My suggestions for the game

    Having just completed my 9th round of Steam over Europe, I offer the following suggestions for various aspects of the game:


    1) Prestige for investments in industries. Either end them or scale them back.Too many Prestige hunters swoop in right before an industry levels up and dump a ton of money in, just to claim the prestige points, while at the same time breaking the majority ownership. Often those people are from an adjoining region and are just screwing up the gameplay. Perhaps no prestige for any investments in last hour before leveling.


    2) End Game. Prohibit trains from running in a region other than where their registered home city is located. This will prevent the sabotage that happens every single end game. It is supposed to be which region/city can work together as a team to fill all the goods first. Having to put up with folks from other regions that are connected coming in just to screw things up is extremely frustrating, and something has just about caused me to stop playing. This should be an easy fix. Return all trains to their start city at the beginning of the end game. Blow up all the special routes at the start of the End Game. Don't allow reactivations from the museum to cities outside the region they are registered in.


    3) Provide prestige for daily deliveries to LM instead of on a per level-up basis. It detracts from helping the LM level when prestige hunters are running for the city delivering goods that will simply be consumed without leveling, yet get large (relatively) amounts of prestige for that, while delivering to the LM gets nothing until the LM levels.


    4) Put a cap on the time it takes to build a track, similar to the cap on track costs. There should be a maximum time, say 20 to 30 minutes for a track. When you get a large network, taking 45 minutes or more to build a track is nuts.


    5) Fix the bugs with the clocks. The clocks for city consumption and goods recalculation start at the same time. There should be four 15 minute consumption periods per recalculation cycle. However, every round somewhere along the line, they get out of sync so that there is overlap. This really screws things up in End Game in particular. When the consumption hour ends, the recalculation should occur at the same time. There is no reason why the software can't do a check and reset if necessary once per day, if they get out sync.


    6) Fix the communications for the mobile platforms. Having the message screen disappear randomly all the time, especially while in the middle of writing a message, is frustrating to say the least, and makes it very difficult for people playing on mobile to communicate. This makes it especially tough for them to be in any position of power (Association Chair or Deputy, Mayor or Council Member, President or Cabinet Member) that has to send message often. Our Association Chair is giving up that position simply because he cannot tolerate the lousy comms within the game while on the mobile platforms. The PC messaging seems to be okay. I have no clue why there would be a difference.


    That's enough for now. If I think of more, I'll add to the thread.

    hejhej,

    i finished the same round as steve and i absolutly agree with him. and i have one more point: only mayors or deputies should have the right to pre-register an association for the next round. in our assoc a member pre-registered without consultation and aggrement against 24 members of the assoc (as first) the wrong city, and refused despite a lot of official and peronal messages to withdraw her registration. so only 6 of 24 members could pre-register in the desired town or region (all cities in this region are mostly or permanent overcrowded) - as a result is the destroying of a very good operating assoc.

    (sry, if my english is not perfect - i hope it will do anyway).

    Dublin_Again wrote:
    i have one more point: only mayors or deputies should have the right to pre-register an association for the next round. in our assoc a member pre-registered without consultation and aggrement against 24 members of the assoc (as first) the wrong city, and refused despite a lot of official and peronal messages to withdraw her registration.

    I've had the same problem before with a "Rogue" member. What I've done in the past is simply get the team into another city, and boot the person who created and refused to fix the problem the following round.


    I do like your thought .. an expansion to that .. not sure about the Mayor side, however, it does make sense to limit that authority to the chair, and perhaps give the chair a way to designate A Deputy or Deputies the same right.


    Set it so once the approved person has selected the city for the team, remaining members no longer have the option to change their city IF they have selected "Keep association". If they want a different city, they do so solo.

    Following on from what Steve was saying about prestige hunters delivering to cities, when everyone else is delivering to LM, I think it would be good if the Mayor had the power to turn away unwanted deliveries and thus reduce the problem.

    Steve Mencik wrote:

    1) There is no reason to scale back prestige points for industry investments. If someone swoops in just before the industry levels then it doesn't take much money to take majority back. If a single person is able to take majority of the industry by themselves then you and your corporation did not have enough money invested into that industry. If you did then that guy just blew his cash and should be rewarded for his lack of game-skill. If nobody is online to take back possession of the facility after it levels then it is quite possible your "prestige hunter" didn't swoop down and claim the top spot before it leveled. They may have taken hostile ownership of the industry after it leveled and was cheap. That is part of the game.


    2) End Game spoilers happen to EVERY endgame city on every server type. You city is not disadvantaged because of the so-called endgame spoilers. There is no reason to prohibit people from hauling to whatever city they would like to haul to or whatever good they would like to haul to. If this causes you to stop playing, that is your choice. Your actions are just as likely to cause other people to stop playing as you say you're considering. Some of those players may be big spenders which RN would not want to have quit either. The best course of action is to remember that every city, to include the winning city, is dealing with the same problem. If you are like me and connect to all, or almost all, the top ten cities then you will see that every city is complaining about the same things. As for blowing up the special routes, I have hauled goods across a special route with less time than from within the same region.


    3) No idea what LM stands for.


    4) Great idea on a time cap although I would point out that 45 min is a short time. As you really build up your tracks you start pushing 2 hours.


    5) Could not agree with you more. City recalc and industry recalc should be on the same timers.


    6) Also agree. Don't know why a chat window that I never use keeps popping up at the worst possible times.

    Steve, I am a sometimes player of Europe. Play it enough to know the basic game play but not enough to know the lingo. The issues you speak of are not specific to Europe. If someone wants to dump 10 mil into a factory they should be allowed to do so. That player likely falls into one of two camps. They are the guy who saves up all his money for that one big investment and is then broke. That is easy enough to deal with. Or they are the credit card player who is paying Travian Games so they can have the ability to dump 10 mil into your industry just before it levels in order to get prestige points. To be blunt, Rail Nation, and the rest of us, need the credit card players or there is no game to play. So deal with it. Dump some cash back into the facility after it levels up. Or... as a corporation invest so much that it isn't worth the prestige hunter to outbid you are. You speak of teamwork all the time so get your team to show some of that teamwork in investments.


    You are correct, it isn't likely to connect to the top ten cities in Europe.

    RailsOfGold wrote:

    I think there should be an option for the bank to exchange gold for money just like in any real bank.

    It already has it.

    It's called a lottery.