Posts by sacroima

Remembering the time when the landmark was actually costing some money, needing some time to level up, and some coordination...

Haven't played SoE for a few months, but all the changes that happened in the 2 years I played that map were, IMO, only ever casualizing the scenario. At first, you needed to think, optimize, it was actually difficult to find money sometimes, you had to make sacrifices, compromises, and so on.

But patch after patch, it became easier and easier. To the point that it became boring, because three people could pay for the landmark by themselves, everybody could level it to 15, etc.

Meanwhile, real issues (closing of regions based on average number of players instead of number of players in the lowest populated region for instance) where never fixed or even thought of.

TLDR : an amazing scenario became as strategic as classic : close to 0.

EnReDouble wrote:

The main effect of this issue is that every hour becomes a "55 minutes hour".

When you are trying to level up a city, the 4th consumption arrives 5 minutes before recalc, so in 5 minutes normally you cannot
reach the city level, while if the 4th consumption is synchronous with recalc, you can use also these last 5 minutes...

The same problem will arise during the final game, each hour will be only 55 minutes long...

Often, in EG, I do prefer unsynchronous timers as a caller. there are many cases where you manage to skip a consumption (because you have had a free consumption after a few minutes, instead of having a large one after 15min, in cases where you need 20min to transport the good for example).

Overall, it depends on the number of players (for certain number of players, it's better to be synchronized, for others to be unsynchronized). It also depends on the average reactivity of the players, etc.

All that to say it's not that big of an issue, and you can work around it quite easily. But yeah it wouldn't change much if we get the timers synchronized at all times either.

I've never really been interested in those "faster but not so fast" servers.

What I've usually liked are servers that are either x1 (x1.8 on travian-like games I liked), but basically slow enough for you to be able to enjoy a long night's sleep without missing out on anything. Or servers that are extremely fast (x100, x200) and last for a few hours to 2 days.

A x4 server, for me, simply means that you need to be 2 people on the same account (one playing during the night) if you want to compete with the people that will do that. And since I'm not interested in sharing an account on RN, I will most likely never play a x4 RN server (in addition, classic is so boring...), because I will simply not be able to compete with the top-dogs (each night will be like the loss of 1 day in terms of station buildings, prestige will be extremely difficult to gain, etc).

rurald wrote:

I would love to see a worker that would increase the acceleration of all trains of a corporation for 24 hours. It would be as popular as increasing speed of trains or reducing wait times. It could start at less in the earlier rounds and increase as the engines become more advanced.

that would also make some under-used trains actually viable.

>> a great thing to add I think

Samiia wrote:

You can get the phoenix on the first day of the era). Why do you need Udava and Medusa?

Google translated by Moderator

Samiia please comment in English here on COM/US forum, or from the profile multilingualism settings select Русский (RU) so you can join Russian language threads User Guide - Rail Nation Forum

Who in their right minds would ever willingly go into a train that has 2 acceleration when they can use medusas ????

Icestorm93 wrote:

Don't worry about me - went with this strategy good since two years. Got in playerranking on german SoE Server 7, 17, 3, 4, 3, 12 in a row and also on german OJ Server ranking at 10. Heavily pushing laboratory don't worth it. With this strategy you'll get lynx, prometheus and thor in three days at least otherwise u can get it perhabs 12 to 18 hours earlier. How much u earn in Era 1 and 2 a day? 3 or 4 Mio? So u earn few 100k more, your restaurant doing it every 90 minutes more.

However don't tell me I'm wrong never trying it. More than 40 people already told me , but everyone of it I could convince being wrong themselve after doing it.

I'm not saying using it you won't be able to reach the top10, I'm saying other strategies such as mine work better. (I've optimised everything about era 1 train station buildings, I also get restaurant 32 by mid era 2, but I also have a level 22 lab at the end of era 2).

+ you sacrifice your team and region for personal ranking by skipping girafe (if everybody was doing the same as you, everybody would be stuck), whereas with my strategy you can get girafe + lynx very quickly.

Oh and since you want to compare **** size, I've done 3 top1, and any time I chose to, I got top5 while playing fully for my region (once, I did it with a total of 3 competitions done and only delivering to the city only the day of the level up, never chasing PP) and without investing money. Not that it is relevant to this discussion.

I've seen terrible players reaching top1, and some of the most cleverer ones barely making top100.

Atlun Deraj wrote:

Hi, I've been confused about how exactly city leveling works. I get that you want to deliver enough goods to satisfy the city demand, but the part that is weird to me is how all of the percentages are calculated. Why does it show different + and - percentages for goods? Why does the city level up percentage fluctuate up and down? It would make sense that there is a penalty for not delivering enough goods, but is there a penalty for over delivering?

What you must know for effective city leveling is this :

the consumption is a percentage of the actual stock. The precise percentage is a function of many variables (server day, good, maybe distance to city, number of connected players, ...). But it is still a percentage. Meaning that, the higher the stock, the more quickly it depletes.

Which is why it's never good to have a huge excess (it disappears very quickly).

Malus Dacus wrote:

depends on what you play for, if want prestige - be sure to have hotel to level 32 fast, i reached this level in 4th era last game and at the end my difference in "full base prestige" was pretty big compared with #1, i was #25 in base prestige with hotel level 32 in era 4 and full base in era 5 day 3

If you play for prestige, it's much better to use the tens of millions you would spend on the hotel for

1/ tracks

2/ tracks

3/ tracks

(4/ investments sometimes)

Why is that ? tracks allow you to gain money (competitions, more variety of schedules for deliveries = more money as well), prestige (competitions, investments on certain industries where nobody invests, deliveries), gold (competitions). The hotel only gives you a few prestige points.

Yes, you get 2 prestige points * 8/day*28days(2eras) =500 prestige points for each level of the hotel, which is quite good (some levels are worth 3 PP with the bonus video, + the worker, etc). But anyways, that amount of prestige points is not worth the millions in era 4 IMO. Because PP are not a limited good, as long as you have money, you have many ways to convert that money into prestige.

Whereas tracks are a long term investment with very high pay-off, the hotel has a flat pay-off of 20 PP/day / level.

But going for the hotel is very good if you aim to break the PP record for the station category

Icestorm93 wrote:

Bonus buildings are the most important Buildings. Get it up as quickly as u can, every day earlier u get it to limit of 32, is one day more u get more Money. Stupid Laboratory building as quickly as u can worth nothing. Go Era 1 to 8 as quick as u can, at the end the last three day up to 11 or 12, last day of Era 2 16 or 17, Era 3 20, Era 4 22 and Era 5 25

You are right to some extent with the laboratory. But overall you are wrong. Yes it's worthless in early era 1 (once you get it to 6 or 7, I don't recall precisely, you stop it for 10 days), but then you must have it at level 16-17 for the beginning of era 2, and finish it by the end of era 3, if you really aim for the top.

It is especially important in era 2, because you must have the girafe and the lynx ASAP, since the era 1 trains are shit nowadays. And in era 4, because the thor is at the end of the research tree.

Since we talked about lab in addition to restaurant. One quick tip : keep your restaurant at level 31 until your lab costs as much as your restaurant. Because you want to be able to gain money by redeeming the -20% cost vouchers on your restaurant level 32 and then cancel the upgrade.

I think restaurant level 24 is the must (because after that the price goes up from 2.3M to 4M).

Usually, what I do is build the restaurant ASAP up to 24, with the hotel lagging a bit behind, and the SC even lower. And then the hotel catches up slowly. But I never go beyond hotel level 25 because for me, money is usually more important than an investment on long term PP (which is the only gain for hotel above level 25).

I tend to finish that building during the EG. For the SC, I am lazy so I never really did the maths, but it might actually be better to not upgrade the last levels (similarly to the hotel), because the pay off is very low.

Usually, for me, in the first few days of era 1, the restaurant is an extra 3 trains, because I invest a lot in it (and it grows exponentially compared to your opponents).

In addition to what was said (which are the 2 main reasons, prestige is usually not accurate because when you deliver to another city, other people steal some PP on your city, and top delivery spots on high level cities is much more valuable) :

It can allow for some strategical EG preparation (if you and another top level city both level up 3 cities to 40+, the 10th city cannot really sit at level 30 and wait, pressure will come from the 11th and 12th (because you removed 4 additional spots with the 4 "fake cities").

It's very useful in SoE and USA scenarios (points for your region).

It's great for competitions

In less populated servers, you can discover and level up industries using those neighbouring cities, while keeping your main city at level 35-40 if you wish.

Matthew Boulton wrote:

On average the lindworm is 20K/hr better than medusa and across the 9 (+/-) days it takes to research olly to full upgrade (due to the capacity of LIndworm) that amounts to $1.04 BILLION of lost earning to be on olly 1 and a bit days earlier with amounts to something like 15 million extra

that's completely false

1/ I value much more RP and the speed at which I get OL, than some money for running lindworms for 4 days (not 9)

2/ I get OL in 7-8 days and I have no idea how you can spend 9 days to research hydra + OL (the only 2 missing trains after having completed lindworm), please compare comparable things... If you take that long to do 2 researches, then you can't assume running lindworm the first day of era 6 either.

If you were to compare 2 comparable things, you would see that the gains are much smaller than that (basically you spend 81 RP more than me to get lindworm full, I only need 222 more RP before starting to earn money with non-upgraded OL, which already are quite viable. Let's say 300 RP for the necessary upgrades to actually have OL that are better than lindworms. That's 4 days, if you don't get any competitions + lottery + workers. Not 9.

And now, you have to input all the losses you have, for buying lindworms. 50 millions $$, and precious vouchers (10 millions a piece). And the day you will be running lindworms and I will have fully upgraded OL before you.

And all that, not taking into account that medusa is more flexible (higher top speed and acceleration, no need for 25 extra wagons of each good compared to OL).

And don't get me started on the "catch-up" on city levels (easier to level up the later in the era you are, so that having the best trains as early as possible is much more valuable than running a better train between days 3 and 7, and a worse one for days 8 and 9.

I can assure you, I did the maths. And my trains were pretty much optimized. I've seen the top players on masters do the same with medusas as well. There must be a reason

Voldy wrote:

• its better to have callers from different time zones who can co-ordinate round the clock.

Might depend on the server, but in mine (not very populated, EG taking 48h usually) it's useless to have callers during the night, and actually does more harm than good. Might need to specify in which cases it's good (many connected players during the night).

Voldy wrote:

• Park all trains (goods) 2-3 hours before the EG or drive in a far way city so that the wait times in Industries are cooled down to zero. You can continue to run passenger trains but its better to run them as Drop only in the EG city to get the best results.

I usually set the parking time as the morning of the EG. So that people going off to work and not logging in during lunch break don't forget their trains. But it's a small detail.

Voldy wrote:

• An alternate approach is to play EG in the top cities for a few rounds for practice and get enough prestige before EG starts in your city if you have connected around the top cities.

That depends on your goals. But if you want to win the EG, helping another city is definitely not the right call (one exception is when you have 2 cities from one region in EG, usually the first one is a fake megacity, but you can still earn some points on it before starting on the real one).

Voldy wrote:

• If a good in finished 5 to 10 minutes before hourly recalculation, the caller usually ask to Park for the next hour to start.

A caller wasting 5-10min (8%-17% of total time) is not a caller you want for your EG. Except for very few exceptional cases, the game-winning caller will always find some way to make use of that time.

Voldy wrote:

• For factories with wait times, its advisable to have the biggest hauling corporation to have majority investments. If others invest, the majority of players will have increased wait times. Not really useful to invest during EG unless asked because nobody is going to use the leveled up factory in future after the goods are completed in EG.

I've never fully understood the investments and their full effect on wait times in 1.5 years of calling and optimizing, but from what I've seen, it's always good to invest, as long as the leading corp is able to maintain the majority. But that's a very tricky issue (because people shouldn't click more than 2-3 times per industry, to leave enough room for others) and I agree that to simplify, saying that investing is bad is quite accurate.

Overall a very good guide ! Congrats, and you understood the game very quickly you might make a great caller soon if you wish I'm sure.

Eilenberg wrote:

Hi all,

In my association we have a player changing his hometown to our town. This works well except for the fact, that he seems to still belong to the other region, where he started. We have been wondering about the following too: When there is a (ordinary) competation in our hometown he can join it but will be playing it all alone and always winning. The rest of us are playing the competition together with other players from our town and region and there might be many of us.

What goes on?

Regards

Joe Smith

Display More

Also for the competition, there are different competitions happening simultaneously (based on prestige points). I don't recall the threshold, but I suppose he has less prestige points than you, and therefore is with the "less active" players for the competition.

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

ByteHeaven wrote:

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.