Another East China robbery

[Rikki]

Okay, maybe someone can explain this to me.

I was playing the East China scenario.  VSeems next to impossible at the Expert setting so to win I really need to plan carefully.  After being reduced to a hobo a number of times I finally managed to build a fairly robust rail system about halfway through the game.  The cornerstone of my plan in this game was linking the steel mills in the northwest mountains to Jinan, where there was an auto plant, which was key to winning since you have to export a certain number of autos to win.  I had planned toward this from year one, and so far everything was going fine.

Then, after getting sidetracked for a few years (no pun intended) by some company takeovers and building the toy and clothing industries (also required for victory) I began to notice I hadn't been seeing any autos on my trains for awhile.  I kept trying different things like specifying autos for my trains and checking the color overview to be sure there was a demand for them.  I finally went to check on the status of the auto plant and to my surprise... it had disappeared!  So I had to re-route all my steel to Beijing, where there was another auto plant, but this cost resources and time which ultimately led to my losing the game, bigtime.

So what the heck happened to my car factory?  Now, I've noticed an occasional logging camp disappear if it was unconnected and thus losing money, but that factory was poised for high capacity production.  Incidentally, a few games later it happened again, also in Jinan again.

Is there a game reason for this or might this be a bug of some kind?  It's rather hard to plan if we don't know whether a factory will stay on the map.

Rikki