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.

We can use ice core records to extrapolate past temperatures. Here's the last 800,000 years: That's 8 glacial/interglacial cycles, with an interval of roughly 100,000 years as mentioned before. As for sunspots, we're actually at a reduced intensity currently. 2011/12 should've been a maxima (the last one was in 2001), but anticipated sunspot levels were not reached. 2010 was the warmest year on record, regardless. There's really no other culprit for our recent temperature record than man. There's not a scrap of a competing theory, because it is obviously not radiatively forced, and the only significant alterations in the surface's radiation budget since the Industrial Revolution has been an increase, then decline in aerosols, and the amplification of the greenhouse effect via anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.

A couple more of my strategies: - I find that for regular trunk lines (the ones that are busiest) selecting locos with higher speed isn't as important as selecting ones with good acceleration - I'm actually OK with running main lines through cities; I build a bypass for freight and waypoint them around so that they don't clog up the urban area. If there's room, I'll also build a turning loop or two so that trains don't have to turn around in the station; they can continue going straight, then loop back (preferably with a right hand turn) onto the main line - By the time I have enough cash, I try and run most of my long-distance pax/mail on dedicated, flattened lines that run as straight as possible - Building multiple stations in big cities is key. I run them like how Paris, London, etc. run in real life: I have different terminals for different directions of travel I was experimenting on the England map. I built radiating outwards from London: one station in the south had a through-track that handled all north-east and southern local traffic. Another station in the west handled all west-bound local and freight traffic. A third one in the north was the terminus for my north-south high speed line. I built two principal lines: London-Oxford-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, and London-Leicester-Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow. There were bypasses around some of the major cities, most notably Birmingham which had previously been incredibly congested and needed two stations, one for the high-speed line. Branch lines connected London to Exeter and Southampton, and Edinburgh to Inverness. Then I built a high speed line that connected London-Newcastle-Edinburgh, with a branch to Birmingham (dedicated stations for each). Long story short, I was able to handle 100+ trains with very little congestion. The real difference this time was just planning ahead for rights of way and routes for the trunk lines. Also, the geography of the map helped too, because I was able to run the high speed line in between the two axes of the other trunk lines without interference or a need for a link across the high speed line where it wasn't diagonal.

Sun spots don't correlate well with the increase in temperature. Milankovitch Cycles occur over too long a time period (~100,000 years) for it to be the cause. Besides, given that the stratosphere is cooling (with devastating effects on ozone concentrations, particularly in the Arctic where there was an ozone hole similar to the one over the south pole for the first time this year), we know global warming isn't radiatively forced. It's that pesky ol' greenhouse effect, that we know exists, and that we're amplifying by emitting greenhouse gases.

The global warming experienced since the Industrial Revolution is most certainly not natural.

Ah, I see what you're saying. I guess that would work really well as a freight/medium pax main line, and then have another, straighter, long pax/mail line.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I don't understand the layout.

I just thought that one of the fun things I try to do with this game is use elaborate track arrangements to reduce congestion and keep trains going. The real problem, map size, can't be changed (your average train has a length of 50-100 km), but some maps are tighter than others. I was just wondering what other people's strategies were to reduce congestion. I use the grid exploit as much as is feasible, bypasses, un-electrified shortcuts on electrified main lines for diesel freight trains, several terminus stations in big cities, etc. Are there any obvious (or not-so-obvious) strategies I'm missing?

In order to turn the grain into food, you have to ship it to another station. You can't even use waypoints to have a train leave the station, and then return. So, attaching another small station to the grain or bakery and then shipping it that short distance would work, but it's far from optimal. Supply/demand are separate, from what I know of the game's mechanics (although supplying a station will help build up the town, and provide you with more passengers and mail). So I believe the answer to your second question is the latter.

Wow. This looks great. Didn't even know mods like this were possible with this game.

Yes, it was. I was surprised that the AI would deliberately choose such a twisting track arrangement.