3 answers to 3 questions

[Gwizz]

City growth:

City growth depends upon time and how much its' station is used.

I believe both supplied cargo and the hauling of manufactured cargo adds to city growth.

I don't think RT2 counts factories, etc.  That is more a random happening.

In RT3 you can build industry and the use of them may help the city grow.

I'm not sure.

Short selling stock:

Short selling can bankrupt a person.  If I can tell that a stock is going to drop in value I can short sell that stock.  When I sell stock I don't own, I'm short selling the stock.  I keep the money that I sold the stock for.  When the stock drops in price, I buy the stock back at a now lower price.  Since I pay a lesser amount then the amount I originally sold the stock for, I will have the difference left over, which I keep. 

Basicly I sold someone's stock at a higher price and then used less money to buy it back, keeping the differance as profit I earned.  At the stock market it is all done on paper.  The losers are those who sold low and bought back at a higher price.  If that happens to you, you lose. 

If no trains will reach their stations for a long time, the stock price will drop. The price goes back up when the trains arrive.  If you remove a cell of rail, and no train can arrive, the stock price will go down.

Variables:

Variables are like X in math.  They stand for something.  Normally they are used as counters.  Example.  Gamevariable1 could stand for how many loads of coal you hauled;  Or, the number of times an event was completed before the variable restarts or turns on something; or, to satisfy a goal for a win event. 

such as: gamevariable1 = 9 is in the trigger as one of the requirements for a win event.

The trigger can include  a variable.  If the trigger fires as being true then the effects happen.

One of the effects could be to add to or change a variable's value or number, etc.

A good way to learn about how variables work is to look at the events in a map's editor.

[Gwizz]

FYI, Questions are welcome here. 

Often others will answer a question if I'm off line or If I mis-quote something. 

Questions, either way are fine with me.

Answer to another question.

When you place a region, name it then choose the industries button.

You can choose which industries you want to appear in that region plus a ranking number for each industry.

You can choose a 1 to 200 ranking number; But, the ranking number is more random then anything. 

If you choose 100 for one industry, then that industry has an average chance for placement.

The chance depends upon the number industries you choose for that reigion and the size of that region.

0 = no chance,  1 = very slight chance,  100 average chance and 200 almost always placed in the region.

The more industries you list in a small region, the lower the chance of every industry gaining placement.

I tend to make many regions and list fewer industries in each. 

I will also rank one or two industries above 100 and 4 to 6 below a 30 ranking.

I normally give ranking to cities for only the industries. 

And regions a ranking for anything but industries.  Farms, mines, etc. 

Some small cities, I may give them one industry.  (A coal town, etc.)  I can then name the town for that industry.

For very small maps I will sometimes let the game engine choose the industries for cities and for regions.

I get a better balance that way.  Larger maps allow you to be more historical where regions work best

#2  The Editor should be on your disk.  Click on it then take time to click on all the buttons in the editor.

There are lists of buttons within lists of buttons. 

For example:  you can choose the cargos going into and leaving a port.

you can also choose how many goods will appear each year.

Or, choose the number for an exchange of cargos. 

Haul one load to a port and get two or more to haul away, etc.

I often use ports like regions since they are more programable.

If your editor doesn't work, you might try buying another disk on E-bay.  They don't cost much.

I know that RT3 does have a disk that dosen't have an editor but I think all RT2 disks do have an editor.

I made a disk copy of my disk and I only use the copy to start the game, saving the original.

Disks can go bad. 

[Hawk]

Just to clarify a couple of things in your second post:

The editor for RT2 & 3 is installed on your hard drive when you install the game.

As for your comment that RT3 has the editor on one cd but not the other:

The origial release of RT3 came with 2 cd's, mainly due to the addition of 3 game demos and the Map Builder.

The current release of RT3 by Atari only comes with one cd. They (Atari) didn't include the demos nor the Map Builder in their release.  ;)

[Gwizz]

Thanks Hawk for making that more clear.

I thought the editor had been left off of the latest single CD Release as well.  My Bad.

[Hawk]

Nope! The editor is there. It's the Map Builder that's missing from the Atari release.

[RSimpkinuk57]

Short selling: what happens next?

The way I understand it, in real life people who short sold had until the end of a stock market accounting period to buy and supply the now (they hoped) cheaper shares - which meant no more than a couple of weeks (no paperless futures market in them thar days).

If you short sell, the game credits you with owning a negative number of shares. Does it reset to zero at the end of month/beginning of next (reducing personal cash according to the then price) or can you stay short for longer?

regards, Richard

[Gwizz]

I don't believe the game has a limit on how long you can hold on to shorted stock.

I know it will tag you quickly if the price changes in the wrong direction.

When an AI shorts my stock, I normally will buy more of my own stock and sink the AI's effort.

[RSimpkinuk57]

Does that then mean that if you short sell a company, which then buys back stock or other tycoons (including its chairman) buy stock so that there are no shares left in the market for you to buy, that you'll be stuck short for the rest of the game and the bank will keep hitting you every time the stock rises? Wow, no wonder you go bust.

Going back to your remarks on industries in regions, are the rankings absolute (affecting overall density) or just relative? For example, give a region three possible industries (by which I mean farms, mines whatever) set to 100% each and four at 30% each. Would that mean the region would end up with 10 times as many buildings than if you'd set the rankings at 10 and 3 respectively? From what I've seen, I don't think so.

Rankings cannot be the whole story if there is a shortage of suitable sites. Obviously you won't get ports if the region includes no coast. Are there other restrictions, e.g. is the game clever enough to realise there cannot be logging camps hundreds of miles from the nearest tree, or crop farms on snowy ground?  ... regards Richard

[Gwizz]

Seeding has more to do with random that the relationship with other allowed industries, etc. in a region.

As an example the map I'm playing now, I restarted a number of times to get a good number, cluster  and mix of Dairies.  One start had 7 dairies on the map.  With no changes in the editor another start had 32 dairies.

The game does seed depending upon the make up of the land.  A grain farm will seldom seed on a steep mountain.  While a mine will seed there and a logging camp will seed more where there are lots of trees.  But the random can always cause an exception. 

[RSimpkinuk57]

That's one of the reasons I dislike regions: the density of industries is too high (and unpredictable). What's the point of a map with 32 iron mines, say, if only 5 or 6 cities have steel mills?

I'd rather have a map which is all one region with no chance of anything, but with plenty of villages for the supplier industries. If that means you get randomly stuck with 5 steel mills on the map and 9 iron mines but only 2 coal then so be it - it adds to the excitement.

[TheDS]

Some good topics here.

I had suspected that servicing a city increased its growth. I know in a scenario I made, delivering food increased the overall city growth rate, and every scenario as a growth rate, but being able to affect individual cities was something I just couldn't be sure of one way or the other since the values are so gradual.

I'd be interested in knowing the odds of losing an industry too. Frex, I've been setting up industiral supply chains, and before I can make them profitable, there's no use (or sometimes no profit) to buy up all the industries involved until they've been serviced a while. Then suddenly, a critical industry disappears and now there's no where else for my trains to go. It sometiems also happens when I've been building up to get TO that city, and now that I can reach it, the critical industry is gone and no where else of use.

Sometimes frequent saves fix the problem and sometimes they don't.

My experience with short-selling is that there's rarely an opportunity to do it. I'm usually trying to buy stock to take over a company, and the only time to short-sell is when I've taken it over, destroyed the company, and sold off all the stock. There SEEMS to need to be about a 2:1 ratio of short-sold stocks to unowned stocks in order for you to short. Frex, you need for there to be at least 3 unowned shares for you to short-sell one.

This isn't hard and fast, something else controls it, but I don't know what. I'd guess it has to do with value, and whatever controls how many stocks are bought each time you click BUY (or sell when you click SELL).

Sometimes you can get one of the AI players to start shorting you, and then you buy up your stock and a lot of his money goes down the drain. If you buy up the remainder of your stock, he has to do margin calls and rebuy what he sold and didn't own... at a higher price. You keep buying until he's had to rebuy everything, then you sell a few shares to lure him back in. Next month, he shorts you, and you snap up all the stock again. Rinse and repeat. It's expensive for both of you, but him more than you, and you can often dislodge an AI from having a large safety net to having a large debt. But they don't always go for it. Sometimes the buggers buy instead of short, and then you're paying them dividends.

One thing I did just find out for sure: when a company gets liquidated, you DO NOT get your shares bought back. That is, the shares and any money you paid (or received from shorting) will disappear. So if you bought up a company, JUST IN CASE it recovers (which they sometimes do), but it gets liquidated, your money is gone. Or, if you short a company, and it can't recover, you've stolen some cash!

[akuenzi]

Just to clarify a couple of things in your second post:

The editor for RT2 & 3 is installed on your hard drive when you install the game.

As for your comment that RT3 has the editor on one cd but not the other:

The origial release of RT3 came with 2 cd's, mainly due to the addition of 3 game demos and the Map Builder.

The current release of RT3 by Atari only comes with one cd. They (Atari) didn't include the demos nor the Map Builder in their release. ;)

This is likely a silly question, but if I don't ask, I'll always wonder. I've seen reference to an 'editor' several times, as well as the 'map builder.' Are these one and the same? I use the platinum version of RRT2, and the only 'editor/mapbuilder' I've used has been the one I can access from the game's main menu. Is there something else there that I'm not aware of?

[jeffryfisher]

As far as I know, your guess is correct. People just use different phrases to describe the same thing.

[Gwizz]

RT2 and RT3 both had editors where a map could be built up on. If I remember correctly the Map Builder program only came with RRT3.

It has a flattened World Globe where you could pick a base map from. then you took the base map to the editor to complete.