It will be a gameplay AAR, where I try to explain my plans and thoughts that went into them.
The report is notably after the action, so even though our game was non-stop, I may take a lot longer actually writing this up
The game Yes, you lost.
Our server runs a daylength patch (this one, to be exact). It's set to 10, which is as far as it would go. This means the length of a day is 10 times longer than normal, and a game year takes about 3 to 4 hours.
We have a number of grfs installed: It's basically a Wild West theme, except with the 2cc set, since the NARS set wasn't properly filled out according to our taste (boring end-game).
- daylength 10
- Tropical climate
- North American city set
- 2cc train set
- NuTracks
- start in 1870
- 1024×1024 map
- Low vehicle limit per company (100 trains, 100 busses, 100 planes, 100 ships)
- FIRS industries, set to lower in production, but no closing
- no cities (city factor off)
- hard settings, loan at $300k
- increased costs from pb_build
- Specific increased construction costs:
- Terraforming 64 times more expensive (but foundations halved from default)
- Clearing houses 64 times more expensive
- Aircraft running costs 4 times higher (concorde runs at half a million dollars per year)
ONLY transport passengers and mail from desert towns. This is an added challenge, and some of our more novice players may disregard it if they're having too hard of a time. Note that this is only from desert towns, players may transport to any town they want, as long as they don't pick up passengers and/or mail there.
Since we're playing FIRS, Goods take the place of Water in making desert towns grow. This means players have to set up the entire food and goods production chains before thinking about getting more passengers out of the towns.
There are 6 other players in the same game, and more may join later, so there can be plenty of competition. With daylength 10, the whole game from 1870 to 2050 is expected to last 3 to 4 weeks (we didn't do the math). On 2050 we'll stop competing, sabotage the crap out of each other, and move on to the next round (if we still want to at that point).
When we started the server, this was our map (tile type to show deserts): That does look like an insane amount of industries, but it's the normal setting. FIRS has such a variety that it really tends to spam things up. We'd play on low industries, except with 6 players that just doesn't leave enough viable starting positions for it to be fun.
So much for the information, next up: Setting up the company.