Southern Honshu seems unwinnable now

[gussmed]

For one of the provinces, you have to move 10,000 passengers in a quarter. That no longer seems achievable, though it was once. I built stations in every city, and built most of them up to level 4 or 5 to boost passenger production, and never got over about 7,000 passengers.

I thought maybe there was some trick to it, so I watched Adekyn's video on the subject. When he was playing it, it counted the passengers moved by the computer player. He was showing 2,500 passengers moved before he placed his first station. He completed it without really doing much expansion at all or doing anything tricky.

[JR's TARDIS]

I am in the process of playing this scenario and just completed the 10,000 passenger challenge.

I also connected every city and jammed on every train I could, and I did notice as I watched the task board that the passenger total would climb to around 7800-8000 and then would retreat back to around 7300. This happen several times as I watched until I stopped watching and let the trains run. After about a minute or two I checked again and the total did go to 8000+ but it did again retreat several hundred passengers. After that I only made some brief checks until the task was accomplished.

Not sure if this is some sort of glitch in the totaling or if its something else, but something weird is certainly going on.

-JR

[gussmed]

One obvious source of variance is how many passengers the computer player transports. My passengers totals went steadily downhill after peaking at 7,200 or so, as the computer player expanded. There are 3 cities he has no presence in when you unlock the province, and he connects those eventually if the scenario goes on long enough.

[JR's TARDIS]

Mine was not a steady decline, it was a significant drop of several hundred passengers at least 5-6 times. The AI player was not super developed, but even so there is no way he delivered that many passengers at one time. Seemed more like a bug than normal game play.
-JR

[chaney]

Yikes, that sure doesn't seem right. Is there any reason to believe the running total should ever drop?

I'll speculate a bit based on the posts here (no personal experience) but if the competitors' passengers were being counted before, that would have been easier. If that was not intended and uncovered as a bug, perhaps it was fixed badly. If the fix was to subtract ongoing competitors' passengers, that seems to fit the behavior. Several full carloads of passengers would be a few hundred passengers. The fix that seems right would be to not count them at all, instead of adding or subtracting them.

[Chrome EaglezZ]

I just played this scenario, well up until I passed the 10,000 passengers. Once this task became available, I only created passenger/mail lines with the express train. I checked each city by looking at the express goods (passengers), and kept putting more trains on until the I got to at least 85% travelling by train. I also got some market criers and immediately hired them and selected 'comfort' to help passenger numbers. I was able to complete this task relatively easy and got a gold tick for it.
I just kept creating passenger/mail lines until I saw the passenger numbers get close to 10,000. I had about 6 or 7 city connections with at least 4 of those being just passenger/mail.

[Kaarl]

Originally posted by JR's TARDIS:

Mine was not a steady decline, it was a significant drop of several hundred passengers at least 5-6 times. The AI player was not super developed, but even so there is no way he delivered that many passengers at one time. Seemed more like a bug than normal game play.
-JR

Hey JR,
I would kindly ask you to send a message to our support at [e-mail] with a detailed decription of the issue (and ideally a link to this thread) and the affected savegame attached, so they can investigate what is happening to your passengers!
You can find your savegames for Railway Empire at the following location:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\[Your UserID]\503940\remote\savegames
We will get back to you as soon as possible!
Have a good one

[JR's TARDIS]

Originally posted by Kaarl:

Originally posted by JR's TARDIS:

Mine was not a steady decline, it was a significant drop of several hundred passengers at least 5-6 times. The AI player was not super developed, but even so there is no way he delivered that many passengers at one time. Seemed more like a bug than normal game play.
-JR

Hey JR,
I would kindly ask you to send a message to our support at [e-mail] with a detailed decription of the issue (and ideally a link to this thread) and the affected savegame attached, so they can investigate what is happening to your passengers!
You can find your savegames for Railway Empire at the following location:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\[Your UserID]\503940\remote\savegames
We will get back to you as soon as possible!
Have a good one

Thanks! I will take care of those things right away.

Only other thing I can think of for passengers going down is I had one Express train which went out of the province and maybe/perhaps took those passengers off the total. But seeing that most of my Expresses only carried at best 2 carloads, does not explain my major drop.
-JR

[JR's TARDIS]

I have to say that after receiving the reply from Support I'm a bit disappointed.

Quoting:
'This is a very difficult task. It will probably require some adjustments to the rail network.

Please try to focus on creating Express Rail lines with all cities connected inside this region. Set all Rail Line ticket prices to the lowest and try to make the cities grow on the side with connecting essential rural industries on side tracks which aren't interfering with the main express lines.'

Thanks. I was aware that this is a 'difficult task.' It is also a task that I eventually completed originally. The suggested actions are already things that I had done (for the most part), and there is no explanation on why the passenger totals are dropping so drastically. Very unsatisfying, and it is this kind of rote, generic reply than make me (and other players, I suspect) more frustrated.

I ran the scenario again from the same point and this time I watched the Task Screen and counted 10 times the total dropped by hundreds. I then switched to watching only from the Map Screen for five (5) minute periods, checking only with the game paused and found that it is also possibly happening as one time the total was 8,000+ and the following time it was 7,600+. There were other times the total did not seem to move. There is no way to be absolutely sure because on the Map Screen you can't see the running total, so I'm still guessing.

I made only two after-the-fact adjustments (which I also had done originally) by expanding stations where there were bottlenecks. Eventually I again was able to complete the task without watching the Task Screen.

Without a further explanation I feel that this is some sort of bug, just not a fatal one.

Please understand, it is not an personal attack on the developers or support. I appreciate the quick turnaround of the replies, however unsatisfying it was, and I thank you for it. But I am just looking for an answer.

-JR

[gussmed]

I'm pretty sure what's happening with abrupt drops is that the measurement is a sliding window of time, not the current quarter. If it were the current quarter - like quarterly financials - the passenger count would drop to zero at the start of each quarter and climb. What it appears to count is the last 13 weeks.

So, if your passenger count *this* week is a couple hundred below what it was exactly 13 weeks ago, you'll see an abrupt drop.

It's still pretty rough, at least now. I still think something changed in the last year or so, because in Adekyn's video he gets the 10,000 milestone without any effort beyond connecting the cities, no city growth involved at all. Whereas I only saw about 5,000 passengers initially when I did the same thing.

It's kind of a crummy milestone because if you don't complete it almost right away, you'll never complete it. The computer player expands and interferes with the task, and the only way you can improve your count beyond the initial surge is to grow cities, and that doesn't happen fast enough to compensate for the computer player growth.