Annoying things in maps, and how to avoid them

[CJN]

There are several cases where I have stopped playing some map because it has annoyed me. Since these annoyances are avoidable, I will offer some comments how to avoid them.

1. River in the middle of cities and other station & track placement annoyances. This is the worst of all and is mostly cause by the big bridge ramps. I find it unacceptable to not be able to put a station in the middle of the city under the stars. Keep your rivers outside the cells reserved for the station and preferable outside the cityradius also. Take a look at the PopTop maps, real life London and Paris are split by rivers, but PopTop put the rivers outside to make gameplay not so frustrating. There are related cases not as common to look out for: Track that doesn't fit into a historical route river valley, mountain cities which lacks a place to fit a station, port cities too far or too close to the coast.

2. Speed goals. These are not so good if you want the players to really serve the map. Players will often either refuse to play at all or just run one train to meet the goal on such maps. Think carefully before you use a speed goal on a map.

Some definitions: A builder map is one that focus on connecting cities, hauling cargo and driving up CBV. A baron map is one that focus on making money for the player (player net worth). A baron map often has AIs, a builder map often doesn't.

3 Builder map design: Don't give the player a task to build a rail network and only have a CBV goal (and eventual connection goals). The map will become boring once the player has connected to every city. Add events and hauling conditions! Also make sure that the material to be hauled is available! Raw material producers will go out of business if they don't generate profit.

4 Baron map design: Baron maps are more intresting if the player is able to compete against AIs, so avoid map designs where the AIs can't prosper. Plains that doesn't have too many rivers are great. Example: Northern France.

5 A suggestion on the time period of your maps: Try making a map that doesn't start at the same time (1830-1880, 1945-55, 1990-2000) as all the rest. Try to make a map that takes place during the following underused timeperiods: 1910-1940 and 1965-1985.

[Taleisinchat]

Yes, guilty as charged. I don't think I have ever actually dumped the 'build a city' icon right IN the river (splosh), but I have sometimes wanted to have either a) buildings on both banks or b) the possibility of serving a city with a station on either shore. I agree about the ramps on the bridges being a pain sometimes - and I wish they would flatten out to gradient 2 if you wanted them to.

And in North Wales I made some valleys that were almost too tough to build track down. I wanted to have Snowdonia look impressive and have gradients that actually slowed the trains ... but erred towards the borderline of practicality.

But isn't there just a personal taste thing here also? RRT draws in players for many different reasons. Strategy game players, rail fans who like playing trains, rail fans who like historical accuracy, rail fans who like technical plausibility etc etc. I'm a map and landscape fan with a passing interest in railways. The greatest joy of all is to put the camera on a long distance consist and watch the scenery go by, especially in something with real guts to it like Meteor Strike, or Greening the Red Planet, or Rhodes Unfinished (thanks to those authors for hours of fun). There are other maps that I leave alone because the organisational requirements are too demanding or the scenery a touch bland.

Getting hooked on RRT3 has left me somewhat unimpressed with SimCity4 ....

Horses for courses?

[pigboy306]

Annoying but i think there is a reason for rivers being in the middle of cities. Historically they were needed!

Speed goals. These are not so good if you want the players to really serve the map. Players will often either refuse to play at all or just run one train to meet the goal on such maps. Think carefully before you use a speed goal on a map.
There are a lot of achievements that can be measured with the events available to the editor. Let's not limit ourselves to PNW, CBV or goals we have seen already. You need speed goals if speed was a factor historically and you want to make an historical scenario. Flying Scotsman as a scenario is dead without speed. Building stone bridges, longstraightflattrack, shorter trains, faster locos is fine but what I hate about speed requirements is that you can also improve it by micromanaging your servicing. A scenario builder should consider using Wolverine's plan for giving players and option to incorporate servicing into their stations. If you accept the options, oil sand and water use drop to zero, station construction costs and load unload times increase. And bingo, you have killed your micromanagement issue. Fulfilling an express speed goal by sending only one load on a one car train is easily prevented by requiring a number of express cargoes to be hauled.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Sometimes when building a bridge or tunnel, and then adding track at either end, the previously established grades get all screwed up. This sometimes also happens when just laying track that connects to existing track in the same track-laying "session". To aviod this, exit out of the track laying mode after laying track with the desired grades, then go back into track-laying mode and add more track. It seems that this will set the track grades of the already-laid pieces, and only a few track pieces at the junctions change grade as track is added.

Wolverine - Also if you anticipate extending track later, try to pick an area that is either flat or has an even grade.
- Bridges can get screwed up when you add stations or curves too close. All I can think of for this is to save before you start if you see a potential for a problem. Add the station after the bridge, or the bridge may add the station to one of its ramp structures.
- Sometimes I just deal with the small bumps by adding a post office or maintenance facility.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Bridges can get screwed up when you add stations or curves too close.

And by all means, if you plan on upgrading a wooden bridge, don't put a station (or water tower/maint.fac.) too close (or on) the approach ramps. When you decide to upgrade the wooden bridge, you have to bulldoze the structure before you can bulldoze the bridge.