Review Of British Miracle

[Blackhawk]

During my play test to make sure the fixed version works, I noticed an error in the scenario.

By buying dock improvements you can pay 10 million at once, or 1.2 million a year for 10 years. But the event to deduct money monthly for the installment payments deducts 120,000 a month (not 100,000). Which as there are 12 months in a year, 12 x 120,000 = 1,440,000 a year (not the 1.2million as the message says) for a total of 14.4 million.

EDIT:
I also think there is a minor issue with an annual coal event. "annual coal - 1da" - says cotton 200% but it's only a modifier of cotton of 75%. I didn't check to see if there was an original modifier of +25% or something elsewhere that would create the 200% increase though so maybe this is a non-issue.

[Blackhawk]

Finally finished the scenario and got gold. I started around Manchester and then expanded from there towards Birmingham. And bought up lucrative industries when I could, particularly when I saw a new dairy farm or cattle ranch I would buy those before their prices went up since they were unaffected by the amount of coal shipped each year.

In my first attempt at the scenario I was mainly trying to see if the game would still freeze, so once the taxes hit, along with the speed requirement fines it brought the company to a halt. However, in the second attempt with owning a significant amount of industries, I never really had any money problems. Early on I took a lot of bonds, and at one point had over 10million in bonds as I bought out another company and took on their bonds. But with the industries and being able to issue stock it was a steady stream of income for expansion and buying more industries. So if there was a personal net wealth goal this would have created another challenge. While passengers were probably a useful for income, I didn't really focus much on them after the early 1840s. By then most of my trains that were created were freight only Baldwins as to not have to worry much about my average express speed. By the end of the map I probably had close to 150 trains. I also bought out 2 AI players and allowed the other AI to connect to my track. Occasionally they'd steal some cotton or clothes, but the money I got from them using my track was worth whatever they decided to "steal." I debated building around or buying out the AI that built around Bristol, but I came to the conclusion it was probably more cost effective to just buy out the AI player there.

I didn't buy into Ireland as I didn't really have any need to go there. I also didn't buy into Scotland until late in the game, and the last thing I did to win was connect to Edinburgh.

Early on coal and iron were scarce, but as time progressed they became more common and it became much easier to haul the required amounts of them. At first I was worried about the lack of coal, as in my first partial attempt I was shipping just as much coal as I was clothes but more coal slowly appeared.

Occasionally I had times when hauling things for a profit were difficult, but a few trains set up with custom consists and sent to select cities negated that difficulty. I don't think I'm a big fan of the total loads hauled concept as the custom consists can just allow you to haul the same loads from A to B to C and you get credit for multiple loads.

Overall the first part of the map was fun and entertaining. But as others said by the time the 1850s roll around, it felt like I've run out of things to do and I'm just waiting for the required loads to be hauled. Also nice work on the historic notes that were placed in the scenario, they were interesting to read and they give the scenario some context into the time period that it's set in.

Hopefully the version I posted works for others and fixes the scenario freezing on anyone else who has had the scenario freeze on them.

[EPH]

'Japanese Miracle' uses electricity generation as a multiplier for all industries including port production of raw materials. 'British Miracle' uses coal transportation in this same way - the more coal you haul the higher the multipliers go.

I think if you check you will find there are initial decrements for categories like cotton.

I added steel and weapons categories for haulage to put some tension into the later game - the same reason I required a connection to Edinburgh. If you have suggestions for making the later game more involving, I am open to suggestions.

'British Miracle' was intended to be one element in a trilogy including 'Japanese Miracle' and 'Farewell to Steam'. Ah, if only we could create campaigns as well as scenarios!

[Blackhawk]

I didn't know this was supposed to be part of a trilogy as I haven't really played many RT3 fan made scenarios. I generally play TM and work on TM scenarios.

As for keeping it interesting throughout the entire scenario, I'm not really sure what can be done. Maybe increase the amount of weapons/ammunition that needs to be hauled. Or maybe something with fruit/alcohol. Maybe something like hauling alcohol to Ireland.

I did double check the cotton event and unless I'm missing something I'm fairly sure it's the wrong modifier, or wrong "percentage" in the text part of the message.

[RayofSunshine]

I like a challenge, but don't always come up with a good system of play. However, as Blackhawk mentioned in his last post, here is an idea which I heard from one of the user creators. I don't believe that I am "stealing" his idea, as with his idea, it could be a path to a whole new avenue of challenge.

Idea: I don't believe starting with "seed" would be manageable, but that of "fertilizer" might be "part of the start", even though it is presently incorporated in the greator productions of corrn and grain.

But his idea was to let us say a field of grain. This to be hauled to a "flour mill", and that gain would not just to be hauled to a "bakery", but has to first go to the flour mill.

Other products could be enhanced in similar manner, but this is just to give you creators a different avenue of direction. I thought that it was a novel idea.

[Blackhawk]

It's slightly taking this thread off topic but that is a creative idea there Ray. I was thinking of working on a new scenario sometime except I wasn't entirely sure of what the goals would be. Using some sort of chain cargo development system like that might be one possibility. In my last scenario I required steel to be hauled places for an industry to appear. It would have been nice if I could have made it so if you brought steel X appears, but if you bring wood Y appears etc. However, I already had too many events for that scenario and couldn't easily add more for increased variety of play.

So thanks for bringing up that idea and thanks to whoever you got the idea from before that.

[HerrPanzer]

First post in 2 years in the thread, but I just recently bought RT3 and have been trying out the various user-made scenarios. I tried out British miracle v3, unfortunately I ran into the previously mentioned crash. The game would start getting jerky and if I did not immediately pause the game and zoom the map out to max until it cleared up, the game would freeze. Eventually it got to the point that even this did not work.

Coming on the forum I DLed the fixed version. Everything was running smoothly but I got a recurring insta-crash in 1837. After a few merger experiments to see if a train was causing the crash, I found that the Continental Railroad was the cause of this crash again. I noticed that for a few years before, Continental had a train running from Copenhagen to Hamburg but instead of going back and forth, it ran north of Copenhagen to where the rails stopped at the sea and it just sat there saying "cannot connect to station". When I deleted this train the insta-crash did not recur.

I don't know if it's worth anyone's while to figure out why this train just sat there causing the eventual crash. I won't be restarting the map to see if this problem happens again. Just wanted to let people know that my first try with the fixed scenario still had an error with the continental causing crashes.

It was not my intention to buy either steamship line as it seemed against the spirit of the scenario, but it looks like buying Continental to ensure proper train routing is the only solution at the moment in my game. Luckily because that train just sat there for years and the Ai did not fix it or create a new train to do the job, the company was almost worthless by the time of the crash and it cost a few hundred thousand to merge.

[HerrPanzer]

just finished the scenario winning gold on expert level in 1865. A really great scenario with all the extra flavour from events.

Went broad gauge starting at Liverpool. I use a hub style in my games. I link 5 cities to a central hub, usually the largest city in the group of 6 is the hub, but sometimes depending on the concentration of resources/industries sometimes I go with a smaller one. I try to concentrate industries in the hub appropriate to the resources flowing in from its local connections. If the connections have plenty of wood then I build a lumber mill in the hub, etc. That way I get lots of loads of resources flowing into the hub I make money on, make money on the industry (and resources if they can be bought cheaply enough), and then I make money on the finished goods going from the hub to the local connections. I don't do a lot of micromanaging so with standard mixed trains (1 per connecting city) there usually is enough spread between the 5 connections to always have some goods going out.

When the web is set up, a hub + 5 connecting cities + relevant industries, I make a new web and then link the 2 hubs together. Trains running between a hub and the local connections I set on lowest priority and name them "Hub-connection Local" (eg Liverpool-Manchester Local), I then set up 2 express trains of passengers/mail between the hubs (Liverpool-Birmingham Express) set to highest priority, and 1 train of just cargo (Liverpool-Birmingham Freight) set to middle priority.

With the dock at LIverpool, my first hub was reversed, instead of resources coming in from the connecting cities (Wigan, Manchester, Blackside, Blackpool, Lancaster), cotton flowed out from Liverpool to a crazy number of textile mills. I bought a couple of textile mills close to each of the connecting cities and made a killing even with the -50% penalty from low coal movement. I then covered Birmingham/Wolverhampton with a station and connected to Coventry, Shrewbury, Chester, Stoke/Crewe, and Wrexham. The 2 express and 1 freight train between Liverpool-Birmingham along with a couple of industries made tons of money while the smaller trains made enough to cover company expenses. I put a few more textile mills in to capture most of the cotton from Liverpool with very little making it to non-owned mills.

I proceeded to connect to 2 new hubs in Peterborough and Bristol, setting up good industries as I went and checking the resource map every January for any new resources that could be purchased cheaply, especially Milk/Cattle. A northern London hub and a southern one covered the southeast of England, another one at Taunton covered Cornwall. Nottingham, York, and Newcastle completed the Northeast while I turned Wales, hubbed out of Newport, into a steel/goods juggernaught.

By the time I connected to Scotland I had the gold completed for (in order of completion, weapons, ammo, goods, steel, coal, clothing) without running any special routes except for weapons/ammo.

I probably could have won it a lot sooner as I bogged down for a few years getting 100% personal ownership of the company. It's just a personal goal of mine in every scenario to have 100% ownership. Unfortunately I left off the necessary personal stockbuying/company repurchasing a little later than I normally would and had to deal with a almost a million shares to take over.

Definitely one of the best scenarios I've played yet.

[EPH]

Thank you! I still enjoy playing British Miracle myself. I usually concentrate on the Liverpool area first and get some cotton trains moving to my own mill or mills. Then its off to Bristol or London. I make a point of building the 'shipping line' from Bristol to the new world and then concentrate on winning the Battle of the Gauges. Buying up Continental Lines is a priority, since that lets me ship in enormous quantities of logs and iron, plus build up a massive pulpwood-paper feedback loop.

I have found that it is possible to make the haulage quotas without much trouble just by building or buying some industry and playing for the long game.

Glad you enjoyed it! Have you tried the companion pieces 'Farewell to Steam' and 'Japanese Miracle'?

[HerrPanzer]

looking forward to trying them but I am working through the scenarios on as close to chronological order as possible. I'm up to scenarios that start in the late 1800s but haven't been able to play any in a while because of the download issues. I'd like to tie whoever is responsible for attacking the site to the front of my train and ram it full speed into a wall.

[grashopa]

Any reason we can't bump up the number of AIs to 12?

[EPH]

Two.

Resource usage goes up as the game goes on, so you may experience slow play or crashes if you expand the number of AIs. Or you might not, depending on your system resources.

Second, you may find it hard to compete out that many AI players. There isn't a lot of cargo, especially early on, so a lot more AIs could make it harder to make money.

Of course, the best way is just to go into the editor and try it. That's one of many great things about RRT3.

[grashopa]

Yeah I was worried about the late game with more AIs, but 5 of them haven't built railroads yet (5 years in) and I started with liverpool - manchester - birmingham while another AI connected 5 cities next to me so linked together we both started seeing a lot of passenger revenue early which is huge.

I love the coal - production linkage though. The neighboring AI owns a tool and die being fed from 3 iron mines far away. I just setup a stop that grabbed the iron from those mines and redirected it to an empty tool and die I've bought for a million. At the same time I picked up 4 coal mines putting us over 25 coal a year so I should outpace and be able to take him over in a few years which will be a huge chunk of the battle of the gauges.

Thanks for the great map which adds a lot more interesting early play.

I'm using the map from the downloads section, the 'fix' map from this thread was crashing in the first few years as I have more AIs and one always started near London and was able to connect to London somehow which also caused the ferry boat AI to send a London - Copenhagen train off into nowhere.

[EPH]

Be careful - you have to have x number of stations (45?) for the Battle of the Gauges and I'm not confident that you get credit for stations an AI built, even if you buy him up. Let me know how that comes out.

Sounds like you're doing some good old-fashioned tycooning.

If you have trouble with crashes try destroying and rebuilding the Copenhagen station. PM me if you need pointers on how to do that. Not sure why that has been a problem with this map, but it has. On the other hand, that was what I did in the 'fix', so...

One of the things I love is running 'trains' over the 'ocean'. I stole that from 'Men and Seals', by the way - didn't invent it, but I really love the concept.

Make sure you don't forget to build a shipping line from Bristol to Philadelphia. You can make a great deal of money and gain valuable cotton at the same time.

[grashopa]

One of the things I love is running 'trains' over the 'ocean'. I stole that from 'Men and Seals', by the way - didn't invent it, but I really love the concept.

Haha I was like whats going on?! Then I realized what you were doing. That just made this map brilliant by doing that and setting up the industry like this. Was wondering why the paper - pulp feedback loop though?

I just started with 1.06 because I was frustrated by the inability to feed my own textile mill in 1.05 when it says unprofitable route. This time three AIs borrowed 1500 each in the second year for expansion so it will be more interesting. In the earlier game I saw that merger connections did add to the connected count in the status.

I have no clue what I'm doing connecting cities though - I see people talking about hubs and what not and I just throw track around :)

[EPH]

The British Industrial Revolution was built on export sales and pretty quickly out-stripped the island's ability to provide the necessary resources. So there are some import/export chains available which you can 'pump' to get really amazing volumes.

In the west, you can import Caribbean/American sugar and make rum for export, plus you can import cotton and export clothing.
In the east you can import iron ore (from Scandinavia and the Ruhr, most likely) and export goods, plus you can import logs and pulpwood (Scandinavia and Russia) for lumber and paper. All of this is based on real industries of the time. Britain's only raw material export was coal... and perhaps a little wool, though I suspect her own mills used most of that.

I could have modeled this with whopping great ports and warehouses, but I put in the shipping lines for two reasons. First, because the Great Western Railway also ran a shipping line from Bristol to Philadelphia, and second because I thought the added distance (putting the warehouses/ports overseas) would make the loads more valuable. Plus, it is just cool.

Good to know that merging with another line adds their stations to yours. I've been playing RRT3 since it came out and I didn't know that.

Using 'loads of coal delivered' to control raw material output and industrial production is actually a concept from 'Japanese Miracle', which uses electrical power generation. I thought the circumstances were similar enough to warrant re-using the mechanism.

A hub is a station in a central point where several lines come together. In 'British Miracle' I use Birmingham, with lines going north to Manchester, west to Shrewsbury, southwest to Worcester and Heresford (and Cardiff), southeast to Coventry (to Bristol and London) and east to Leicester (and on to York). All the trains tend to originate or terminate in Birmingham, which makes it a 'terminal' or a hub. You only need to be careful not to jam in so many trains that none of them can move. In a lot of games I build two stations in Birmingham and segregate the north-running trains to one and the south-running trains to another.

[Hawk]

I just started with 1.06 because I was frustrated by the inability to feed my own textile mill in 1.05 when it says unprofitable route.

Playing a 1.05 map in 1.06 can almost be considered a cheat.

[grashopa]

Playing a 1.05 map in 1.06 can almost be considered a cheat.

The AI is much stronger in my 1.06 playthrough which is making things more fun. The only problem is the AI doesn't know to connect the big cities and run express trains where all the income is. And you get too much money to start - allowing a liverpool - manchester - birmingham connection right off the bat is something no AI could ever come close to competing with. But 7 years in with 3 new AIs worth more than 3m each is cool. Of course smarter AIs also means more express income from connecting with them.

Is there a way in the editor to reduce express income? I'd almost do that in early scenarios like this where there isn't much industry rail profit in comparison to passengers. But you'd have to rejigger goals of course.

I have 19 cities connected 7 years in, I'm not exactly sure where I'm at as it will still take a lot of money to get to the 46 city mark. Especially since I have to acquire AI companies which now are worth more than book value or route my rails around around theirs.

If you auto consist you can't cheat the loads, but I still think pricing is broken as a 6 load a year supply city with 1 load in it should have a much lower price than a demand city with 3 loads in it and a demand of 8 loads per year which I still see in this playthrough though I don't own the affected industries. To supply that demand you'd need multiple trains to all pick up supply before any one of the trains reaches the demand city otherwise they'd refuse to pick up unprofitable loads.

[grashopa]

Hahaha I just jumped in the game to rearrange some trains from an AI I just merged with and I'm going what is wrong with this silly AI not running trains here and here... I run a year out and suddenly my profit went from 1.3m to 2.1m. I check my income statement thinking how great my reorganization skills are when I saw I had 800k in additional misc profits. Huh?

I check my tracks and I have two AIs running a bunch of trains on my tracks. 4 of them are completely on my tracks between my stations. They saw that I was letting go 900k in profit so they jumped in and added trains where I forgot! I think my liverpool - manchester train crashed and I forgot to replace it so two AIs were running trains completely on my tracks between manchester - liverpool - wigan. Haha.

Also I bought out the ireland ferry AI ( their stock crashed for some reason ) and I realize I can't run a ferry from Dublin to Belfast because I can't build a maintenance shed on the water. People may want to add that just in case before playing.

[EPH]

Add a station whose footprint overlaps an existing station. That way they can share cargo. You can do the same at Dover and Liverpool, for example.

AI trains may bring you money but they will also clog up your rail lines and slow down your trains. You have been warned.