Hi

[thomasjordan]

After a very long hiatus, I've begun playing TSC again, and enjoying it as much as I did 6 - 7 years ago.  Nice to see there is still a small community of active players.

[steve39]

Funny, that, me too!  :)

Mind you, my scenario-designing skills have atrophied somewhat...  :(

I've got my eye on a map with wonderful topography but can't for the life of me come up with a fresh angle.  I've always liked the strategy aspects that form a core in RT2.TSC and hated RT3 for the same reason!       

 

[Gwizz]

Steve39, what map that be.

For map making, I've picked a map and a period of time.  I went to online libraries in major citys that were on the map and searched for newspaper articles of the time period for ideas.  I was surprised how well news were covered in the old days.  Not like todays newspapers that are controled by people who control what news they want us to see.

[steve39]

Gwizz,

Yep, you're dead right.  I've done the historic, geograhic and economic analyses but all good scenarios need a "core idea" around which the whole thing can be developed; I just haven't found it yet! 

I'd rather not disclose the country I'm looking at for now, if I may, and will only say that the terrain, economy and history are unusual and the whole thing is quite difficult; this is almost certainly why it's not been visitied before!  A couple of possibilities have floated by but the eureka moment hasn't found me yet....  Good scenarios take time, please bear with me!  :)

[Gwizz]

Searching for that right idea is part of the fun.

[RTPlayer]

I've been working on editing the campaign map that has you taking Roosevelt on a whistle-stop tour of the northwest (where I live), because the map "Rooseveltings" gave me the idea.  You see, while "Rooseveltings" is an interesting map to play, the economics are a bit off (the presence of the huge megalopolises in the eastern regions, the overall large size of cities and huge volume of passenger traffic, etc.)  I decided to start from the campaign map (my first serious attempt at using the map editor), and ran into the difficulty of deciding just what the ports would supply/demand.  You see, things have changed quite a bit over the years, and there's no Effect to change what the ports do (this is a suggestion for any possible future patches, if they ever come out).  For example, somewhere in the last 25-50 years, the real-life ports of Oregon and Washington have largely gone from "demanding" lumber and paper (in RT2 terms) to "demanding" logs and pulpwood and "supplying" paper (somebody figured out he could ship out pulpwood to Japan, have them make it into paper, and then ship it back more cheaply than he could have the paper manufactured here in the Northwest).  Now, one thing I like about RT3 is that while you can't make a port change functions over time, you can set up port regions which allow you to make different ports in different regions do different things.  This would help me account (if I ever were to get into RT3 mapmaking, which is probably very unlikely) for the fact that some ports in Washington have radically different supply/demand requirements than, say, the port of Portland, OR, which is the largest grain export center in the US (second in the world).  (Also of note is the fact that it's impossible to build a port on a river or in a relatively small bay-I tried to put the port of Portland into the map I was editing to no avail.)

[RTPlayer]

Funny, that, me too! :)

Mind you, my scenario-designing skills have atrophied somewhat...  :(

I've got my eye on a map with wonderful topography but can't for the life of me come up with a fresh angle.  I've always liked the strategy aspects that form a core in RT2.TSC and hated RT3 for the same reason!       

I've discovered that there's just as much of a strategy element to RT3, especially when it comes to building industries and creating a passenger network.  I've noticed that it's possible to play RT3 without any real strategy, but that this only goes for games of "easy" or "medium" difficulty as it takes some real strategy to make any real money on "hard" or "hardest."  An example of this type of strategic thinking (different from the kind of strategic thinking that you use when playing RT2) is the map of the east coast set in the primitive days of railroading.  This map always starts out with no meat packing plant and many cattle yards.  If you can come up with the roughly 1.5M to build a meat packing plant, make sure to put it in the right place to make money!  If you put it in a city, it will make money rapidly (houses form demand for meat, which raises the price), but will drive the price of meat down in that region (not enough to make the meatpacking plant lose money, though), making it possible to haul meat to the other cities where the meat demand hasn't been driven down.  Picking the location where you want to build an industry is a major strategic element in RT3.

I play both RT2 and RT3 because I enjoy both, although I can see why someone would prefer one over the other.