GuineaPig

This happens after 25 years of operation. Breaks pretty much every company.

To be honest, I've never started this map at Tokyo. I've always begun at Kyoto/Osaka.

Eh, it's taking advantage of the hapless AI. It's not cheating, but I think it is against the spirit of the game.

Yeah, if you set it on expert and add a bunch of AIs, it's paradoxically a lot easier. But I consider that cheating.

So I ended up beating this on Expert fairly leisurely. Took my time building a nice, double-tracked, electrified mainline from Sydney to Cairns which got me most of my income. My secondary mainline from Alice Spring to Darwin was constructed around 1970. The two AIs I was playing with seized Adelaide and Melbourne, which prevented me from expanding from there. Regardless, by '77 I had gold. Didn't seriously connect to the other cities; just built long single track stretches for the connections. I did build a proper connection between my two mainlines, but it didn't see much service because there was no real lucrative long-haul services to exploit, and the Sydney-Brisbane part of my mainline was already overcongested (without the room to fix it).

Wait, really? I'd love to know if there is an actual connection here. Because that would be good to know, and strange.

Whoa whoa whoa. Now we know why you were having so much trouble.

I'll give it a go as well. I seem to remember getting gold, but not sure of the difficulty level.

It still seems otherworldly good. It's fantastic at everything. It takes an engine five times as expensive (and less reliable) in order to best it at passenger service, and even in that case the Eurostar can't handle grades nearly as well. If the GG1 were half as good in real life as the game makes it out to be, it would still be being made. There are plenty of bizarre quirks to the engines in RTII, though. Too many to list, really. I wish it was more easily moddable. I wish TGVs didn't break down more often than mid-19th century locomotives, and could go up hills half as well as them, too. I wish there were low-cost, excellent on-grades locos in the modern era. I wish there was a half-decent passenger diesel in the modern era, too. Or a useable electric before the GG1 showed up.

I love the 2-8-0 as well. I think the game definitely screwed up by making the GG1 so bloody fantastic. It makes electrifying, especially at the time it becomes available, worth way too much versus what the actual costs are. Otherwise, given the slate of diesels that become available in the '40s, there would actually be a reason to go and stay diesel until the E111/Eurostar show up. Often I play without letting myself use the GG1. It's too good. It's a gamebreaker. As for the Mikado, I'm not so fond of it. I need more than two hands to count the number of times, especially when I was a newbie, I bought too many of 'em impressed by their speed and reliability, and ended up bankrupt. They're extremely costly, so much so that you need high-value freight to make 'em worth using. And usually what ends up happening is that my high-value freight is being delivered by Atlantics already (once the Pacific has become available and I don't need them for pax).

It might be interesting to sort of crowd-source a list of the best engines by era. I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive list of someone's (let alone a number of people's) rankings of the various locos, and I would be intrigued to see which locos the various people here who are much better at the game than I prefer.

Yeah, I seem to remember something like that as well. But the answer to your choice should be the Shinkansen Bullet.

Game weakness: AI will never build to a city that has had a station placed there. So not only will they not compete for big hubs or replace destroyed stations/tracks, but they also can allow human players to "cheat" by placing small stations and then deleting them. Nice-to-have: some way of in-game altering the terrain other than by tedious track construction. Dream: being able to do grade separations.

Well that's a clearly credible anecdote. Here's a different one: a skeptical physicist, using funding from the Koch brothers, ended up independently reaffirming temperature data critiqued by denialists. Anecdotes don't prove much one way or the other. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists think anthropogenic global warming is happening. That's what matters. Past warming/cooling has not been driven by greenhouse gases. The chief instrument of long-term climate change is what's called Milankovitch Cycles, a combination of various factors that affect insolation like eccentricity and axial tilt. Greenhouse gases like CO2 were acted as a feedback, released/sequestered by warming/cooling driven by changing insolation, and accelerating/decelerating cooling or warming. So yes, there's more than one cause. The cause of the current warming (man) has not had an influence in the past. Instead of being a feedback reacting to changes in insolation, anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the forcing. Eh, sort of. In temperate climates the extra CO2 will help spur growth, and warming itself will turn ecosystems that historically have had less plant matter, like the Taiga forests of Canada and Russia, into areas with longer growing seasons. But there's also the offset of more droughts and expanding desertification. Given that humans have been emitting more and more amounts of CO2 over the last 250 years, one would've thought that this "balance" or "reaction" would have already manifested itself rather than being purely speculative. Any long-term balance that might be achieved would take likely tens of thousands of years; and would kill most humans in the process.

Well, no there isn't. It's clearly not radiatively forced. There's no other plausible external forcing. The major change within our own atmosphere since the warming began was the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. We know about the greenhouse effect. It doesn't take a genius to put it all together. And if you think the results of 2 degrees C global warming will be "the Arctic being less cold," then you're being willfully ignorant. There's this thing called thermal expansion. There's this thing called ice-albedo feedback. There's going to be droughts and famine and wars over water supply.