Attica (Greece) railroads

[Vic]

As a big fan of Railroads! I have made a couple of maps over the years and my friends say I should share them. So here goes.

I live in Greece now so I thought it might be interesting to make a local region map.

This is my first map, I didn't know there was any size limit (is there?), and I wanted to reflect the local rail history so in order to have some distance between Kifissia and Pireas - the first railroad in Greece - I needed a bigger map than the standard 15x15. The result was a map of 25x25.

It was made on my trusted old Vista Ultimate, and also ran on my Vista laptop. It now also works on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (my new laptop) without any problems.

I don't know how to make specific buildings and goods and such (it would be great to have an Acropolis building and olives, for example) so it's all made within the standard parameters of the editor. It's not a SAM.

I hadn't realised I had set the game itself on 0 competitors when I was making the map and this seems to result that it crashes when you are trying to play it with AI players, so these are SINGLE PLAYER maps.

The task list got quite long so I divided it into 2 scenarios: Attica5 and AtticaModernAge. The first runs from 1865 to 1935 and AtticaModernAge from 1930-1989.

The towns differ slightly between the two scenarios. And Greece is really only this green in winter time!

I hope you all enjoy them and I welcome any suggestions, corrections etc. Thanks!

[snoopy55]

I was looking into why the map would not take AIs. I noticed some things in your RRT_Cities_AtticaModernAge.xml. I'll get back to you on them later.

Are there Goods in any of the maps that you do not want in them?

Have you or anyone else fully played all of your maps thru?

[Vic]

Hi Snooppy55,

Yes, I made the Attica maps about 5 years ago, and my friends and I have played them through many times.

They had some suggestions, about placement of industries, tasks, etc. that I have incorporated, but any other suggestion is welcome.

I had copied the cities.xml from the Utah scenario (one of my favourites!) where there are different sizes, up to 12.

One thing I did notice that later on in the game, the cities all of a sudden shrink back to Village size. I thought that might have something to do with the total number of buildings allowed as the map has quite a number of locations. I did reduce the settings somewhat but it still happens. Maybe I need to reduce it more? I couldn't find anything on the forum regarding total maximum buildings for a map.

All of the Goods are used in the scenario, I'm not sure I understand your question.

Thanks!

[snoopy55]

As to the Cities, there are some limits which have been found, tho I cannot recall them off the top of my head.

One thing is Goods conversion. If you have one Good, say Grain, going to a Sheep Farm and you write it to produce two different things, Wool and Nitrates, it will only produce the first one of the two conversions, in this case Wool.

Now, the item I found yesterday - your cities are trying to produce the same thing twice. You have:

Passengers - None
Mail - None
None - Passengers
None - Mail
and the last two,
None - Passengers
None - Mail

Not a big deal, it's just there and after nine years of this, I tend to notice things like that.

Why don't you come on over to the other forum? We have over 160 finished maps, a Wiki, new Engines, Cars, Goods and Industries, And Building Blocks which let you skin your own. And there are Tutorials on most everything involved in this game. http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net/portal.php

And I'll continue to look over your map.

[Vic]

Hi snoopy55,

yes, you're quite right. I do have doubles in the coding. It's all that copying and pasting. And twelve different city sizes, etc.

It was my first map and I just looked to see how others had done things I needed. I had to redo everything 5 times (hence the attica5) before it was all working. Starting stations in water, etc. I think cities need to be rotated to avoid that when placing them.

Thanks for the heads up on the Goods conversion.

In my other two maps, Pampas and Polska things are a bit smoother overall. I do tend to get carried away with the task list, so many possibilities! But the game pauses in recalculation after laying new or changed track gets somewhat annoying so I'm trying to compensate for that somewhat in the task list. Especially towards the end or when you take over a competitor it starts to take longer to recalculate.

I get a blank page for the link. I'm using either Firefox or Opera. Maybe my browsers are set too tight?

Thanks.

[snoopy55]

Ya, I know what you mean, I've worked on almost a hundred maps (only a few actually mine tho ) and sometimes I think in the language...... And the game has always had a surprise written in that can make you want to beat it with a hammer!

To quote a post I wrote: You might try this - go here: http://smrsimple.com/map-database/ go all the way to the bottom and click on vzbob's Forum. That gets me there.

Or try at the bottom of this post: viewtopic.php?p=50936#p50936

I'm an Admin there and I've had that same problem you are having. I have a version 12 of Opera on my system and had to use it for a couple of weeks before my latest version 33 updated enough. Keep trying, you'll get thru.

[Vic]

Yes, the game continues to fascinate, despite that there are other simulations out there. It's a perfect break from real life once in a while.

Still not getting through on your site. I'm not sure about running IP black lists. I've deactivated them on my sites. It stops people from getting through, and spammers usually find a way around them.

But I'd love to see what is there so I'll keep trying every so often.

Thanks.

[snoopy55]

From our discussion in PM I spent about 45 minutes in search and working and got the files below for Fetta Cheese and Olive Oil. They are sized at 32 and the files I worked with are included. See what you think.

[railage]

Hi, Vic, nice maps. Thanks for sharing them. I am a member on Bobby's forum, but signed up here to comment on your maps.

Attica 5:
1. The event file needs renaming to RRT_Events. The main scenario_user XML is calling RRT_Events so it's currently not even used. If it were the game wouldn't allow saving. RRT_Events is a global file, RRT_Events_attica5 is a local file. Must be global for saving.

2. Once renamed, the event file needs cleaning up to remove events that effect Goods that aren't used such as Beer. This will prevent random crashes when the game randomly picks the events, and happens to choose one with an unused Good.

3. Well done on getting a conversion specific to the Ancient Sites. How did you make this conversion specific to those sites? I don't see an industry, and it stays the same throughout the city sizes. I haven't seen that before. The Passengers->Mail conversion isn't working, but if that's the only way that the game will allow it. It's a really nice touch.

4. This is a large map with many cities. I ended up using the coordinates in the Cities XML file to find the cities that were included in the goals. A map overview (image or pdf, etc.) showing city locations would be useful for players that don't know Greek cities very well. I would have found an overview useful on your other maps, but I struggled most with this one.

I notice that your maps don't have starting cities allocated. It seems that all are set to False, but the game then randomly picks from any of those on the map. This is fine and definitely gives plenty of replay-ability. I started in Epidavros Amphitheatre giving me a bit of deadline-play to reach Athens in time, but it wasn't too close.


Modern Attica:
This map ran perfectly without crashes. I like the variation in annex prices and also the increased cost for stations. I like higher industry building costs as well. In my opinion some of the others like the Fromagerie could justifiably have price increases as well. At 500k those things are a steal.

Disclaimer: I didn't play this till I completed all the haulage goals. I only have a 32 bit laptop and I lose patience with track laying when approaching 20,000 miles of track. My style is to build the economic routes (got to 140M revenue in the year) and then add more track for the special haulage required. In order to complete this one I will need to slow play the economy and limit how much track I build.

Enjoyed these maps, excellent scenery, the goals have a good flow to them as well. Thanks for sharing them.

PS. I would suggest putting SINGLE PLAYER in the game descriptions. People may tend to forget that they are single player (as I did right now while checking some details). The game's reputation for crashing is bad, so some may discard the map instead of reading the directions again.

[snoopy55]

I PM'd Vic on his maps, noting what needed to be done to get them to work. When asked if it was OK to post them on his threads since files could not be sent PM, he replied Great. Sure.

They can be deleted if this becomes offensive to anyone.

There is an RTF file explaining what was done.