Mars - Greening the Red Planet

http://www.railroadtycoon.info/maps/JayEff/MarsGreening04.zip

3 missions to make Mars more hospitable:
1. Construct greenhouses in the domed cities.
2. Haul deuterium (for fusion reactors) and fertiliser.
3. Spread green goo.

Features:
varied topography, scenic landscapes :D
varied cities - different industries, bylaws and work ethics :D
effects of low gravity :)
omnipresent dust :(
agriculture is concentrated in cities
only mining in the hinterlands
colours and height map by Viking and bmp2gmp :D
50 year time frame
at least 5 punny city names & I only made up one of them (guess which) :twisted:
B-I-G, needs a skookum computer after 40 years :shock:
optional university course in terraforming 8)

:arrow: I would appreciate some help with testing :!:

[kriss]

Jayeff,
I have to wait one more week for my skookum PC to arrive, I'll happily test this one after that. It looks like you should include a sound file from Dune with this map.

I suppose we could all include music, skins, logos and rt3.lng files in our .zip's. I wanted to rename uranium to deuterium and pulp to termite food :wink: And, yea some spacey music would be good for this one.

I will be doubling my video card to 128 MB and doubling RAM to 512MB. Hope that helps. Could be my comp (AMD) just got hot. I only had 50 trains and there are only 19 cities. And 768*512 isn't really gigantic. It is just barely big enough to get the 256MB warning.

[kriss]

I've done a bit of research on this & while it's impossible to be precise, the minimum spec to get the best out of RRT3 would appear to be around 2.4 Mb, 512 Mram & (impossible to define) decent graphics card.

[PJay]

I have started playing this map, but next time, I'll have to write down all lessons from the university :)

You can repeat the course any time by placing track again in the white square. It goes through the six lessons, then deletes the track and resets the counter.

Also, all the lessons are in the accompanying text file.

[HaulEm]

The Mars scenario looked good -- it was really fun to play and the pre-green scenery almost realistic.

Two questions:

1. Plenty of deuterium cargoes to haul but not enough fertilizer. Seems there is very little fertilizer to go around so I couldn't make the goal of 500 fertilizer cargoes. Am I missing something?

2. I'm in year 37 and I could only seed 50,000 acres -- with all cities connected. I noticed quite a few green squares pop up at random on the SW quadrant of the map, but the UMM lessons weren't clear on that. The other alternative would have been to lay enough track to seed 200,000 acres with the bio-accelerators, but laying that much track would have busted my company with 13 years to go. Don't the greenhouses or the deuterium/fertilizer hauling somehow accelerate the greening of the map?

Any answers appreciated. Thanks. :D

1. Haul alcohol to the warehouse at Tempe Arvens, where it can be exchanged for chemicals, then haul chemicals to the fertiliser factories. The chemicals are the 'ammonia bergs' mentioned in Lesson 5. It is possible for one un-upgraded warehouse to generate 13 loads of chemicals and 3 loads of fertiliser per year, 400 theoretically possible in the time allotted for the scenario. Plus the city recipe allows more warehouses to be generated, and any or all of them can be upgraded. The fertiliser and chemical is meant to be in short supply - that is the point. There is hardly any nitrogen on Mars. But you are in a position to advance the cause by importing these ammonia bergs.

2. Yup, you have to construct track for the sole purpose of seeding but you can destroy it as soon as the job is done. You might want to have your main tracks electric with electric trains, then have your temporary seeding tracks non-electric with non electric trains. That way none of your hauling locos will end up on track that has no maintenance sheds. On the train's route map you can program waypoints that are not stations by pressing Ctrl while you click on the track.

You need to have quite a financial empire to fund this effort, so get some industry and some lucrative routes. You can make a lot by owning and hauling deuterium. Also look at the specialized cities. Some of them produce and demand double the amount of passengers, and one city has more productive factories.

As for the green patches popping up, some of your bio-accelerator green slime must have blown there on the wind.

ANY MORE COMMENTS ANYONE? SHALL I TURN THIS BETA BABY LOOSE?

[Wolverine@MSU]

1. Haul alcohol to the warehouse at Tempe Arvens, where it can be exchanged for chemicals, then haul chemicals to the fertiliser factories. The chemicals are the 'ammonia bergs' mentioned in Lesson 5. It is possible for one un-upgraded warehouse to generate 13 loads of chemicals and 3 loads of fertiliser per year, 400 theoretically possible in the time allotted for the scenario. Plus the city recipe allows more warehouses to be generated, and any or all of them can be upgraded. The fertiliser and chemical is meant to be in short supply - that is the point. There is hardly any nitrogen on Mars. But you are in a position to advance the cause by importing these ammonia bergs.


I was hauling enough alcohol to Tempe Arvens to make the whole planet drunk as a skunk, but didn't get any chemicals in return. The warehouse put out its programmed 3 loads per year, but wouldn't make any from the alcohol. I noticed that the warehouse was set right on the corner of four economic cells, and there was never much of a stack of alcohol on any of them. Is this a bug or is the warehouse not supposed to have a big demand for alcohol? And how do you upgrade warehouses if you can't buy them?

The rest of the scenario was marvelous. Quite an ingenious concept. I got a good seed to start and connected the two cities south of Sacra Mensa and ran the fast diesel between them to build up enough cash, along with bonds to buy a Nuke plant early on. With several nearby Uranium mines it made oodles of electricity, allowing me the electric option. My advice is to take it, and use the ultrafast (but not very reliable) locos to move cargo. I then built north along the side of the valley and connected to Sacra Mensa (by a long bridge), then over to Tempe Arvens. I basically used the cargo overlay and looked at "ALL" cargoes to see where most of the stuff was and connected those cities first. With the ultrafast locos, cargo was moving really well, giving generous profits and enough to buy more Nukes. Gradually added other cities and quickly bought surrounding farms/industries as the greenhouses were built and they started producing. Had to build Tool & Die factories in some of them to kick start the demand for Plastic and Aluminum. As the ultrafast locos started aging and crashing I replaced with the slower but much more reliable electric ($1,000 K each). After 30 years I had all the greenhouses built and thanks to favorable economic states (only one depression and two booms) I was able to start greening up. It took several years to lay enough track and run the locos (non-electric track with fastest diesel) to seed the required area. It was really neat to watch the trains running back and forth over the flatlands, spreading life to the sterile landscape. Since the game didn't seem to be giving the chemicals it should have, I cheated a little toward the end and used the editor to place two more chemical plants in Tempe Arvens. The game had only produced enough chemicals to make a little over 200 loads of fertilizer in 25 years, so I gave it a little boost.

I'm going to try it again with a fresh start and see whether it was just a fluke that the TA warehouse wasn't converting "booze to bergs". All in all, it was a wonderful play and an interesting concept. Keep up the good work JayEff!!!

Wolverine, I don't think it is a bug really. I think there is just a lot more that we mapmakers need to know about warehouses, ports and the cargo model.

Just to test, I placed a couple of grain farms and a brewery near the TA warehouse. Then for about ten years I watched the brewery, the warehouse and the fertiliser factories do their thing, with no locos. It's a circle really, because grain->alcohol->chemical->fertiliser->grain.

I did not get the impression that being on four cargo squares made much difference. Most of the alcohol just piled up on one square, on the brewery side.

Over the ten years, warehouse consumption of alcohol climbed from 0 to varying between 0.8 and 2.0 per year. That would give 2.4 to 6.0 chemicals.

Someone, I forget who, suggested that productivity is related to price. And I think that manufacturing or swaps may be related to the relative prices of the raw material and the finished product. In the boldface numbers that follow, x is the rated capacity, and the number ahead of it is a performance factor.

1. The grain farms are rated to produce 2 loads per year, which can be increased by 20% with fertiliser. Well fertiliser at TA was cheap and there was a brewery next door so guess what - they were averaging SIX loads per year EACH and earning $170-220k per year and cost $1700k and $2000k to purchase. Production was 2.5x what it 'should be'. They were consuming fertilizer at the rate of 0.7 loads per year. Meanwhile, at Sacra Mensa, the grain farms are at only 2.2 loads, 1.1x, no fertiliser.
2. The brewery also did well producing 6.6 alcohol per year with a ready supply of grain and a buyer next door. 1.1x what it should be.
3. A chemical industry is producing 2.5 loads, 1.25x.
4. At 0.8 to 2.0 loads consumed, with max 10 swaps per year, the upgraded warehouse is accepting alcohol at .08 to .20x of capacity. The overall production of the warehouse is at 22-23 loads produced, subtract 2.4 to 6.0 traded chemicals, and you have about 17-19 loads raw-supplied (should be 18). So the supply function is performing at about 1.0x.
5. The unupgraded fertiliser plants, whith abundant supplies of chemicals, are producing 2.4 to 3.3 loads per year out of 4, that's about 0.7x.

The local abundance of chemicals and fertiliser is suppressing their production. It appears to work a bit like a reversible reaction in chemistry I made it worse by having the warehouse produce fertiliser as well as chemicals. The fert might be suppressing the fert factories.

The price of alcohol relative to chemicals may be a factor. After 9 years, the prices near the warehouse were $183 for alcohol and $63 for chemicals. Maybe dollars out has to exceed dollars in. At that stage the 3 for 1 swap was generating $189 out for each $183 invested. Hardly worth it if unemployment insurance is an option.

[Later that day...] I ran the game for two more years, and production increased slightly. At 11 years gone I am looking at $135 for alcohol to get 3x$55=$165 for chemicals, and the warehouse is a bit more productive. Worth it for the $30 per swap I guess.

I could be way off on the $ per swap thing. After all, what would happen if the swap was 1 for 1? You would never get a $12 load of coal out of a $200 weapon available for swap.
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Examples from other scenarios:
- In Trans-Sib it is very difficult to upgrade the warehouse at Vladivostok, probably because it has to compete with the port, toy factories and barracks for the products it demands.
- In Colonial India I had trouble upgrading cotton export ports, perhaps because there are so many textile mills keeping the price high.
- Ever notice that sometimes you start a scenario, and the warehouse, port or factory has upgraded just from the three year seeding routine?
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Perhaps what warehouses, ports and industries need is the ability to buy low, sell high. That affects profit, and probably how soon it will upgrade.[/i]

An updated version was posted today. Price increases for chemicals and fertilizers should make that industry chain works better. Make sure you haul the stuff somewhere it is demanded or production will drop off.