Quad City Lake in Winter 2

[karsten]

Fixing those random event crashes Part 2

This is the Quad City Lake in Winter 2 scenario, with a reference to the standard random event file. As we noted above, there are many events in this file which are not supported by the map, events for nitrates, for medicine, for arms .... etc.

• The obvious solution would be to delete all those references and to leave only events that are supported by goods in the map. Fair enough, that works.
• Personally, I am not a fan of random events. They make it difficult to compare two games, when one has favourable events popping up early, while the other may be plagued by some negative events. Therefore I came up with the Boom-Bust event file, which reduces events to the bare minimum. The good thing about Boom-Bust is, it always works, no matter how you modify your map. Whether you add goods, delete goods, your events will never crash and you have one less xml file to worry about.

  

• The Boom-Bust file is less useful for a scenario like Quad City Lake in Winter, however, because it will mess up the crucial goal of net worth. Just as you think you are cruising to victory, up comes a stock market crash to ruin your net worth. Fun?

  

  So what I did was to choose the least important good on the map (which seems to be fish) and let the events kick that around. As you can see, fish prices get much more volatile than, say, food prices, but that really does not hit the bottom line much. (One could also reduce the magnitude of the fish price changes, to further reduce the impact of the events.)
  Most important result of fixing the events - not a single crash during the whole game!

  

[Lowell]

Oh boy...looking for crash city if you don't build those Event files correctly.

When I make new ones, I now make a RRT_Events.xml file that has a full listing of only the events that will adjust the cost of what goods my maps use. Then I also make a scenario events list for the scenario that only has the names of the events from the master list.

I remove any event from my new master list that my maps do not use...no coal, then no coal event.

So when making your scenario files, you really cannot leave that line in the scenario file as default (RRT_Events.xml) Even if you copy the Events file, then erase any your map doesn't use would work. If your map is like the games maps, where it uses everything the base maps do, then you may leave it as default RRT_Events.xml, otherwise, every scenario should have an events list if it's own.