It's 11pm.

The busiest hour so far. All of Digsby's and WHATEVER's trains arrived, as well as two of AKNel1's.

Scores:

AKNel1 77
Digsby 77
WHATEVER 52

It all comes down to the number of trains that arrive in the next hour...

It's midnight. The end of the game...

No more trains arrived, so the final scores are:

AKNel1 & Digsby 77
WHATEVER 52

First tiebreak is the fewest number of lines that aren't used...

AKNel1 and Digsby both had 7!

Next tiebreak is the player who started last...

Digsby is the winner!



Congrats to him, and thanks to all three players

A few thoughts...

The building stage went on too long and the timetable stage didn't have enough (any!) player interaction. Trying to avoid elements of luck, I've been thinking about the following...

1. Increase the amount of money initially, but increasing the cost of building track to be 1 coin to the bank and 1 coin to whoever owns the land. That should make the building stage quicker as money becomes more scarce. It may mean that one or two cities never get connected though.

2. Once the building stage is finished, calculate the population and the number of trains each player gets as at present, but then nationalise the lines (maybe paying compensation to the owner). This would mean that players could then choose which routes to run, maybe by auctioning them off.

3. Have a fixed cost per train journey, payable when the train leaves the station. Maybe 1 coin for 1-4 carriages and 2 coins for 5 and over. Train departures wouldn't be automatic, but a player could choose to delay a departure in the hope of attracting more passengers.

4. Give each player the choice to run a passenger service or goods service each time they prepare to leave a station. 1 carriage of goods would be accumulated at stations each turn that 4 or more passengers were waiting. Goods trains would be slower but would pay twice the reward. Goods arriving at a station would not be available for further journeys (unlike passengers). This would provide greater variety and alternative tactics.

5. Each plot of land (except stations) would only be occupied by one train at a time. If two or more trains were due to be on the same plot, some kind of priority ordering would be needed, maybe length of train, goods/passengers, distance from destination.

Before all of that, I need a better way to display the board than using MS Paint! All suggestions gratefully received!

Ding Dong!!!

Cheers for running. Not much of a clue what was going on though.

I know Definitely needs some better graphics so people can picture what on earth is happening!

Wow, that was close. Well played guys.

OK, here's an option for the timetable phase, just to make it a little easier to visualise what's going on. This is the board as it was at 9am...



The codes in the station boxes are station name - number of passengers, e.g.Z-11 means 11 passengers at station Z.

The smaller boxes are the plots of land, and the trains are colour-coded with destination, number of passengers or goods and total capacity of the train, e.g. V2p4 means a train heading for V with 2 passengers on a train with 4 carriages.

Would that have made life easier?

Do you have time to do this? I would be fascinated to know what difference it would have made to the size of my defeat.

I'll give it a go, though probably not until next week.

Difficult to do without running the whole simulation again (your trains dropping off/taking away passengers would impact on the number of passengers for everyone else), but a quick calculation gives you an extra 7 coins at the end. Your long/quick train was only full once whereas your smaller/slower train was almost always full.

I haven't coded it to run automatically yet as I want the rules to be right first