End Game Assassins

    I am sure I am not the first to encounter what I fondly call "End game Assassins". The purpose of the EG assassin is to create rail connections with all the EG cities so they can locate one or more engines in those cities for the purpose of transporting goods from all the RG's of the city and eliminate the 0:00 w/t for a completely cooled down factory. One train can successfully carry 4 or 5 RG's in a schedule to accomplish this rather nefarious EG tactic. If you use this tactic can you truly claim the First Place honors without actually out-hauling your opponents or maybe you just want to claim the pp without doing the hard work of coordinating a team of associations in your city. I propose the following possible solution:


    Servicing engines is required to maintain your engines in a peak performance state. In the real world of locomotives that would require that the engine to be brought to the maintenance facility for the work to be done. In the imagined world of RN the servicing is magically done by just paying the costs of service. I propose something along these lines. Each engine must periodically enter the home city train station (travel through the home city) of the player for maintenance purposes. Let's say the engine frequency is every 3 days. The closer an engine gets to that deadline the faster they lose their maintenance reliability until the 72 hours expire and then the engine would automatically return to the home city (at a reduced service % - like 10% or higher if the player pays emergency maintenance costs to increase it to a top of 50%). Some other possibilities could be 1) Pax trains could be exempt or have a longer frequency before the maintenance stop is required. 2) The longer the time away from the home city, paying for maintenance on the engine would accomplish a lower performance percentage. 3) A bonus "maintenance engine" could be purchased or won (later eras) that can travel to the engines and perform maintenance resetting the clock for the engine. 4) Mechanics cannot be hired for an engine that has been away from the home city over a set period of time (like 24 hours). 5) During era 6 and End Game maintenance requirements would become more frequent and losses of performance percentage would be accelerated. Also severe limits on changing the home city would be established.


    So, just some ideas that would add a wrinkle to maintaining engines and hopefully lessen the effects of End Game Assassins!!


    :cursing::evil::!:

    I mean, starting with the flaws of your system, or ways to avoid it altogether.


    1/ selling and rebuying the engine

    2/ teleporting the engine through the museum

    3/ pre-servicing your trains just before EG start (EG are usually finished in 48h, dunno if it has changed dramatically since the new update with EG tons scaled based on active players but I expect not).


    Now about your "EG assassins". The ones you complain about are called PP-hunters, or freehaulers, and they are usually the people I care the least about, because they don't cause any trouble. I don't give a shit between 0.00 and 0.05 WT when I'm a caller. And neither should you. What is 5 seconds when you have a 3 min TT delivery ? 2%. So yeah sure in a perfect world, it sucks. But RN is far from a perfect world. And when you end up with 1min+ wait times everywhere, the few guys ruining it by 3 secs should be at the bottom of your priorities.


    The true EG assassins are the one hauling the wrong good with the full force of their 5 olympii. Either because they don't know, don't care, or are just offline.


    But then, I'm giving you a basic lecture on how wait times work right now, and you know all that like everybody.



    Tldr : focus on the people that fully haul wrong because they don't know. It will be easy to get them back to the correct good. Once that is done, focus on the people that are offline (or better still, focus on those before the EG actually starts). After all that, you will still have the issue of the people that don't care (for that, I can't help you, but I have rarely seen those in action, the only thing you can do is call in a way that they do the least damage possible).

    After all of that, you can start discussing with those guys that haul 50 tons of each good (often through the warehouse or from a neighbour city btw, because they don't have the money to connect your industries).

    Fr-201 Bad Wolf de coeur

    en pause indéterminée - away from the game until next interesting server


    Likely coming back for clash!

    sacroima wrote:

    What is 5 seconds when you have a 3 min TT delivery ? 2%. So yeah sure in a perfect world, it sucks. But RN is far from a perfect world. And when you end up with 1min+ wait times everywhere, the few guys ruining it by 3 secs should be at the bottom of your priorities.

    You are absolutely correct, :10 w/t probably won't stop a good city hauling in synchronized harmony, even if there are some bad apples screwing shit up. Here is the scenario I saw recently :

    Two cities in the running neck to neck for about the first 8 - 10 hours, then the second place team starts gaining ground on #1. Over the next 12 hours team #2 slows significantly and comes out about 5 or more RG's behind..... game over. It was team #1 who had the "freehaulers" that I saw in my city (#3 in the end). I checked and there was a freehauler in #2's city with about 20 trains. I can't say for sure that the freehauler disrupted #2 but it sure looked that way. The freehauler named his trains after the city where they were deployed. The train with my city's name was in #2. One player can easily screw up the game and my big point is this. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUN TO WATCH THOSE TWO CITIES TO THE END, NECK TO NECK. I don't think that win would be something I would brag about.


    The bigger point is this. All games must evolve and keep adding new twists to keep the players interested and coming back. Making engine maintenance another game strategy to master with twists turns that test and confound algorithm mashers like us would be enjoyable. It would make the game more realistic in terms of actually maintaining your fleet in tip top condition and if it thwarted a slimy tactic used to steal a win, so much the better.


    Finally, anytime you can use the verb "teleporting" to describe the way to move a 100 ton train engine you are describing science fiction and not science.

    rurald wrote:

    The bigger point is this. All games must evolve and keep adding new twists to keep the players interested and coming back. Making engine maintenance another game strategy to master with twists turns that test and confound algorithm mashers like us would be enjoyable. It would make the game more realistic in terms of actually maintaining your fleet in tip top condition and if it thwarted a slimy tactic used to steal a win, so much the better.


    Finally, anytime you can use the verb "teleporting" to describe the way to move a 100 ton train engine you are describing science fiction and not science.

    Yes, you are 100% correct. I don't like the teleportation system either, because it's a pay2win feature (if you compete for top1 and base your strategy on competitions to some extent for example, you have to be able to run 2 competitions at the same time at 2 different places every 15-30min). If 1 player can teleport all his trains and the other can't, you have a p2w. But well, they decided to implement that feature... And you can have enough vouchers to use it with olympii in era 6 if you keep them.


    The other point (not sure if it is fixed with html, didn't check, but it worked with the old version) is that the engine maintenance is badly coded. And you can avoid it altogether.

    From what I've seen the engine maintenance works like a timer (that is influenced by your engine stats, and your engine age). Every time you change the schedule of one of your trains, your reset its timer. If you know well enough the timers and are willing to change schedules often enough, You can keep your trains at 100% efficiency at 0 cost.



    I, myself, only had to service my trains in the morning using that "strategy". (would call that a bug, but it was never acknowledged when I reported it...)




    For your specific example : I wasn't there so I cannot say 100% why they fell behind so hard in the end. But from my experience, human factors were the reason for catastrophic EG failures (even though 5 goods isn't that much, depending on the goods left).

    EG is a stressful time and I've often seen issues caused by investments/breaking of majorities, disconnections, etc, that end up demoralizing everyone. Or simply a configuration of goods to deliver that was harder for you at the beginning, and you thought it was neck to neck when I reality you finished all the difficult goods and they didn't, or failed 1 call, or another reason entirely. Yes 1 guy with 5 engines can destroy the WT of that era 6 factory that is still level 1. But that's exactly why you call that good first in most cases.

    Fr-201 Bad Wolf de coeur

    en pause indéterminée - away from the game until next interesting server


    Likely coming back for clash!

    The post was edited 1 time, last by sacroima ().