Adventures of Railroading in Not Quite Shireroth, Beta1

[Ari Rahikkala]

Adventures of Railroading in Not Quite Shireroth is a Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold scenario starring a continent that looks a bit like a horizontally squished Shireroth, many cities that actually exist on some maps of Shireroth (for instance, Hibernia and Cumbria are Zarathustra's work, while on the other hand Plainfield and Wiley come from the game Vega Strike, which has nothing at all to do with this), a few historical events that I hopefully placed right (they show up as newspaper headlines), and terrains that are somewhat reminiscent of the corresponding ones in Shireroth.

The scenario is also based, even more loosely than the other parts, on the MCS resource map. For instance, there's oil in Amarr, plenty of agriculture in the river delta north of Musica (wtf is the name of that river again?). The MCS resource map shows an iron deposit but no coal in Shireroth, in this map iron is slightly more plentiful than coal (coal mines are closer to population centers, though, so paradoxically it might be easier to find coal to haul). On the other hand there's absolutely no heavy industry in the western parts of the map, though if anyone finds me a bunch of good city names for that region there could be some in the future.

You can get AoRiNQS at http://www.lyseo.edu.ouka.fi/~lighten/N ... reroth.mp2 (do right-click and save as, as the server apparently thinks it's a video file). You install it by copying the file to your Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold scenario directory, of whose location on Windows hosts I have no idea. On Linux it's $HOME/.loki/rt2/maps. Once you've put the map in the right place you should be able to play it by choosing "Not Quite Shireroth" in the map list under "Single Player" -> "New Scenario". I don't know if the scenario file is actually compatible with the game on Windows hosts, but I don't see any reason why not.

The current state of the scenario is that all of the terrain is ready, except for islands. All the cities and industries in the eastern part of the map - in essence, Shireroth's actual land holdings - are ready, but there could be a few more cities in the western parts. Playtesting has only barely been started, and I'm only going to carry it far enough to see if it's necessary to add cities or industries to the western parts or to change the victory conditions (right now in my current game it seems that they're probably too easy). I'll add the most interesting/major islands in the near vicinity of the Shirithian mainland once I've this scenario to victory at least once.

Right now I'm quite happy with how the different environments turned out. Amarr looks pleasantly like a desert wasteland compared to Brookshire which in turn looks like an industrial wasteland (well, it could be populated a bit more densely) compared to the lush, green Goldshire. Elwynn is unfortunately not quite as cold as it should be according to Ric, because an inhabitable tundra right next to Goldshire would have looked a bit implausible...

I'm also currently happy with the deviousness of the mountainous region. Just building a railway between Shirekeep and Ardashirshahr is a lot more difficult than it seems. Habrichtsburg usually has a steel mill which is convenient for melting down the coal and iron which are relatively plentiful in the mountains. However, once you've got the steel, how do you haul it away? Do you take the south pass (the one with Woodshire Village) to cities like Fatehpur Sikri or Nee, or the eastern way, probably through Ataraxia to Musica... and if you do the latter, you'll probably have to haul it up to Alexandretta, and now how will you do that?

[Lord Farewell]

That's just cool :-)

Wish I had the game now.

[Ari Rahikkala]

That seems to be a common deficiency. I wish I could provide a solution to it, but I can't... if I can't find players in Shireroth, I'll do the final fixes and improvements I've planned and take the scenario to MNN.