Baltimore start for North America map!

[Bmorekareful]

C'mon now, lets get some respect!... B&O, Avalon Hill, Microprose, and Firaxis, all Baltimore.

[Dray Prescot]

The problem is that on a continental scale map, it is too close to Washington DC. Think of Wahington DC as including Baltimore, or vice versa (but one is a National Capital and the other is not).

[Bmorekareful]

Originally posted by Dray Prescot:

The problem is that on a continental scale map, it is too close to Washington DC. Think of Wahington DC as including Baltimore, or vice versa (but one is a National Capital and the other is not).

Boooooooooooooooooooo!

[Dray Prescot]

I just started a game of free mode for 1830 to 1930, and if you look at map, Baltimore, if it was there, would merge into Washington DC, i.e. there would be no space between the two cities, they would be all one urban area on our map scale. So think of Washington DC as being Washington DC/Baltimore.

It would distort the balance of the game map to have two cities so close to each other. They were almost too close to each other already on the 1830 East Map.

[PopularCraft]

Bhahaha. It's Baltimore. Best thing Baltimore has going for it is not being Detroit.

[zeitbauer]

washington was a tiny town. baltimore was the major town next to washington. it'd by like your map of germany having 'potsdam' as the terminal and not berlin. the dev's just 'everyone knows washington d.c. is the important city.' it weren't.

[Simonson [29th Ret.]]

I'd rather have Baltimore than D.C.

D.C. is very tiny, and not important other than it's the seat of the U.S. government. It's basically a suburb of Balitimore, Maryland and Arlington, Virginia.

I'd also rather have Detroit than Toledo. Toledo is unimportant compared to Detroit. They should also throw in Miami. Major city whose absence is noted. No reason to lay track in south Florida otherwise.

[genemead]

They've left out of thousands of other cities (and industries) that also need "repsect". You can't have them all.

[Dray Prescot]

It is also a matter of an international player base for the game. People in Europe or Asia probably have a better idea of where Washington DC is than Baltimore. But Economicaly Baltimore is much more important

I agree to Detroit over Toledo as well as the lack of Miami, although when did Miami start becoming large? Most people, even Americans, have a better idea about where Detroit is, than Toledo. Having Detoit and no Toledo might make Cleveland possible on the map and maybe Cincinnati, which have been a lot more important to the US history than Toledo, plus even the foreign people playing RE have much better idea of where they are. Cleveland's problem on a Map for RE is being too close to Pittsburg. For much of the 1800s and more than the first half of the 1900s, Cleveland was the 10th largest city in the USA. Toledo is much too small and unimportant to represent Ohio on the RE game map. Detroit is a lot more economically and strategically important than Toledo (which is at most the 4th largest separate urban area in Ohio (actually it is more like 6th or 7th or 8th in Ohio).

But then we also need Philadelphia in the East which is too close to New York City, as well as Albany (NY) which has the same problem on the RE game map.

There is NO Boston which is much more important than Portland Maine. Plus Buffalo, NY and and Erie PA need to be there on the Great Lakes. Then there is there lack of the St Lawrence River connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The whole North East of the USA needs more cities on this map. They also need a couple (at least one) of more cities along the Gulf of Mexico coast of the USA, east of New Orleans. They also need at least two or 3 more cities on the Great Lakes (Superior and Michigan) North and West of Chicago. Plus Charleston SC on the South East Atlantic coast, and maybe Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginnia. I realize all of this gives more weight to the NE, Mid Atlantic, SE, Mississippi River, and the Great Lakes on the map, but that IS the way things were then.

In many respects, the RE game map should be based on how the Rail Road map of the continental USA interacted with the major bodies of Water: the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Great Lakes, and the major rivers, since water was the other major form of transport, and where the biggest cities were. In the early part of this period, even the canals were as important as the Rail Roads, which competed with them.

[genemead]

I just started a full American map, a Sandbox game in the East. Guess what? It has Baltimore-
as it's own city. So yes, you can start in Baltimore if that's what you really want/need. (It's in the North American map, East , Free Mode also).
Problem solved.

[Dray Prescot]

It is only on the map for the East region, which does NOT include the whole map for continental USA.

When you choose Free Mode you get a map of the USA showing various regions to choose similar to many of the regions for the Scenarios or Campaign Game. What you get are various regional maps. However, there is a little side arrow icon and if you click that you get offered another map choice which is ALL of the continental USA. If you choose that map option then you get the map peoples are complaining about (see above messages), with Washington DC and NO Baltimore.

[Dray Prescot]

What I would really like for RE is to have a lot more potential city sites that can be grown into normal cities with a little effort, but they start off with almost no population (even less than 20,000 and NO Industry built, make the Lot available at 20,000). This would all the player some ability to change what cities are actually on the RE Railroad Map by choosing which ones to grow (even more than the present game). You would still be limited by the availability of resources, but we need additional resource locations to show up on the map as the game developes.