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http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=826621785
It's 1988 now, but these were my 1850 starting routes. The green line carries crude oil to the refinery and fuel back to the oil well. The red line carries fuel into Weybridge. The first line I added after that (once I was in a position to add a line) was the light blue line, a bus route between Weybridge and Rowley Regis. I also added a fuel truck line over to Middleton.
Once all of that was stable, it's really just a matter of time.
Your Raw - Factory roundtrip line will be 2x profit line ( this is true for CM or Fuel to start with).
If your weight your delivery line correctly you going to have small profit on city supply ( one way cargo route ) and some small negative on local city delivery. But who cares on this small negative if you have huge plus on your production line. You will want to deliver into 2-3 cities right from the farm to boost requirements to 100-150 and have 150-250k route to get you by with the loan.
Using passenger transport only to grow cities > increase my goods demand on existing line , make it possible to put more of those profit carts.
Dont get below 15-20 sec!!!! You better build another line.
Use 3-4 bus routes to circle inside the city to grow them a bit - expect +15-20% size grows just with that.
The sceenshot posted - trains will not make their costs likely before they will wear old and will drawn into red zone! :) Passengers seems to be heavier than goods for the same transportation bounty.
Hard mode is the only mode for me since on easy and even on normal you'll drown in cash pretty fast.
As suggested above, look for a food or fuel route that allows you to stop at a town on the way back. buy a TON of carts.
If possible, place a second depot in the catchment area of your drop off in town (or somewhere along the route.)
Once you see your town is maxed and affecting production, add a second route from the 2nd depot to the next town.
Route 1: Farm > Processor > Town / Depot
Route 2: Depot 2 > Town 2.
this allows the first route to continue to take all of your goods from the processor, while allowing them to transfer to the next route.
In my game, i put 40 carts on the route from the start (work up gradually, wait for the farm to produce 20 goods then add 5 at a time). with that first 40 carts, i supplied 3 towns.
Now wait, you will slowly amass a Million or so in time for the first round of upgrades.
Before upgrading, expand the line to another route with 1 new vehicle to establish it.
Auto replace Route 1, it will take several years and clear your account. the route may falter and cause a back up as the farm and producer ramp up production. don't worry, wait it out, it will clear up and rebalance once all replacements are complete.
Replace Route 2, and so on. Once all upgrades are complete, check the cargo on the New route you set up before upgrading, and add vehicles to it until cappacity is met.
DO NOT try to tinker with the exsisting routes to try and add vehicles, it will cause them to crash if you over shoot. Only remove vehicles if production can't keep up to maintain full loads and profitability.
It will take some trial and error to keep this chain going without overloading a depot and shutting down production, but most fluctuations will balance out once goods are removed. Add vehicles to new routes if need be, but keep your original routes steady. Adjusting the first route effects every single dependant route and so on, try to only adjust the end lines to keep up and then sit tight until the next round of upgrades.
Then wait again. I used this strat to take me into the 1900's up to the Benz. Did not set up my first train until 1920 or so when i started to connect passenger routes.
Another trick i find very usefull, pay off a chunk of your loan FIRST. the first route can be established with 700k or less, paying off that first 500k takes a 15k per year interest payment off. Pay off another 500K after the first round of upgrades, then the remaining 200 sometime before you build trains.
Once you get into the 2nd round of motorized trucks, you should be seeing enough profits to protect you from bankruptcy while your first train gets established. Add a new train every few years, be sure to plan for upgrading all of your truck routes when they come due. Eventually your trains will make enough profit to match the truck routes, allowing you to replace them with cargo trains as you see fit.
I upgraded my Farm route to a train, yet kept the truck route to the 2nd town due to its proximity. On my current map the towns are close enough that 1 cargo train can supply several towns by truck routes and maintain a healthy profit.
(seconds per day x 365) / Frequency of route x Number of vehicles x Capacity of single vehicle = Units delivered per year.
If you didn't mess arround in the lua a day has 2000ms (2s).
Ive been doing the math on frequency and capacity right, i guess what my main question would be, is does the demand of the town reflect monthly?
as in, if my town demands 100 food, is it looking for 100 per week, month, 6 months?
Same question for production.
This, so much in hard depends on the map spawn. I'd add in create shortcuts when and where possible. It may not help with profits, but it will help with frequency.
If a town has a Demand for 100 Food, it's the yearly demand, though a town will consume 1/12 of it's supply per month, so at the beginning of every month you'll see the supply drop down by roughly 8.33 (probably rounded to 8 per month with 9 per month every three months).
Industries will look at the potential demand (I presume each month) to determine whether there is more or less Potential, based on the unsatisfied demand. If you're consistently supplying to the cities demand will roughly remain the same, ignoring of course town growth. As towns grow, they'll demand more, which signals consumer goods industries (Fuel, Goods, Food, etc) to produce more. Those industries will signal demand to their suppliers, so as production and demand rise and fall, these ups and downs will trickle down the chain.
Before the patch, Production of a factory was heavily dependent upon the frequency of the lines it was supplying and being supplied by. This made having more shorter trains preferable to fewer longer trains, which isn't so the case now. Factories will over produce, I've heard aiming for about 130% of their demand, but eventually things will balance out. This over production has lead to many people noticing how much easier it is to make money, since they no longer have vehicles running half empty on a line that used to struggle to put out enough resources.
1. 1850-70: Created 6 standard starter oil/fuel and food cart routes
2. 1870-90: Created two stone/bricks cart networks to serve 6 cities (2 x (1 stone + 3 brick routes)
3. 1890: Connected three of the best supplieed cities with two passenger lines, one train, paid for out of profits from cart routes (runing about $1m p.a after vehicle replacements etc at this stage).
4. 1902: Bank balance now at about $10m and the magic 100kph A3/5 loco arrives. Key moment......
5. 1902 Rebuilt the passenger tracks and extended them to a new city next to unused oil well at one end and a distant oil refinary at the other paying no head to expense - bridges over valleys, tunnels straight through hills, no account taken of cost of cuttings/embankments etc, just straight flat fast 120kph track.
6. 1902 Increased loan from $1.2m (original) to $10m to use this track for premium A3/5 passenger route through three cities line between refinary and well (massively increasing city growth) and the first oil train to bring fuel back to the oil well (using 100kph A3/5 at 80kph at this stage due to wagon restriction) which is then trucked to two cities
7. 1902-5 Passenger A3/5 is making mediocre but consistent profits (about $400-600k) but more importantly exploding served town populations (as they already have food, bricks and in one case fuel). Oil train is banking life changing sums, $4-5m profit p.a.
8. 1905-20 During this period developed two oil train lines operating three long trains each now upgraded to 120kph wagons serving five cities with total fuel demand of 600+ due to eexploding city populations caused by the passenger line and are making $10m+ p.a. profits each by 1920. Passenger line profits increase to $1m.
9. 1920-3 Lay track (again paying no regard to expense for tunnels, bridges etc or what I have to knock down to get optimal station placement etc) to connect three more cities already served by truck with food/fuel/bricks with passenger service. Passneger line is moderately successfull but more importantly connected cities start to explode in population.
1923. With $75m in the bank now I am finding it difficult to spend money faster than I make it. I've just laid track for two new long distance fright lines sparing no expense whatever making them as fast, flat and stright as possible and placing stations en route at factories I'm intertested in activating in the future and found I have $5m or so more money than I had when I began, primarily 'cos I have to attend to little glitches here and there and unpause for while to test fixes so one of the oil trains or other is always banking a whacking great cheque for 4 or 5 mil or so.
Observations:
A. I am finding this game much easier than my previous attempt at a US 1850 medium hard start. At the moment I attribute this to:
* spending a lot of money on bridges, cuttings, embankments and tunnels to get fast tacks. Like Train Fever, the cost of this is chickenfeed compared to the cost of train manitenance over time and has a huge impact on profits.
* Factories seem more willing to ramp up production. This may be becasue of chages in the recent patch.
* The A3/5 locomotive. It seems it rocks compared to US equivelents.
B. The rules for city growth seem to be:
* no passengers and no goods = stagnation
* goods but no passengers = glacially slow growth
* passengers but no goods = slow growth
* goods and passengers = explosive growth
I would say you use passenger services to grow cities and you use freight services to make your money. I would also say don't bother putting in a passenger service unless the cities concerned already have at least one good delivered.
C. So my recommended rule of thumb formula for 1850 hard start at the moment is:
* start with goods cart routes looking to supply groups of cities, say two groups of three or four.
* connect two or three of these supplied cities with a cheap passenger line, not to make make money so much as to encourage growth
* Wait until you get a decent locomotive capable of shifting 14/16 wagons over long distances at decent speed (like the A3/5 for example) and then build either a food or oil line (which you can easily run loaded in both directions) serving these cities you have connected with the passneger route. This is the game changer after which you will not have to worry about money again.
If you have this plan in mind from the beginning you can study the map to find the places where this approach will work most easily, whree the required factories are, how easily cities can be connected, a suitable oil/refinary or farm/food processor pair to connect for the first mega-freight line.