The American Transcontinental Railroad- Version 1.2a Final

[stormfather]

Stormfather's America Map: Manifest Destiny
Version 1.2a released (4/17/07)

New features include:

Iron mines, which produce Iron, which is turned to Steel at Steel Mills.
Assembly Plants, which turn Steel into Machinery.
Machinery, a new good, that is worth more than manufactured goods but less than autos, is demanded by cities and metros, and made from steel in assembly plants.
Iron and Machinery complete with icons, traincars, etc.
New Icons for the Military Base and Stock Exchange.
A more detailed Canada and Mexico, including cities and victory conditons.
New trains, including the GG1, the 4-6-4 Hudson, and the AEM7 (all pictured below.)
A fourth era, from 1961 - 1993.
New texturemap for gold mines: in this map, gold mines will appear on desert mountains, not on rocky ones. This helps differentiate them from coal mines (which appear on rocky mountains, as they always did) and iron mines, which appear on craggy mountains.
Removed the Grasshopper and Norris (Map seems to run faster)
Machinery Car CTD has been fixed.

In addition, I tweaked a lot of minor details, such as city locations and victory conditions.

I want to thank Atani for the installer, and Eilelwen for the GP7, and thanks to Choobacca and Big Papa, as I learned how to make custom content by dissecting Chicago to the Rockies and seeing what made it tick. Finally, a special thanks to everyone whos helped me out with advice and input, without you I'd never have been able to get this done, especially the custom content. So enjoy the map!

UPDATE: The installer is at the bottom of this post. Installer courtesy of Atani. Enjoy!

[dwax]

The map wont load, You never do see the picture of it all you get is what I posted as a picture. If you press OK to start it it CTD.

anyone get it to load?

[snoopy55]

Sorry, I got the map, but it didn't come up again.

[dwax]

No luck snoopy55, got the same picture and whem I tried to load it, CTD

[snoopy55]

No go.

[stormfather]

Try this. XML is picky and wants first place in any XML programing. I got the screen, but didn't go into play. I'm thinking he added his name in each XML file as last thing. (correct me if I'm wrong Stormfather)

You're right, I tacked them on at the last second and didn't playtest them. Shows what happens when you cut corners, I suppose. Anyway, I fixed the XMLs and have posted a working version of the scenario above. One last thing that I noticed is that my traincars xml referenced a few tender cars from mange's tendermod. I removed those reference, they might have been causing a problem.

Sorry for the mix-up; hopefully this one will work out better.

[jlammann]

Awesome map! The only thing I see is the scenario asks for cattle, but it should be livestock. A simple change from Cattle to Livestock in the Scenario XML file fixes that. Great job!

[gforce]

Well done! It gives me a idea where all the cities are in america, after some playtime i can find already some of them...
Thanx alot for the effort and keep up the good work...
ps: i still have problems with the fact that i'm too rich in every scenario, but heck yeah in fact i always wanted to be rich...
i want to motivate people to change the game at money level or forced costs to change this...

anyway congrats with your map, it kept me playing...

[snoopy55]

gforce - this is one place the Globals come into use. You can open up the Global RRT_Trains.xml and increase the cost of buying and maintaning the engines which will affect all the maps you play without disturbing the original.

[gforce]

Good thinking snoop,
so we could also release, let's say : 'single player global xml files'
maybe i will have a look at this, but then i will concentrate me on the original scenarios of railroads...
They probably are more or less the same in money making.

[snoopy55]

You can also go into the map and open RRT_Trains_map name.xml and put new prices under each engine. It will then ignore the global price.

[karsten]

I really enjoyed this America scenario. It starts out well, with easily the most attractive overview screen I have seen so far. Lots of neat little puzzles keep you busy, like the implicit need to grow cities and the need to organize steel production for Detroit. The hospital as military base and the newspaper as stock exchange are simply brilliant and should become standards!

In my first test run, I had completed all except two conditions by 1930, the start of the third era. The victory condition for cattle in Chicago needs to be fixed, as noted above by jlammann already, and the New York-Washington connection in the end simply depended on waiting for a fast engine to turn up. I will play this map again on harder difficulty ... I think it would be really neat if you made an expanded version.

[gforce]

you're right karsten,
using the hospital and newspaper for new industries is a good thing,
in fact, in my development i'm doing the sam thing,
using those 2 industries for other ideas,
and it was even before this scenario was made,
strange how 2 people can have the same idea at a total different place...
i was thinking about using a bank to get some bonus money, produced by some industries (cities) to cash that bonus (that would be payed in a kind-of cash-good).
- i also recollered once a hospital to make a difference between the normal hospital, i didn't used it yet, but it will work, i think (does someone has an idea if there are many references in those .nif, .kf, .kfm that you need to change for that???)
- the need to grow a city before the scenario-goals can be reached is a simple trick that works just fine.
- i used those borders also once in a europe-testmap, it's a good way to distinguish countries, maybe in that way we can learn the americans where countries as belgium, spain and portugal are situated
- those spots on the ground are cool, does someone knwos if rain and snow would be possible?

[dick810]

ran the program covered the whole usa as it progressed it did get sluggish but never crashed played for several hours i am thinking that may some of the cities are not placed quite right but it is only a gamess

[stormfather]

Thanks for playing my map, I hope you enjoy it.

A few key points:

- As far as the cattle/livestock thing... oops. No other word sums that one up, I guess. I had to rush at the end to get the map out before my first week of midterm exams and I missed that. It'll get fixed in a soon-to-be-made update.

- As far as city locations go, I tried to be as accurate as possible with placement, but a lot of them (especially those that are close to mountains, rivers, coastlines, or in the case of Seattle and Portland, all three) had to be moved a bit so they were both accessable and would grow nicely. If you see anything that's way off, please let me know. I also know that there are a few spots where rivers aren't deep or wide enough, a spot in minnesota near Minneapolis / St. Paul comes to mind immediately. I'll touch it up a bit in the aforementioned update.

- As for the sluggishness, that's a result of the map being 15x15. It slows to a crawl in the late game on my computer, too, but that's the price to pay.

- Karsten, thanks for posting the screenshot of the minimap. I ended up posting the map from a different computer from which I developed it and played it and didn't have a minimap available to post.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I know that a transcontinental America map had some big expectations, Im glad to hear people like what I've made.