compression of a RT2Plat .mp2 file, but it doesn't use any special features that separate it from a simple .map. One improvement the scenario could use would be the ability to create the Chemins de fer Orientaux for Nappy Jr. with full rights in Turkey but none in Greece. But at the moment, it seems that I can only grant AI companies the same traffic rights as the player (ie, either both start with no rights anywhere or both start in Greece.) Surely there's a way to fix that, but I can't seem to find it. Working on a fuller treatment of the idea (including more accurate city and industry siting, the gradual expansion of Greek territories, seizures by hostile forces during the Balkan and world wars, destruction of track by the Brits and Germans, etc.) but will probably need help with some of the events for it.

Not to start off on the wrong foot, but having just registered, it's on my mind. I appreciate the maps and I hope to be able to ask for help with modding RT2, but c'mon. . . this isn't a bank, it's not my primary email address, and it's not my primary networking portal. No hacker is interested in using accounts to attack the site; no friend of mine would bother vandalizing it. There is absolutely NO legitimate reason to require anything beyond the 11-digit default I already have memorized for unimportant sites, and requiring something unique just means six weeks from now when I accidentally clean my stored passwords out with the other cookies I'll have to register a new account. So please, if you could, sit your IT guy down and tell him thanks for his diligence but we can get along just fine (better, in fact) with the six-char minimum. j.