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Railway Empire(2018)

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Campaign Chapter 2 Guide - Any% and 100%

Guides

Campaign Chapter 2 Guide - Any% and 100%

Updated 2 years ago by Nickel5

Bullet-point checklist is at the end of this guide.

For this chapter, I run with all DLCs enabled. One of the DLCs lessens how well wagons can supply cities with goods. To optimally complete this challenge, you want the DLCs enabled so that wagons don't work as well and cities instead need to rely on your railroad to be supplied. There might be a DLC combination that works better, but this is the best I know of at the moment.

I'm assuming for this that the runner will be able to set up supply stations and track signals without assistance, I'll also assume that the runner can handle track management at stations. In general, assume that all tracks I mention are a double track unless stated otherwise. I'll also assume the runner can handle when/where they should be placing maintenance stations.

A hidden mechanic exists in this scenario. If you run out of money, you will be given a 1 time bailout of $2 million that does not need to be paid back. Since this is a huge amount of money, it is optimal to trigger this. From what I can tell, this is triggered by having less than $1k listed at the top of the screen. If you go negative, this is triggered for sure.

For this chapter, your critical objective is reaching a company value of $20 million. Company value is found by adding your assets together and subtracting debts. In practical terms, this means your company value is found by adding together your cash, track costs, train costs, stocks, owned resources, and owned factories, and then subtracting your bonds' total value.

Of these assets, the one that we'll focus on the most is owned factories. When a level 1 meat factory isn't supplied, it is worth about ~$200k, and when it is 100% supplied the same factory is worth ~$1.2 million. Further, investing in a business to make it level 2 will increase it's worth to ~$2.5 million. All factories work this way in general, supplying them drastically increases their value, and upgrades disproportionally increase value. Compare this to your other assets: track costs are fixed, trains decrease in value slowly over time, stocks in your competitors should never grow in value faster than yours, and cash is just cash. Owned resources are good, but not quite as good as factories since they aren’t as transparent. This means to reach $20 million, owning factories is the best method and the one we’ll focus on in this guide.

The cost of an industry is related to how well it will be utilized the next day, the higher the percentage the higher the industry cost. Utilization for tomorrow is determined by if the factory is able to produce goods today. In general, it can produce if it has its raw resources and if there's room in the city (or connecting warehouses) to store the produced goods. This means it is highly advantageous to wait until the industry is not well supplied to buy it. If an industry is already well supplied by one of your trains, this means it is to your advantage to delete these trains in order to stop the goods from arriving, then buy the factory, then put the trains back in service. By buying a non-supplied factory and then supplying it fully, you will have the company value and profit associated with buying a million dollar factory while only spending a few hundred thousand.

When buying factories. if you wait on the splash screen for purchasing a business, it will update its cost every 10 days, but if you close and re-open the same purchase screen you will find the cost updates daily. In general, you want to buy when the utilization is on a downward slope right before it hits zero.

Bonds do decrease your company value, however, you still want to use them. This is because they really only hurt your score due to interest, and you should be outpacing the interest rate by a significant margin.

When setting up the chapter, the rail network must be realistic. For pause mode choose trainiac, since runs are about real time you are only hurt by pausing. If you have a second screen, I recommend using a website to have the objectives open on your second screen.

Reminder to switch to fast speed when the game starts.

Take out 2 bonds and buy 100% of Don Lorenzo's company. Merge it and liquidate everything. Then, buy Beatrix von Pomp, merge, and liquidate everything. You now don’t need to worry about competitors. This also will take care of 2 objectives when they appear, the "acquire 20% of a competitor's stock" and the "acquire a competitor" objectives. It is tempting to only buy/merge/liquidate only one competitor, but this isn’t optimal. If you do this, then the game doesn’t count the 20% shares objective and you’ll need to do it later at inflated cost. I also have attempted runs this way with only buying one competitor up front, and they have been significantly slower.

As a result of taking over both competitors, this means you have no competition for auctions, generally, you want to buy all technologies while being selective about industries.

When the cost is prudent, purchase the meat industry in Baltimore (~~$230k or less is good), sawmills in New York ($200k is good), and weaving factory in Pittsburgh (~~$525k is good). It is worth wasting 30 seconds in total or so to wait for these to get to a good price. It is tempting to buy the New York furniture factory since the resource is already there, but the problem is that there's no demand for the furniture until a city reaches a populace of 115k and that's quite a ways off.

Build a small station in New York, connect to Baltimore. Set up 2 trains between them. Prioritize clothing being picked up at the Baltimore station. Do not set up the trains between these cities before the meat industry and the sawmills are bought.

Connect the Thomas Breeding cattle farm to Baltimore, set up 2 trains between them.

Set up a small station in Washington, connect it to Baltimore with a single track and set up 1 train. This fulfills an objective. It’s fine to keep this station since it gives the meat a place to go, it also helps grow Washington so we can buy an industry there later potentially.

Connect Pittsburgh to Baltimore. Set up a single track and use a single train for now. Do not set up the train before the weaving factory is bought. Connect the Wilson Farm cotton plantation to Pittsburgh. Only a single track and single train is needed.

Connect the Collins Estate wheat farm to Baltimore and New York. Set up 2 trains at Collins Estate, the first going to Baltimore and the second going to New York. This will complete your first set of objectives. Select Baltimore to keep the narrator moving his dialogue along.

Set up a second track from Pittsburgh to Baltimore. Set up 3 additional trains. Assign an engineer and a stoker to one train to keep the narrator's dialogue moving.

At Baltimore, set up 2 additional trains to New York, prioritizing clothing.

Set up a medium-sized station in Albany. Purchase the brewery when prudent (min cost ~$200k). Connect to Collins Estate by weaving through the mountains, New York, and then connect to Baltimore by creating a bypass around Collins Estate. At Albany, set up 2 trains connecting to Collins Estate, 2 trains to New York, and 2 trains to Baltimore.

Set up a small station at Allen Logging near New York. Set up a single rail and 1 train connecting it to New York.

For technology, prioritize the John Bull first. Anything after this should be invested into reliability as much as possible. Upgrading all existing trains to the John Bull is recommended, use the engine shed to make this rapid.

At Baltimore, add a museum. This should eventually let you reach 100k populace. Also, dedicate one of the 4 rails to the cattle farm if haven’t already. After upgrading the factory later, it will be hard to get away with sharing tracks at your hub for this.

At this point, expand into Syracuse and Buffalo. Buy their industries first before supplying them with trains. In general, I recommend 2 trains between each city connection, 2 trains between a city and a resource that supplies a factory (such as wheat for a brewery), and a single train between a city and a resource that supplies a city (such as wheat for a city without a brewery).

Take a look around the map and see if any of your connected cities have a secondary outside circle; this means there’s an open spot in the city. When new industry spots appear in connected cities, be opportunistic. Your special ability as the industrialist is to be able to purchase new factories for less, and you should do so. Pittsburgh should get a brewery when possible. Syracuse is well suited for cloth. Baltimore is well suited for a paper mill. Washington is sort of out of the way for everything, the best I see is a brewery and having a really long line to supply it.

Connect to Toledo for the objective, then delete the station and track, it isn’t useful.

Check your objectives at this point. They all should be taken care of except for Baltimore reaching 100k, having 10 connected rural industries, and a company value of $20 million. Baltimore will take care of itself. For rural industries, find ones that are easy to connect, such as sugar near Buffalo and milk near Baltimore. None of these require trains, they just need to be connected for the objective. This leaves the critical objective, company value.

Focus on purchasing industries and upgrading industries. In general, you want each industry to be level 2. For the meat factory in Baltimore, you can go level 3 easily. It is recommended to take out bonds to achieve this.

After you factories are all level 2, you should be nearing $20 million. If you aren’t, you can expand back out to the northwest, but this wasn’t required in my run.

At this point, you should be good, pat yourself on the back.

Checklist during a run: