Thoughts on scenerio goals

CeeBee51 · Post by **CeeBee51** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 2:57 pm

I've run across a few maps that gave me some grief and made me think a bit. Generally speaking, most scenerios start between 1830 and 1850. The locomotives in that time period are rather slow which makes early expansion difficult at best. Now throw in specific goals such as haul x number of passengers to x city and/or x number of (food, goods, etc.) to y city in the first time period as well as have numerous starting cities all over the map and the game begins. For most people I suspect its quit to the main menu and reload hoping to get a favorable starting city. While that does eventually work it does, IMO hurt the replayability of the map. My thoughts are that the first era should generally have more generic type goals where the starting position isn't quite so important unless the starting sities are set up to somewhat facilitate the early goals. I realize that getting a tough starting position does create a challenge but if the goals are close to 100% unattainable from many of the starting locations I feel the map loses much of it's appeal.
What are you're thoughts on goals and starting locations? Am I in the minority or way off base? What things on or about a map give it the most replayability for you? I'd like to know.

gforce · Post by **gforce** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 4:50 pm

i am testing with events but i don't get any control on that.
This would be also a good way to increase replayability.
Having those events generate a big impact would be possible and because of that you will need to change your goods of intrest maybe.... fe because wood is cheap, i will concentrate on coal
if you replay the game, you are having maybe another event wich increases the price of the wood and decrease that one of coal...
ps:
If someone already been able to change the event settings let me know...
ps2: maybe setting a goal as "connect city A" could be a good one for the begin of a scenario, let's assume your 4 starting points are more or less the same distance from city A, depending on wich village you start, you will be concentrating on the good and cities in the neighberhood, to get enough money to get connected to city a and/or build a station, terminal overthere

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 5:15 pm

CeeBee, I fully agree. I figure out three good starting positions close to each other, where the player can start with confidence that the early goals are attainable. The fourth starting position I put far away, which means a reload is necessary only 25% of the time. willie g had the unusual experience in the LM map of being dropped at the wrong place 4 times in a row,

but the likelihood of that should be less than 1%, if the random generator is really random.
This approach also facilitates the idea of gforce, because all three starting locations are placed to make the initial objective of reaching eg city A equally feasible.

CeeBee51 · Post by **CeeBee51** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 5:17 pm

real good ideas, gforce. I hope all the stuff you are testing out works and we'll see some really cool scenerios in the future.

gforce · Post by **gforce** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:22 pm

ERAS-TYPES
this is the list of eratypes:
- connectcities
- shipgoods
- growcity
- ownstuff (buy or build industrie)
- networth
- ownstock
- buildstuff (fe terminal)
- speedrecord
for most settings there's a key word ANY that can be used,
those are: ANY_CITY, ANY_GOOD, ANY_TRAIN
****
is this the full list or are there more??? (to discover)
(those types are hard-coded, i guess)
(is there a limit on the amount of era-periods?)