Hi I like A-train too or A������ 9!!! Ive got fed up with the european version (v1) and am waiting on a copy of V3 from Japan.
I thought Id post my experiencesof playing A-Train. I find setting up Large Factories and Large Storage yards good for stimulating growth. Using a port(30% profit) to ship away the excess goods. Then I put 4 heliports in they usually are 80-99% profitable!!! Then i put lots of wind turbines in the 3000Kwh ones, also very profitable at about 30-40% I then turn my attention to the trains. I put 8am departures on from my residential area ,and a 6pm departure from ym business area, I usally run 6 trains over a double track with a couple of freight ones in the evenings ( 8 in all for high track usage). I then set about waiting for the economy to drop and buy 100 million shares @250million+10%tax (2.5 price). Then I set about buying up all the cheap subsidiaries making the most profit (usally right next to the station). I think my version is bugged because the 186Express is too cheap at 39million maybe should be 390million? Anyway because of this I love buying these and using them as my fast non-stop trains, they make lots of money. Obviously you need the shinkansen line but its worthwhile when you have the cash or a bank loan or a quick cheat on the stockmarket selling those shares off at 20+(worth 2 billion). Then I start in on putting in the expensive Tower Block Residnetial to boost the population up to 100,000 , and start building Multi-storey buildings the expensive 60 floor ones in the business area. By now my asset base is usally around 100billion, and making 10 billion a year. At this time I lay on the 7 track 10 platform stations,and run 14 trains over the 7 tracks. At this point once you get to "Big City" status it becomes more about desinging your own city!!!

Hope this helps anyone looking for hints.

Emma

Hi Emma, welcome to the A-Train Community. Here we are all enthusiasts of "The Train Giant", "A-Train" or the German "Bahngigant". The most of our members are playing A-Train 9 v1 and v2 (there's a rough translation into German - so it is possible for us to play the original game).
Some of our members play the game as you, to earn much and more money , some of us create really beautiful maps with great landscapes, a bunch of traffic and really complicated timetables in the edit-mode and some of us try to understand how the game works, they try to create some modifications and try to change the one or the other thing inside the game...
If you want to find a home here too, feel free and register.

Best regards
Ingo

P.S. Sorry, but my English is a little bit "rusty"....

Following on from my prior post. I would like to ask if anyone knows where the land values are set, and how they are calculated?

I can read japanese so i know how, and what the csvp csv files say but I cant find a way to set property/land values to 1% of their real value ie so the construction cost of AR hills is 8million (building)+5.4M(land value)=13.4M total not the japanese amount of 1.34Billion!!!. In the japanese version my land value is 540M which is too high. Maybe its the growth rates in the development.csv file?

Hi Emma,

within the csvp you can find a file named structure.csv. If you open this with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc you can find in the column "AF" lots of numbers. These numbers are the costs for all structures in the game - totally easy to change... ...but without a guarantee.
Consider please, all costs base on the Japanese Yen and that's the reason, that they are seemingly too high. (the exchange rate is round about 1₤ = 173 ¥, or 1� = 138 ¥ ) We didn't find till now a possibility to change the currency symbols into an other, therefore we didn't change the values too.
About the growth rates unfortunately I can't say anything, because indeed we translated large parts of the game - but we didn't change the parameters.

Ingo

Thanks for the quick reply!!! Yes Ive translated the Japanese v2 into english, and altered all the costs in the game so theyre in euros or pounds I have changed my currency symbol it is located in the gametext.csv ("TEXT_UNIT_CURRENCY") file. The slash hows up as yen due to font translation. However you need to read the exe (use 7-zip) to find the font, and use "Character map" in windows to lookup the correct "character" for display.

However my problem is when I place a building, the reduced (New) cost is correct, but the cost of the land ie landscaping or land value is the japanese value therefore 100x higher than what it should be in euros or pounds!!! I tried changing the freight trains to charge 1000 euros per container but it didnt work.So im starting to think maybe land value is hardcoded.

an example

AR Office
Construction cost 8.2 million euros
Property Cost 500 million euros!!!! <------- ( I want this to change to 5million euros to be correct)
-------------------
Total Cost 508.2million euros