{NEW BETA} fix/update South Central British Columbia 1898

[Gumboots]

But if you penalise that then you'll also be penalising legit hauls on the way to the final station, if they unload at your intermediate station first. Which is a pretty common situation. I'm not sure I'd be keen on penalising that. The only way of avoiding a penalty would be to entirely skip the station that's being checked. Do you want to enforce that?

[RulerofRails]

The limitation in RT3 is that there is only a one-sided check of loads hauled. If you test origin you can't check destination and vice versa.

Petain is a small territory, just the place for your station, the AI's station + the warehouse. The only hauls that wont count are those starting and finishing in Petain territory by your company (only possibility is from the AI station to yours), or any Goods you haul away from Petain bound for other destinations. With the right warehouse demand this number should be quite low.

There are two cheats with haulage in RT3,
1. Hauling multiple times in the same territory (this coding prevents that from counting)
2. Having a station just outside the territory but with a catchment area reaching into another territory to "capture" goods inside. Then haul goods to the counting territory. Prevention for this is done with a larger territory of the surrounding area where stations are not allowed to be built (aka. cost is $20M).

I'm thinking to have a detection for >20 loads of Goods hauled from Petain in a year. This will give the player a warning. If the number is high again, the target for the next point will be raised. Hopefully that will discourage sneaky players.

[RulerofRails]

Ok. I'm not satisfied with some of the election perks that hurt the AI players. I want there to be a likelihood of some action. At the moment it's a bit of an "oh, I'll cry today but be better tomorrow."

This means I am going to track Player stock value during a certain period and forcibly set their cash with a negative value.

Question for all, (opinion please):
What is a good threshold to use for negative cash against stock value?
For example 30% threshold would see a set cash to -300k when stock value is $1M.


I know that economic state is a factor here. But, it could be a little tricky to factor it in without extra events (let's say I didn't find a good plan yet).


PS. Can you see I've been testing some stuff?

Testing in full swing.jpg

[Gumboots]

Without knowing the intimate details of how the scenario runs, it's difficult to give suggestions here. You'd probably have a better idea than anyone else.

[RulerofRails]

It's basically a variation of the debt:net worth ratio question. As in, looking for moderate risk, so I was thinking perhaps slightly above the ratio the player might run during an aggressive margin game. The AI will try to get out of risk when it sees the opportunity. But, yeah maybe no-one bothers to calculate a running level for that?

The AI chairman in question is "going to jail" etc. according to the storyline since the perk for your support during the election means the government officials went after him.


Purchasing Power is the sum of (half of stock value + cash). So the value I am looking for needs to be below 50%.
My "idea" was 30% as I illustrated. I will use this if there are no other suggestions.

[Gumboots]

Try it and tweak it.

[RulerofRails]

Lots of testing lately and finally a fresh beta is ready. I put in the first post with some notes.

PS.
Ended up using 40% for negative cash ratio. The AI were initially weaker with Connies, since those have a higher fuel cost than the Eight Wheeler or Camelback. Sometimes being faster=more empty trips. But I made other tweaks to compensate.

[Gumboots]

Taking a quick look at it now. Wasn't in the mood for caterpillar tracklaying, so went the tycooning option. Question: why is there a tally of loads for Trail Smelter popping up? It's not mentioned as a goal for any of the medals, as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure what the point of it is.

So far I'm getting the feeling that the tycooning option is pretty pointless. With no ability to do anything with stock or industry, and with no track available at all, it's not looking like an interesting prospect. It has basically taken the tycooning out of tycooning. It might be better to just drop it entirely, and force everyone into the construction pathway. That would also save having to have superfluous messages about irrelevant options (like "Ignore this if you haven't chosen the caterpillar track option").

Edit: Ok, further into it now and am seeing some progress, but it's borked. You order whatever amount of track (300, 500, whatever) and then when you get the notice saying your track is ready, you only get 75 pieces. Also, if you have 20 pieces or whatever left at the end of a month it takes them off you and sets it back to 10 pieces. Which is a bit much considering you just paid a premium to get 300 or 500 pieces. If you are going to have dirty tricks being played on people they should at least get a warning. At the moment it's not at all clear.

Noticed something else too. There's always an event in November or December saying you can't lay track over winter, but if you have any remaining track you can lay it anyway. Seems to make no difference, so I'm wondering what those events are supposed to do.

Meh. It stole more track off my again, with no warning and no explanation. I'm over it.

[RulerofRails]

Will work on a first-time notice for the smelter. As you might guess there are other smetlers that you can connect to (you just start with Trail). You can earn tycoon points and improve their efficiency by meeting the supply targets. I did put a note about that when approaching Grand Forks, but another one can't hurt.

As far as tycooning. The thing I did was forbid issuing/buy-back stock and jumping companies. Other restrictions were in place already including something where you can't end the month outside your initial company (lose game). I don't think JSS was imagining what we know as tycooning when he said "active in the stock market."

The reasoning behind the restrictions I added were that some AI companies in late game get a big pile of cash. You get a point for every company you merge. There is no way to test if it was your company that did the merger. Perhaps you start to see where this is going, you can merge a lot of other companies into one with money that you didn't earn. This stacked merger technique has been around since RTII.

As far as trying to wreck companies to make them easier to merge, that's a possibility too. Although in some ways in this scenario you may be shooting yourself in the foot as well. So I did have reasonings for the restrictions I set, but as always there are other ways to solve the problems I saw, they just might be a bit more complicated.

For example, I could skim AI company cash but boost their stock price each time + also set all AI credit ratings way down. I could also put a point for each $10M of your industry profits, if you go and sell industries out from another company which you would have received at merge . . . well it might be less points in your pocket at the end. But all that would require a bunch of test tuning.


In regards to track. What happens with the path you took is that after some years (1904) you are tied into the same track laying setup as if you take the "normal" path past the end of the official connections: this will be 1910+.

What happens is that your order track in bulk for your stockpile, but your crew can only lay it so fast.

Details of this:
75 per month April-September then 50 per month in October and November. December-March is 10 units per month, which isn't worth mentioning.

When building the tunnel, I managed to tie it into about half a dozen potential scenarios of track-laying situations (all tested). So basically I do have a better idea of how I can get around the programing for the main path now. I would consider to make a special case with no monthly restriction: you get the summer period to lay whatever you ordered, which would be probably capped at max 500 per year. The trick will be as to what connection events I allow to fire and whether I can tie it all together without extra events (at least ones that require a heap of re-ordering). Actually on this path you used to never get any track to lay. But I decided to at least give something to work with. As you might have found out, there are a couple of railways you can merge early on (check how the seeding pattern you are playing will impact them, what's a good merge in one game could be lackluster in another), plus some of the industrial companies can be a good investment.

[Gumboots]

Will work on a first-time notice for the smelter. As you might guess there are other smetlers that you can connect to (you just start with Trail). You can earn tycoon points and improve their efficiency by meeting the supply targets. I did put a note about that when approaching Grand Forks, but another one can't hurt.

Didn't see anything about it when I hooked up Grand Forks, but then it wasn't hooked up all way way back to Whatchmacallit Thingy with the port and sawmill. I just did GF and the next one across (Cascade City?) as an isolated line because of good haulage at the time. Ditto Midway and Greensomething, which were then connected across to the other line over the top of the hill that has Escargot or Camelot or whatever it is on top.

I got the irrits with it stealing my stash of track before I got around to connecting those lines back to the original line, so called it a night at that point.

The reasoning behind the restrictions I added were that some AI companies in late game get a big pile of cash. You get a point for every company you merge. There is no way to test if it was your company that did the merger. Perhaps you start to see where this is going, you can merge a lot of other companies into one with money that you didn't earn. This stacked merger technique has been around since RTII.

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

As far as trying to wreck companies to make them easier to merge, that's a possibility too. Although in some ways in this scenario you may be shooting yourself in the foot as well. So I did have reasonings for the restrictions I set, but as always there are other ways to solve the problems I saw, they just might be a bit more complicated.

I don't like actually wrecking them if I'm going to merge them. I like sorting out AI stupidity in advance, but that doesn't wreck the company. It's not relevant in this one anyway, since the AI's can't build track or buy industry, so no stupid things get done.

In regards to track. What happens with the path you took is that after some years (1904) you are tied into the same track laying setup as if you take the "normal" path past the end of the official connections: this will be 1910+.

What happens is that your order track in bulk for your stockpile, but your crew can only lay it so fast.

Details of this:
75 per month April-September then 50 per month in October and November. December-March is 10 units per month, which isn't worth mentioning.

What is worth mentioning is that the ruddy thing steals your stash of track. 10 units in December is all very well, but if you have 20 units left at the end of November guess what happens? Or if you have 74 units left at the end of September. This is not a good look, IMO, when you are expecting people to bulk order, at a premium price, in advance. Instead of "reset their stash of track to some piddling amount which will really get up their noses" I think it would be better to "add this month's allowance to whatever they already have" unless they already have heaps. 75 units isn't heaps anyway. It barely gets you out the door of the pub and halfway to the nearest phone box.

As you might have found out, there are a couple of railways you can merge early on (check how the seeding pattern you are playing will impact them, what's a good merge in one game could be lackluster in another), plus some of the industrial companies can be a good investment.

The bank is a good one to merge early, and the sawmill/logging camp/weird yellow icon with bloodshot eyes company pays out massive dividends early in the game. Can't get a majority of stock early on, but the dividends are a good thing anyway.

By the way, with the elections thing I got a good guess one year and took the "wait and see what they offer" option. Got a newspaper telling me Sir Something Hincks (I think) would be going to court and would have some of his stock shaken loose. The court case went ahead, and he got a prison sentence, but his stock holdings remained exactly the same. This didn't bother me since I wasn't interested in any of his stock at the time, but I thought it was odd.