era 2 : lynx, girafe if you want to carry passengers.
era 1 : depends on your personal choices (especially the laboratory level). I personally go for the rhino, it is the one that suits best my playstyle and train station optimisation in era 1. Others go for the falcon, the mole, even the raven. For passengers in era 1, the whale is basically the only viable choice.
Sounds like scandi is a great place to go for a top1 next round LOL
A week would be probably optimal, to give players couple of days to rest before the next end game.
Maybe 40 of you play both servers. Enough of a reason for 700 people to have to wait 1 week more ? I don't think so.
But, I agree that RN could have managed that slightly better and have 1 server start 1 day earlier, the other 1 day later for example.
Even though playing 2 EG simultaneously is not the end of the world I think. Of course you need different callers, but apart from that it's very convenient for the rest of the players (you already are connected for the rushs, you can easily do them in 2 servers, as long as the recalc time is not perfectly synchronized).
Yeah it's usually written down somewhere, but I agree that it could easily be implemented, and would be so much more user-friendly (especially when you have connected a few cities, and ponder whether to connect one industry or not for example, not knowing if the good is gonna last for a few days or only 4 hours).
I do :
1.swallow > rhino (> mole) > 2.lynx (> elephant) > 3. dionysos or prometh+morpheus > 4. thor > 5. mesusa > 6. Olympus
passengers :
MANDATORY IN ERA 1 AS WELL, OTHERWISE EVERYBODY IS STUCK
I agree that some slight changes could be made for the prestige to the monument (right now you really want 1st place, or don't bother to deliver, if you want the prestige).
An adjustement I would like personnally could be that you have X prestige for each good, and each player receives some prestige based on the percentage of the good delivered, rather than based on positions. That would lower the possibilities to gain prestige if you are clever, so maybe you should also increase the amount of prestige gained overall by a bit (20-30% ?). Because right now, on the server I've played in at least, we had like 4 people delivering 99% of the good (the 4th gained basically nothing), and the 5th to 9th player gained "a lot" for delivering 100 tons each.
Prestige to cities is already lower than in other game modes (due to the city being lower level), I don't think lowering it more is really the way to go (especially because people don't really look at how much prestige they can gain that way, they just see they will gain some prestige. I've seen so many people fight for 10 PP in era 1 on the cities...).
You shouldn't see it as a live auction, but rather as an auction that lasts exactly 1h55 min, during which time every corp can bet as much as they deem the worker worth.
At the end, the corp that paid the worker most hired him. It's as simple as that. Thinking someone stole your worker at the last second is simply wrong. You just didn't value him enough, compared to the other corp. Or couldn't compete with their bets.
Nobody is forced to bet at the last second, but people tend to do it, because that way you can usually get workers for less money.
Well it was like this from the very appearance of vidget and is used extensively)) It's a surprise that this feature was not know to someone.
I mean, there are many features that work like that since the beginning, and can only be bugs (the fact that trains don't lose reliability when you switch their schedule often enough for example.). I just assumed this widget also was one such bug, even if I have used it extensively.
Or is not losing reliability on your trains if you change schedule every 30min also a feature ? Mollymauk I haven't had any answer on that bug report, and I reported it 18 months ago.
How can that be useless? With the + package it's very advantageous for those watching the second video
The first player watches the first video for +10%, the second for a bonus.
All the others watch the first video for 0 bonus, and the second for a bonus. Exactly half of the videos they watch are effectively useless.
Are widgets available for regular accounts I don't remember ? It could be even funnier. You could have someone without a + account watching videos to help his teammates, when actually he doesn't do anything because the videos have already been watched. That would be hilariously stupid in its design.
the app players can't benefit of this "feature"
App players haven't been able to watch videos most of the time for the past 2 years anyway. I doubt they concern themselves with trying anymore.
Do you mean you can still watch videos that were already watched or you can't?
If you can watch all of them still that is working as intended and not a bug.
Kind Regards,
Mollymauk
Then you have a discrepancy between the widget and people playing without the widget.
Sounds like an unintended feature to me.
Not talking about the fact that the widget refreshes by itself if someone collects a bonus.
So yeah, sure, it has advantages. But in the long run, is it really something you guys want to keep ? I mean, yeah you get more videos watched. But basically people watch half of the videos for no gain whatsoever. Doesn't sound right to me.
So my 2 cents on the event after 2 days :
- there definitely isn't any place for breaking the system right now. Looks like the best will still hit around 10'000 coins, but we are far from the 6-7digits coins amounts from last year. That's good.
Now on to the bad points :
1/ winter-market videos. Those are worth 3-5 hours of package-buying, every 5h (we have had Vinci for the 2 days). People realised quickly they are worth a lot. And therefore, we have fights in the corp about them. Everybody wants them, they disappear in 5 to 10 min, and a few people just wanting their own haven't been able to get them. While it's an internal problem, I've seen it in other corps as well. And to me, this is far from the Christmas spirit. It needs improvements. On paper, it's great. You must choose one person and give him all the videos for him to be able to hit top5 in highly competitive servers. But 99% of the people don't care about that. They just want their own little piece of event. You basically have 2 completely opposite personnalities clashing.
2/ 100 resources limitations + market fee. Both together are useless. Nobody buys goods anyway, with the market fee as it is. It's too expensive. So the resources limitation is overkill. But without a market fee, or with less of a market fee, it could have been enough to prevent the abuses we saw last year. Exponential coin growth up to 100 resources, at which point you are capped at 150 coins gain / hour (100 from resources, 50 from packages + quests on average). That over 150hours (because it takes 2 days to reach the coins quantities to buy 100 resources), and the maximum coin amount reachable is still 30'000 more or less. If you are online every single hour. Sounds good enough to me. People that enjoyed buying and selling would have been happy, and would have been capped at reasonable amounts of coins (ca. 1000-1500 diamonds max).
I understand you wanted to drastically decrease the coins potential, but right now the only thing we can do with the winter event is buy packages, and sell resources to buy the next packages, when their price is at the highest expected.
It is all very frustrating in the end, because some luck (winter coin lottery for example) is much more impactful than thinking and being online (40 coins for me right now per hour from packages).
I think I would've preferred a decrease in the prices, with some more place for playing around. What was fun about the winter event the first time around, was that trading aspect with the whole server. And it's gone.
Because it has been a while, and during this winter event where the value of coins is much higher (with the fee it has become quite difficult to get as much profit it seems), this bug is kinda game-breaking :
if you have opened the association widget and refreshed it just after the bonuses have been collected (therefore all the videos are available), you can then watch 1 video of each of your teammates that doesn't exist anymore (because someone else watched it after you refreshed, but before you clicked), and still gain the bonus from the second video (which is the best way to gain winter coins atm).
Basically, instead of 1 person gaining 25 bonuses, you can have as many as 25 people gaining those 25 bonuses each.
It's annoying for 2 reasons :
1/ in regular times, you might lose time watching videos without giving your teammates any profit (because someone else already did)
2/ you can get much more bonuses than should be possible without this bug
The Winter Event has started on US102, Grand Central. Do you know of a forum thread dedicated to coordinating buying/selling in the WE on GC?
from what I've seen today, the price for goods is the same across all servers. So to coordinate, your best bet is to hope the russians tell us what they are doing 
I guess the support could help you out on that one, if you ask them nicely. They usually are helpful for those kind of things (Lucy's tasks, ...)
It's worth a try at least.
Era 1)
Steam over Europe: I don't play there so take it with a grain of salt. What I hear is that tThe landmarks will need passengers before you are even near to research the greyhound. So many players reserach Raven, Whale and then Falcon or Mole. Maybe the Mule instead of the Raven, but not the Rhino cause you'll need passengers for the landmark.
What people do on Steam over Europe is either rhino into whale, or raven into whale. The ideal is to get a few players to do each. When playing rhino, you stick to it until lynx and use all the cash to get a lead in the station buildings, since you need a lot less RP (you can basically keep your laboratory at 7-8 until the last days of the era, investing all that money into an almost maxed out restaurant).
With the balance change last year, many trains became viable in some occasions so it's more difficult to give you a straightforward answer.
The tool Emziie linked you is the best, if you have the time to look around. Otherwise in short I list the train that is most polyvalent for each era (meaning it is at least 90% as good as the best train in all occasions, doesn't have any real weaknesses).
1/ rhinoceros (mostly due to RP, which are extremely expensive in era 1) // whale for passengers, except if you play classic, in which case greyhound is probably a better option, at least if you go heavy paxs. But I haven't played classic competitively.
2/ lynx (elephant is great as well, but further down the research tree so not worth it if you begin and don't know how to use it) // girafe for passengers.
3/ dionysos (morpheus / prometheus viable in a lot of cases, and often slightly better than dionysos, but dionysos is at the beginning of the tree and doesn't have any weakness, compared to the other 2. So easier to use. // Artemis for passengers.
4/ thor / hypnos for passengers
5/ medusa / talos for passengers
6/ olympus / nobody cares about passengers at that point, just stick with talos and research those olympi.
And of course, you go the shortest route possible for the researches, and fully research any train you plan to use for a while. As you can see from my answer, most of the decision-making is in era 1-3. After that, some trains are just way better than the others.
Does anyone have an overview of the prestige awarded for end game goods.
The most PP goes to the best hauler of the best asso.
BUT is it better to be the best hauler of asso number 5, or the 10th hauler of asso number 1?
WAYYYY Better to be best of asso 5.
Let's calculate all the different options :
First, the travel time if the Jumbo Jupiter can do the trip at full speed : 620km at 300km/h takes 2hours and 4 minutes to complete.
Option 1 : A four hour delay would mean they miss their train in Hicksburg (4h + travel time > 6hours)
>> no point in going for option 1, better to simply cancel than perform the emergency fix to no avail.
Now let's investigate option 3 : 90min delay + travel time >> they would arrive before midnight and would get their connection. The price of the new motor is 12'000$, much less than the 30'000 needed if they miss their connecting train.
Finally, option 4 : 40% of 300 km/h = 120 km/h. It would now take 5hours and 10min to do the trip. This would mean the passengers would arrive at 11:40pm, 20min before their connection departs. This also doesn't cost anything to the company.
Therefore, option 4 is the best option. People would get their connection, the company wouldn't have to pay anything, and could even use part of the economy (12'000$ for the motor) to give some compensation to the passengers (a drink or sandwich in the train for example).
You can ask the support once to reset your career engine.
Personally I think acceleration isn't as important as other upgrades. I have followed the rule of thumb that 20 seconds to top speed is fast enough (Speed divided by Acceleration ist the time to accelerate to top speed).
I personally use 1:10 instead of 1:20. But yeah, same idea.
Anything quicker than 1:10 is probably not worth it for the carrier engine until very late into the game (speed already at 175).
IMO (SoE player) : find other incentives than $$ to encourage us to deliver to the Home City. We only have way too much $$ in SoE.
Please stop making it easier to earn cash, the game is already way too easy right now (from when I've started, we have had : addition of trainspotters, 100 less wagons, better trains, half the cash needed for landmark).
