let's face it! most of the settings that came along with the game-idea and should have an impact on gameplay (and wich are in the xml, so yes we can change those), are not having alot of impact
i'm talking about
- trains fe speed, power etc... yes one train is faster then another, but who all buy the fastest (most costly) train available, needed or not
so what's wrong:
(as i see it, and i hope you will get the same idea)
- set the production of every good, passengers and mail included to a much, much lower setting
=>
what's the impact?
fe. there's a grain farm producing at 1.0 (=standard)
you buy a train and lay a track to a food-plant and let it run from farm-to-industrie hauling 8 cars with a no wait, at the time is get's back to the grain-farm there will once agagin 3-4 grains available (so no reason to give your train more to do)
- now let's set the grain production to 0.20
do the same, and your train will be hauling very quickly almost nothing wich results in a train being more costly then getting money...
what to do to solve this? right, let's get that train to do more then 1 single stupid job! this will have a very nice impact (have a look at one of my train routing (screenshot)) wich is needed to gain money (it's get even better if grain-farm produces also corn and take nitrates in etc....)
and also after some time your farms will produce more (not so quickly because they will grow less quickly), wich means that you will have to change your routing differently (most of the time less stops or getting an advantage by bying a faster more powerfull train, or seperate goods and passengers
- you will also notice that having such a long advanced routing-assignment can be sometimes not so good because the power of a train is much less (surely if it has a steep grade somewhere) depending on the amount of cars moving.... so ending at a stop where you will get 8 cars means your train will be at half the speed or less, so now we've got a reason to look and pay attention at those graphs on the roundtable, right? so maybe get your train end up at an annex, depot at the moment there are only 4 goods instead of having 8 wieghtly goods to haul...
what i suggest, please for those making new maps, keep this in mind, try it out at minimum, and you could start off with a standard scenario 2 see the result of this all
- some other remarks:
probably having more sources can be good, to invoke more stops, maybe enlarging the map could help, and so on...
- also changing the iturnspermonth will help, so you learn how to work with some trains and will really feel each different train for some time and you will get some feeling with some particullary trains (bad or good, depending on what you do with them)
- most of the (standard) scenarios goals are still possible to get eventhough you're setting the production to a less level (so less money), (also here setting iturnspermonth will give you more time to get the goals worked out)
- why i'm a stating out all those things right now, well hell, because i wanted to get those ideas in my final map, but my final map is in a playground state and i like my playground, maybe it will stay like this forever (that's why it's my playground, no...)
someone with me? someone motivated to change a standard map, in fact it is very quickly done, you could change the global industries file to test it out on all the standard maps at once (if those are in usermaps copied), for cities you will need to addapt the local file, because cities are stating out their production locally...
have a fun test and a much better gameplay?
i'll send lateron an example of an addapted-standard-map
