My hat’s off to you for making a map that guides the player down a play path which simulates actual history. This is hard to do in SMR. I think the restrictive goals, while probably being a bit too severe, help keep the story on track. There’s no time to waste on unrealistic side-pursuits.

This map was instrumental in shaping my high-traffic routing solutions. Naturally I’m curious how you, the designer, handle the high-traffic situations. Do you force one-way traffic by including a mid-way “way-point” stop specific to only that direction, or do you use “sidings” similar to those I used?

I may just lower some of the requirement amounts
as I myself have only won the game once or twice on
Robber Baron.

My Main Goal of this map was to tell the story of
New York State railroading and try to nail the timeline
and industrial history the best that I could.

I was having thoughts of reworking this map slightly
by including cities in Pennsylvania and Jersey, while
thinning out some of the Upstate New York cities.
This act would usher in the Pennsy so it may take me
a few months of research and testing to come out with it.

In that forum post I explain my routing strategy in a little detail. I always use Hard routing difficulty also. It’s unfortunate that SMR has very basic signals, however it’s still possible to make some fairly complex, jam-free layouts.

This is probably one of the hardest maps I have played, but its really enjoyable too.
I noticed that some of the goals seemed unrealistic given their time frames (especially with carload numbers).. I found I had to plan ahead very early on, just to meet the objectives..

I managed to complete more than half of the medals but the last 3 objectives were flat out of reach. I didn’t quite understand the point of making a food plant in Buffalo, and noticed that when grain was delivered, it would interfere with beer production, thus limiting my ability to transport it to NY.

I love to play SMR on the hardest routing difficulty, and I guess this slows things right down… but I kept noticing that I just had to keep laying track for stalled trains even when there were track spaces available next to them.. This seems to be a problem with SMR.. Its really sad that the AI’s routing system is so very poor! I usually don’t get this problem because SMR’s maps are simpler but on this monster the AI buckled.

With “Wait until Full” un-ticked the game will load any part of a load available even if it’s 0.01 and then depart. That partial load will count as a full one in the victory counter. The partial load shouldn’t be counted. That’s the bug I see.

Karsten made Uganda where he requires using partial loads as there aren’t enough full loads available in total. Partial loads can also be used to grow a city faster at the expense of profit of course.

Hope you are enjoying the challenge of this map. I am mainly over on sidmeiersrailroads.net but I did join the forum here recently. I could post a saved game of my Robber Baron win on this forum (anyone can download it here) if that’s of interest to you.