Posts by StressFree

    I've never known the "old days".

    But we have strategic opportunities to explore with this ranking as well. (Right now on my server we are pushing one city to 50, to punish the rest of the server and make them all start EG during the night, while our main city will start in the evening).

    Opportunities exist, we simply need imaginative people to think of some new ways to beat the cities that stay purposefully at low levels.

    The second place city came in 2 hours behind the first place city which started 4 hours earlier, however, had the losing city levelled up to eliminate the 4 hour difference, it would have been much more than four hours behind.

    I will be interested to hear whether your strategy works or not. Tigerhawk has told me that she beat the very strategy you are employing by starting as the 10th best city. The city she beat had many endgame wins under its belt. Ever since, that server has been a race to the smallest city (and now a race to the highest ranked smallest city. It is rapidly approaching the 'all cities at the same level hypothetical' mentioned earlier.

    Can I mention that I miss the days when endgame actually made people want to level their cities? The current algorithm encourages everyone to keep all the cities as small as possible. I am not a city grinder, but I do feel they should have at least a little incentive to keep leveling their city.

    I do too Tiger. oh well.

    Even if they weren't fun, following your calls would be.

    Dutcher, I still haven't forgiven you for taking my 3rd place finish on the winning city bonus back when you were still rockin you 'Poirot' face. Sneaking up on noobs in their first full game, is that very nice? :P

    BTW, Dumbledore/Sandberg used a call I had never seen before to powerful effect. I am sure it is not new to many, but here


    ID Call (advanced) - The city failed to clear the RG by a small margin just before recalc, and shifts all trains to a new RG except for those players who still have Instant Dispatches.

    A call is typically written in some variation of 'Haul Cotton SD SOUTH, ID haul to close Steel'

    This means each player should determine which category they fit into.

    • If they have no Instant Dispatches left, they should shift to the new RG.
    • If they have instant Dispatches,
      • They should shift all their bonus trains to the new RG
      • Use Instant dispatches for their Olympus trains to haul the prior RG until it closes. When spending instant dispatches, spend them 5 at a time because you don't want to waste any once the RG closes.

    This seemingly obvious strategy is advanced for a number of reasons.

    1. It requires folks to determine which group they fall into for themselves... many will fail that determination and stall their trains on 15 minute wait times.

    2. It requires folks to have Instant dispatches... either via gold purchase or via saving 3 months worth acquired over the prior 6 eras

    3. It is not obvious when Instant dispatches will be enough to close out the RG. The caller needs to use this sparingly enough that players have instant dispatches all the way through the end game.

    In the game where I saw it. I personally started end game with 180 instant dispatches. I participated in 6 different Instant Dispatch calls and still had 100 left for the final endgame push.

    I Do.

    Our prior leader once observed that Rail Nation has a tendency to obsess spectrum folks to the point where they made themselves sick. Sounds about right. I just have to ghost all electronic channels after too much Rail Nation chat

    I actually just finished a full round without feeling compelled to log in every day. Didn't even talk on Chat. Actually got to watch Fantasy lose endgame in a two city Sandberg verses the rest of the map conflict. He lost by less than 2 hours despite a coordinated attack that drove up wait times for the last set of goods.

    He actually is a good caller... there may even be a story involved.

    ...But mostly I cannot understand at all the words you are using,

    Please note that many of us are either not native speakers...

    Hah! No... My writing is hard to understand because I don't know how to write like a normal person. That makes life difficult for english speakers and non-speakers alike.

    TLDR; Its not you, its me

    BTW: The second section is literally a glossary of terms. So you asked for a glossary to explain the glossary. :) Awesome!!! If I wrote like a normal person, that would never happen and where's the fun in that?

    TBH; All of the terminology is my invention. They are intentionally meant to differ from normal terminology to avoid inherent bias from folks based on what they are used to. Some of them are standard on the servers I play because I can be ... chatty.

    RoadKill911: Without a doubt. Whether you know better than the caller or not, follow the caller's call... unless they call 'offline'... or rrrrr 'Park your trains... or they tell you to haul from a 15 minute wait time... or, wait, where was I ... oh yes, always follow the callers call no matter what, except when you don't. But when you don't, and I am being serious here, when you don't absolutely make sure what you do has ZERO impact on potential next calss... i.e. no hauling from any active RG, never haul from warehouse, never try to spark a debate when the call is made.

    That used to be possible.Back before city level prestige sniping was common, I had all my teammates doing it. When the team we were chasing tried to counter us, well... We didn't actually get the price to go negative, but $1 a ton was seen. We were wondering if the game could handle it (bad array pointer), and whether we were about to become incredibly rich (integers without a sign bit can go from $0 to $65K), but the city levelled to fast for us to find out.

    Now, they set a minimum price, presumably to prevent exactly what you are asking for.

    I realize there are a lot of OCD types playing this game for whom having to find every last trainspotter is more a compulsion than a game mechanic.

    Having my own set of mental wirings I need to compensate for I do sympathize, but the first step on the road to recovery is recognizing you have a problem.

    1. You don't need to click on the trainspotters... problem solved. you have already made clear how unimportant you feel they are to gameplay.
    2. You definitely don't need to click on that 'last' spotter ... if you are active and believe spotter cash is valuable you just need to make sure you have room for one more spotter, not 10 more spotters
    3. If you really can't sleep at night without first tucking in all your spotters, 10 gold before bedtime is not too steep a price to pay for a full night's sleep. And before long, you may find you don't really need to spend that 10 gold to fall asleep after all.
    4. If you really, REALLY need those 5 lottery tickets asap, you really only need to obsess over finding that last spotter when a star appears on your trophy.

    To be fair, you didn't say they were on the track at the same time.

    But your picture shows both trains at the same time. Of course the picture clearly shows the left train is not on the tacks so clearly they didn't crash because it had already derailed. But that doesn't seem very likely, so lets try some more realistic options.

    My favorite possibility is that the bridge is actually a Mobius strip and the trains are clearly anti-grav trains. One train road the top of the tracks while the other rode the bottom of the tracks.

    There is of course the old standby... they didn't crash because one of the trains spontaneously combusted moments before the collision, only to see the other spontaneously combust moments later. Freaky.

    The Star Trek answer to all problems. A rift in the space time continuum opened moments before the collision whisking one of the trains off to Stavro Mueller Beta.

    I am not very good at riddles like this for some reason, can I have the lottery tickets anyway?

    I think I was referring to the fact that by the time folks get those five lottery tickets they have already received millions of dollars from clicking on those spotters.

    I have tried to figure how those spotters might provide a revenue stream beyond just keeping folks logged in and active more. Honestly, I just think bubble popping is a basic time killing mechanism these online games provide as a diversion.

    Yes I like Sundays Very much, U2?

    P.S. They got booed when they played a concert at my college during spring break because they moved the venue indoors. That was their best (only) known song at the time. :)

    P.P.S... I did think Sunday, Bloody Sundays when I typed that phrase.

    Best man at my wedding was COO for the Buffalo Southern railroad... Actually still is.

    When you are COO of a railroad with one engine, that OO can refer to Operating the train Often

    Also, when you are the COO for a one engine railroad, repairing and 'spotting' railcars is not an insignificant portion of your revenue stream, or at least it wasn't back when he was best man at my wedding. :)

    I was a little vague the last time I said this so this time I will steer clear of the flowery prose and stick to the facts.

    Trainsportters .are a sunday. Every click on a Trainspotter is another spoonful of yummy ice cream.
    You all are complaining that after you have eaten all the ice cream, the only thing left is a yummy maraschino cherry.
    Not only that, but as soon as you eat the maraschino cherry, they give you another bloody sunday, for FREE.

    Now come on, don't you feel the least bit greedy for complaining "I have to eat so much ice cream before I can eat the cherry, that you owe me like 50 cherries"

    :) You actually didn't pay THAT much more.

    Sure, when you pay 650K for a building rather than getting it for free it feels like you lost 650K, because you paid 650K.

    But when you get a 400K building for free rather than a 650K building for free, you only 'lost' 250K.

    Feel better?

    Anyway, I can confirm that the super starter and starter packages do stack (i.e are not mutually exclusive) I was curious about the era package as well, but heck, that was getting a little pricey for me on my strict eat what you earn gold diet.

    I did look for those warnings and assumed no warning = no problem.

    ., and today I wake up, and the game is asking me if I want to be a mentor. Its just messing with me to prove that it owns me now.

    (p.s. I think I worked out that you need to be connected to the city you have mentoring candidates in. makes sense)

    Last round, I got a bunch of folks to mentor. And I enjoyed it.

    This round, I was going to follow the lead of some folks whose game skills surpassed mine, so I wasn't planning on mentoring. Sure I was going to feel a little guilty saying, NO, GIT GUD NOOB, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

    But the game never asked me if I wanted to be a mentor.

    After fully protecting my thoughts with an aluminum coating, I realized the game was not in fact reading my thoughts and that the game operators merely disabled the mentoring program while it undergoes some tweaking.

    But then one of my first time players from last game asked me to help her mentor a passel of folks she took on and I immediately put the tinfoil hat back on my head where it still sits as I write this.

    If that weren't scary enough,

    • The game somehow managed to take all the folks I wanted to watch in their native habitat, and convinced them not to play this round.
    • The game just morphed the team captain from bright sunny rabbit into some sickly green on black Goth Scale of Justice
    • The game just accused me of being selfish because I posted about shedding a tear every time someone runs up wait time on an RG immediately preceding the hour that rg will be needed for a competition
    • All of a sudden I am building to a new city to help a bunch of new player learn how to play the game.

    So, please heed my warning. Get out! Get out now!!!!! Before the game permanently traps you into a mentoring role via some really twisted next gen singularity stuff. Roko's Basilik is HERE, run, RUN!!!!.

    In all seriousness, I was surprised the algorithm did not identify me as a potential mentor this round.

    The rest... its all true, Flee Fleance Flee.

    ... is a team game or solo game we can all argue until we're blue in the face ...

    :) I can agree with that.

    Interestingly the world is having a similar debate in its economic simulation game.

    Personally, I am glad that I live in a country that at least says it believes in solo competition, because of that whole being told what to do by 'Lords' in the other system can be brutal.