Early Game Strategies

[TROAB]

So I'm working my way through each scenario on the hardest difficulty against 3 AI competitors. So far I'm on the Midwest... I would have beat it last night as i had met all the goals and bought out all 3 of my competitors and was just running the clock out when I got a hard crash that scrambled my screen and forced a hard reboot.

Aaaaanyways, through the beginning of the game when funds are tight I'm always struggling to figure out the best way to spend my money so I thought i'd describe what I tend to do and also hope that we get some good replies to the thread with what you guys are doing.

Generally the questions I'm faced with are:

• How much of my stock to sell right off the bat?
• How many trains to try to run? Just one? Two?
• Whether the cost of upgrading the train is worth it immediately after a new enhine is available? Example: If your stations are having trouble producing enough mail and passengers, does paying for a faster engine really gain you any profit?
• When should you upgrade depots/stations/terminals?
• Is it better to start hauling freight immediately with a very weak engine or wait until there is something faster available?
• Do you use mixed cargo of passengers and freight or do you stick to one or the other on your engines?
• When do you start buying back your own stock or buying competitor's stock? Expanding versus Investing?

Generally the first thing I do is build the cheapest shortest link to a city with paassengers and mail (if possible, obviously in scenarios where your starting town has only one demand/supply your options are limited) and I setup a train with 2 cars: 1 passenger, 1 mail heading back and forth.

On the high difficulty level I almost always have to sell 20-30% of my stock in order to achieve this. If the route seems to making decent time and filling up each time, I'll usually upgrade my new depot to a station rather than upgrade the engine... My thinking being that the speedier loading/unloading AND the profit bonus is more useful, especially on these short tracks where my engines never really get up to speed anyways.

Does this mean I'll never upgrade my engines? Of course not, I'm just thinking about that early game time when you've got a route running and $100k in the bank: do you upgrade the engine, upgrade the station, build more track, or buy competitor's stock?

I'll write some more about my other bullets later, but I've got meetings to go to now... I wish MY job was playing Railroads! all day.

I hope this is a spark to an interesting thread, so please please contribute.

[JohnnyK]

I would have beat it last night as i had met all the goals and bought out all 3 of my competitors and was just running the clock out when I got a hard crash that scrambled my screen and forced a hard reboot.

Go to "Load Game" and look in the left pane; there's a "+" sign next to your Saves folder. Click it.
You will see your Autosaves folder pop up - pick the last savepoint and load it.

IIRC the default autosave time is set to 1 minute, so you should not have lost much. I increased the time to 5 minutes since the constant saving does effect the performance.

How much of my stock to sell right off the bat?

IMHO as much as you have to and as little as possible. If I need the funds to get a profitable line going, I'll sell.

Is it better to start hauling freight immediately with a very weak engine or wait until there is something faster available?

So far I mostly focus on short freight routes. I only use passenger trains at the start if the line I have to build also makes sense for freight trains. I usually try to get a chain going asap (food is a prime example, grab livestock or grain, haul it to a food plant thingie and move that food to the nearest city) since this seems to give me more profit than simple passenger transfer. I rather try to move some passengers on my way back to the farm.

Do you use mixed cargo of passengers and freight or do you stick to one or the other on your engines?

I never mix it.

When do you start buying back your own stock or buying competitor's stock? Expanding versus Investing?

Once I see that money is coming in at a reasonable rate, I start to buy competitor's stock. I do monitor the CPU players' cash, and once they start to have decent amounts I also buy back parts of my own stock.

[markofjohnson]

It depends on the map and start position... sometimes I go all out to get a good rail link before the other railroads get there are force me to use all kinds of dump bridges. But in general...

Look at the finances of your competitors in the early and mid game. The computer players make big profits from passengers. So I have adopted the same strategy. I always try to get as many 'passenger exchanges' between many neighbouring towns - ie join a pair of cities, and run passengers back and fourth. If there are not many passengers you might have 3 towns en-route so that they have more time to generate passengers. In the early game I avoid cities that the computer players are at because I don't want to compete for the passengers.

If you start on a map that is mostly villages and you can't get to the cities, then think about urban development! My most profitable routes are always passengers, coal,oil, steel, auto/weapons. But you can only succeed with those if you have cities. You can create them. Starting with only villages I will ship whatever goods they need in order to make them grow into towns and cities. Once its no longer a village I may abandon a low profit starting industry. Eg grain to food. Doesn't make a huge profit, but if grain can grow a village into a town, then that town will have some passengers. Plus the food will help grow neigherbouring cities into metropoli. Once you have a lot of metropoli with efficient passenger rich routes, power stations, steel, then you can abandon the low profit goods routes like grain so that your high profit trains don't ever have to wait, or to develop a good multi stop route that ends up producing whatever goods have beome high value through low supply or you have large raw materials for - manufactured goods, medicine, paper, etc.

So my early games is:

- sell sell sell stock
- routes to develop my villages into cities
- routes to power stations, buy power stations early, throw as much oil and coal at them as possible
- routes to steal mill in preparation for the mid game
- as many passenger routes I can develop without competition.
- upgrade the early trains as soon as possible to speed the economy
- once the money is flowing in and I have a good starting network, then buy my own stock back up to about 40%

Mid game is:

- rebalance passenger routes now my villages have grown
- develop auto or weapons routes
- go and steal my competitors steel, etc.
- check that my competiors are not trading my high value manufactured goods, if they are, then find somewhere else to take my raw materials
- make a route to a far off raw material or town in the mountains etc if it will create a profitable trade route.
- buy stock
- upgrade all the stations

[syntax error]

Hi,

I play on hardest level with 2 or 3 computerplayer depending on my will to deal with the lag.

i always start like this :

- pauze
- sell 1%
- buy 1% from computerplayer (you buy at 200)
- unpauze till sell comes available from stock you just bought
- pauze ad sell stock (you sell at 248 ... just made 48k without building 1 thing, only cost you a couple of seconds)
i sometimes do that twice depending on the map and how much mony i need to start up.

this gives me about 348 k to build first line ... almost alway a goods line. run 1 train let it make mony for 1 or 2 times, pauze, sell 1x, buy your next line (another goods or a next bigger town with passenger)

repeat this a couple of times, i try to keep 20 to 30 of my own stock .. if you expand fast enough the computer WILL react by selling off all his stock to keep up with your expantion. you can now pick up his stock for like 80k for the first 10%

another thing with stocks, once the computer player starts making mony and runs out of places to expand hes gonna buy stock, so i try to buy out all the stock (-the last 10% that he may buy himself) as soon as possible (while he is spending on expantion ..dont worrie these stations will be your soon), even keeping my own stock at 30%.
when you have his stock , he still gonna want to buy stock so hes gonna buy your and other computer players. so now start buy ing your own stock and let him have some and then buy 50% of player 3 .. since you already have 90% of his stock you can buy him for 1 or 2 mill. when you do that you get the 50% he bought from player 3 and the stock he bought from you. this tactic works for me in 95% of the games making this game WAY to easy for me.
i try to focus on goods more .. try to work to the more expensive goods and dedicate trains to it, passenger simply cant beats a 5 wgons train with guns or goods .

also upgrading trains is not always needed ... i sometimes have a noris of 100 years old on a cheap goods thats close to a city thats still making me mony AND keeping the goods flowing.

upgrading stations i usually only do in very busy cities in the start game .. since i dont do a lot a passenger the extra income i can spare

also i try not to change cars at stations, dedicate trains for laods, run the emty cars back .. even if there are goods to take, changing cars usually takes months .. especially in later game with 6/8 cars on a train.

[darthdroid]

After a while, the AI is pretty boring and you have to play real people online. This is how to learn to play and everything you learn will work on the AI.

I agree with the 2nd poster. For example: do NOT run 2 cars, run 8 always 8. I'm not going to get into the complexities of why, just do it, you'll see. But do keep in mind that every train has maintenance, you want as much as you can in the way of revenue.

Second, the whole idea is to get a snowball effect going. So you do what creates $ quickest (usually passengers) and go the next nearest $ maker. and repeat until everyone but you is dead. And i say upgrade to stations pretty quick and then soon to terminals.

As far as engines go: I really don't care too much about the upgrades. I care more about distances and resource supplies. For example: Let's say I'm running to a stockyard, but my 8 car train keeps only picking up 2 cars worth. Why would I upgrade from a crampton to a dx goods?? the dx goods has a much higher maintenance cost. So i keep shipping freight with the passenger train and ultimately profit is higher. Speed is not everything in the game, it's but one element. and frankly soon the dx goods is only shipping ONE car and the maintenance cost might get you into the red....now you should DELETE the whole damn route....so don't get into the red.

Another example: Say I have a resource right next to the city, I'm going to use the tiny rowboat train.....I mean it can't get going fast enough to justify anything else and with 8 cars, it barely moves (or needs to) anyway.....yet I see all these guys using dx goods or some big freight train....not logical, just costly.

-Bob the Lunatic