<< November 2, 2006 >>
sir sum vrent

it's been just over two weeks since the release of the new train game, and i'd like to add my thoughts to the mix:

the AI is terribly daft. i'm playing on tycoon level already, and last night pretty easily won. whereas RT3's AIs could scale to 150+ trains, in SMRR! i routinely have 4x as many trains as the competition, bringing in something like 20x the profit.

the stock market is pretty daft. company stock is only available in 10% increments, as you are unable to offer additional stock, nor will your stock split. you're also unable to sell short, and don't even think about buying anything on margin. which hasn't been much of a problem, since without high-interest loans, i've found it terribly difficult to remain in the red for long.

the economy is pretty daft. the infallible strategy is to find a city near a coal mine that has a steel mill, and hopefully a city near that which has a automobile factory (especially in the 1830s, before automobile prices collapsed). buy the factories (the AI won't buy a factory once the price hits $250k).

then, ship as much coal to the steel mill as possible. build 3, 4, or 8 two-car trains if you have to, but keep that pipeline full. while the price of coal may drop a little, it will never even out between the mine and the mill, as with RT3. and, while the steel mill can only actually use, say, 4 carloads of coal a year, you'll get paid for every delivery. and you'll get a bonus from owning the steel mill, even though that bonus makes more sense when you deliver steel somewhere.

even better if you can get two cities with coal near them, and get a steel factory and a car factory in each. then, you can run a steel train between them, and an auto train between them, go watch an episode of the report, come back, and buy all your cometition.

while i can understand shipping cars between two cities - perhaps one has a bmw factory and the other builds audis? - steel seems more like a commodity. if it costs you $500k to build a car factory in your city, why not let it just get the steel from there?

all this daftness does have one advantage, and that is it's incredibly easy to make money. you no longer need to have another computer handy with custom excel spreadsheets just to get kicked out by the board in 15 minutes rather than 10.

but what can you do with all this money? certainly not upgrade your trains easily. whereas RT3 had a great interface - you could select all trains, or just certain engines - there is no interface for upgrading more than one engine at a time. it gets to the point where i cannot upgrade my fleet before another new engine comes out, and i have to start all over again. not only is this not fun, terribly profitable, but it's also RSI-inducing. sid? please help.

another tip is to not bother with the more difficult routing... difficulties. it's not so much difficult-challenging, as difficult-frustrating. i've found enough routing and switching challenges on the easy setting, and since they give you no tools for dealing with the harder difficulty (save deleting trains), i don't feel too bad about it. also, it seems to crash less on the easy setting.

i have more but i'll save that for later.