I made them meaningful by providing export warehouses/ports for them.
Crystals and ingots, although available from the beginning, were wasting space purposelessly in the first decades of the 19 th century.
Relevant warehouses/ports take care of these essential commodities through exchange with native ones.
The South Balkans also lack coffee and rubber plantations.
However I didn't want to exclude uranium completely as a transit cargo, so I did provide respective import and export warehouses/ports. I felt reluctant to include the probability of nuclear power plants.
The South Balkans lack uranium sources and consumers.
Commodity flow and distribution considerations:.
Population densities mostly follow the proportion of the 1961 census by province, although some individual towns have been deliberately resized to enhance their transport interest. My testing so far indicates satisfactory statistical distribution of the various commodities' occurence across the map. At the same time I've been trying to prevent the whole production distribution from being overly predictable and deterministic. Right from the beginning, I have been painstakingly researching the characteristic industries of each of the nearly 200 featured cities and regions from many resources, including the local trade-and-industry chambers, as well as all industrial history citations that I was able to locate.
Various industry density and frequency factor combinations were and are being tried, and I still consider this task far from finished.
Therefore, I gave up the effort to re-create the look and feel of the actual locations for the sake of convenience and I recommend the same for any fellows that wish to re-develop this or any other maps, despite the barren impression that this may create. However, I found this to be obstructing both the view from train-mounted cameras, as well as the identification of important traffic sources, such as oil wells and small buildings.
Vegetation: You will notice some decent forests at few places.
Towns too close to each other, so as to fall within the catchment area of a single terminal, had their names and densities combined to imply a wider conglomeration incorporating them. Ideally, someone should replace all "mile" references in the language file with "km" -I didn't so far.
Scale: The distance figures given as miles, actually represent kilometers (a very good excuse to have trains "GO GO GO"-ing!).
Our map available here, which I am continuously working on, is in quasi-sandox status and has the following features: For a continuation to the North, I would recommend working on this base map. With substantial improvements in the cargo/port/warehouse distribution patterns, both these maps will have a potential for greatly realistic sessions. Specifically for the case of Greece, we have briefly examined 2 more decently crafted maps (one for the whole country and one for the Peloponnese) with accompanying interesting missions. A substitute located on the internet was rejected for being overly grotesque, with a carricature topography making it impossible to function. My earliest steps for the development of a proper and balanced Balkan base map, as well as accompanying scenarios date back to 2005, with long intervals of inactivity.
Please read carefully the Stop Press section and warning at the bottom of this page.Also, Download these industries here and unzip them in a dedicated RAILROAD TYCOON III installation ("./Data/BuildingTypes" subfolder), exclusively reserved for this base map.
This map is dimensioned directly in kilometers! Immediately afterwards, make sure to download and unzip this additional file in the "/Data/Language" location, so that the correct distances/speeds are displayed in the metric system. You can easily do this by dragging and dropping your RR Tycoon installation directory (while pressing the Control key) to any convenient place of your hard drive, or a removable one.
It is strongly recommended that you create a separate RR Tycoon installation for this map.
Due to extensive modifications to the port/warehouse recipes as explained at the bottom of this page, any downloads of the map performed before Janumust be replaced with the current one available here.