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Pak128 Northeast Corridor

Started by xiaopeng, October 19, 2017, 08:18:34 PM

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xiaopeng

Having played Simutrans for a few years now, and seeing some of the impressive maps that people create (like the San Francisco map back in 2013), I decided to try my hand at creating a large map that could keep me occupied for a long time.  I made it on a Mac, so I hope it still works for those of you on Windows.

Map: The map I'm uploading here is 2200 x 2548 (much of that is the Atlantic Ocean, though), and covers as far south as Greenville, North Carolina, as far west as Pittsburgh, PA, as far north as Plattsburgh, NY, and as far east as Bath, Maine.  I think I got the map from the Simutrans Maps site, but I don't recall, and I did soften and blur the ppm with Gimp and carved out rivers as well, so it's been pretty heavily modified.

Cities: There are 1,888 cities placed as accurately as I could figure out with Google Maps and city-data.com.  There are some erroneously placed cities because Simutrans relocated some townhalls when I was growing them and I didn't care enough to delete and re-grow.  Oh well--the're not too far off.  As far as population, city-data had a nice set of maps with cities over 6,000 people, so I placed cities with at least 6,240 people so I could have 10% of real-world population.  I'm sure I have missed some places, but I did try to check with Google Maps by clicking on neighboring towns and placing them if they had enough people.  Total inhabitants of this map number 6,490,493, so you'll probably need a pretty powerful computer to play.  Maybe someday, I'll go through and redo the map with 1% of real-world population to make it a bit more playable.  I don't have enough time (or care enough) to manually place buildings and such, so I just used the "grow city" function, and tried to err on the side of having slightly too many people in a given town instead of slightly too few.  That way, if I need to bulldoze some buildings on the outskirts of town for my railways, the population will still be somewhat realistic.

Players: I have identified eleven of the largest transit agencies serving the Northeast US and Canada and made them into players.  I have also assigned one player for the airlines, renamed the public player "Government," and renamed the original human player "Unifying Transit."  There is one open slot in case someone wanted to add goods (do goods require a goods AI?) or an agency I missed.  At the moment, there are no industries on the map, although you can probably find a few squares of discolored earth where I deleted the industries that spawned while I grew the cities (I'm sure I missed some patches when I tried to re-color them the proper color).

Objective: My goal for this map is to first place, as accurately as possible, existing transit systems (perhaps optimized a little bit to include features that are in the planning or construction stages, like the Purple line in Maryland or a connection between the Red and Blue lines in Boston), then to go to town creating supplemental lines under the "Unifying Transit" player.  I hope to simulate Amtrak's major intercity services and perhaps some historic lines that no longer carry passengers.  Basically, the idea is to explore what transit could have been like if the interstates had never been built (I haven't placed many roads on this map, usually just bridges over rivers and stuff).  To assist with air travel, I have placed on the map airports with regularly scheduled passenger service to other cities on this map (so a few are missing because they lack service to another airport on the map), and plan on using the "Airlines" player to create somewhat accurate air routes ("somewhat" accurate because there will probably be A380's flying every route for purposes of capacity).

By happy circumstance, just over 41 years of game time elapsed while I was placing and populating the cities, so the game starts in May of 1971 (right when Amtrak took over).  The timeline is off (that's just how I like to play), as is city growth (can you imagine how bad it would get if it were on?).  Free-play is on because by the time I'm done building the infrastructure, I would be bankrupt with free-play off.  Although I created the map without using addons so I could share it, I plan to use LOTS of addons to play with it, mostly so I can have enough capacity with airplanes and the Acela Express/Northeast Regional trains so things won't completely grind to a halt.  I've got more than 3,700 addons in my Pak128 folder, so it should be fun!

Naturally, the file is too big to upload here, but I have placed it on Dropbox if anyone wants to download it and enjoy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dctl003w7bhkb9k/TEMPLATE_NE%20US%20Populated.sve?dl=0