Loco Mogul Tips Walkthrough

a:1:i:0;a:2:s:13:”section_title”;s:15:”Loco Mogul Tips”;s:12:”section_body”;s:10332:”Check out our strategy guide for Loco Mogul.

GENERAL TIPS

• Every level in the campaign as well as the sandbox mode is created randomly, so you can replay them as often as you want to and try to improve your own highscore.
• Survey the map in straight lines instead of uncovering large areas for this is more effective and cheaper. The left screenshot below is an example of how to do it, whereas the right one shows a bad example of a survey.

• Experts: Fortunately you are able to save experts throughout the campaign, so if you find a logger in level 10 you might also use him in level 13 or even later.
• Logger: He cuts down 25 trees for you. Save loggers for levels with a lot of river branches. In this way you will save money and automatically receive the required amount of wood for bridges. Be sure that there are in fact more or less 25 trees on the map when you activate a logger.
• Digger: The digger works similar to the logger, but instead of cutting down trees he flattens 25 small hills for you. Again he is most valuable when activated on a map with a lot of hills. The particular advantage of a digger is that he can help you finding other experts.
• Banker: He simply lends you 5,000 coins if you activate him.
• Engineer: The engineer enables your train to run 25 additional miles, which is especially worthwhile in levels with gold mines, but where your route is longer. All in all the engineer is probably the most effective expert.
• Sheriff: The sheriff clears out all the currently uncovered bandits from the map. Since the payment of bandits is the most expensive action and laying your tracks around them decreases your route’s effectiveness, the sheriff is a very helpful expert. Bandits only occur in levels that feature gold mines, you can save him for those. But you should only activate him when your route is already planned, so that you can avoid to uncover new bandits later on.
• During the campaign you can always restart the current level by hitting the "Esc"-button on your keyboard. This comes in handy when you notice that the customers are very far from each other and that you won’t be able to make enough profit. This especially applies for levels with a lot of river branches, but not enough trees to construct the required number of bridges, or in levels with mountains near customers, but no or only one available TNT.
• TNT is used to build tunnels and can only be found by uncovering fields near mountains.
• Train stations cannot overlap, so take this into consideration when creating a route.
• Your first thing to do is to upgrade your train so that it can pick up four rail cars, since this is a precondition to serve more than four train stations properly. Be also sure to buy out the investors as early as possible, because they will claim more money after each level. Besides, you are only able to access the bonus levels of the campaign when you have bought out all five investors before level 14.
• Beside the left top part of the map you will always see your train with the rail cars and their destination letters it is currently delivering.

Laying tracks:

• It is important to serve as many customers with one train station as possible, since more train stations mean more bouncing rail cars, and even the best available train can only pick up four at the same time. Below you will find two screenshots, the first one shows a map without any train stations and the second one depicts the same map and where to build the train stations.

• In the first level of the campaign are only four available customers. To make a decent amount of profit in this early stage you should concentrate on only three of them that are situated very close to each other as in the screen below.

• In the second level of the campaign you have to survey the land for the first time and there are still only five customers. It easily suffices when you find three or four of them and if they are not too far apart from each other. Otherwise, you won’t earn anything in this level.
• The costs of the different activities are as follows: (1) Pay out bandits: 500 coins ; (2) tunnels: 100 coins ; (3) cutting of trees: 100 coins ; (4) flattening hills: 100 coins ; (5) survey a field: 500 coins ; (6) train station/track: 100 coins.
• You are able to undo tunnels, bridges, tracks and train stations by clicking the right key of your mouse at any time. The other actions like survey, cutting trees, flattening hills or paying bandits are not revocable.
• It is not possible to build tunnels through two successive mountains.
• Try to avoid spurs if possible, because they automatically lengthen the overall route.

The "Run Train"-phase:

• Rail cars have a different value according to the goods they contain. This is the order of the different goods from highest to lowest worth: Luxuries, gold ore, passenger, fish, food, mail, iron ore, lumber, coal.
• Rail cars also differ in their wait time as follows: (shortest wait time) passenger, fish, food, gold ore, luxuries, lumber, mail, iron ore, coal (longest wait time).
• Chaining rail cars is a major component of maximizing your profits. It gets easier when you train is fully upgraded. You can chain by delivering two or more rail cars to the same station at one go. Nothing is more profitable than delivering for example three gold rail cars at once. However you should not accept too long detours just too chain, because in this way you might lose the profits before you have even earned them.
• Be sure to stop at every train station because it is likely that new rail cars will appear in the meantime. In this way you avoid to miss worthwhile deliveries.
• In most cases the most effective manner is to visit the different stations clockwise. Sometimes, though, it is better to change your direction, especially if there are no rail cars at the stations in front of your train, but a lot of them bouncing at the stations behind you.
• The perfect service bonus is hard to reach, but if you get it, it will really boost your score. To get this bonus you have to serve every customer on a map with a train station and are not allowed to miss any rail car.
• The value of the rail cars also depends on the customer rating. For every delivered rail car this rating increases by one, for every failed delivery it decreases by one.
• Later on solid gold cars will appear. For one thing they have double the value of normal rail cars, but they also only wait half as long.
• Each time you fail to pick up a rail car in time, you will automatically lose some of the remaining miles of your train.

Route design – Errors and better solutions:

• In the screenshot below you will see an example for a too long and therefore bad route, indicated by red lines and a shorter, good route indicated by yellow lines. This should give you a feeling for when it it better to neglect one, two or even three customers who are simply too far away to provide any profit for your company.

• As mentioned above it is hard to get the perfect service bonus, however, there are some maps where it is comparatively easy to achieve this bonus. The map on the screen below is absolutely appropriate for this purpose, since the landscape is not too complex to create a long, but straight route, and especially because the gaps between the stations are not too large. The red circles indicate the eight train stations. Additionally, because of the convenient positions of the customers there are not too many curves, which is always an advantage.

• The map below is an example of a generally challenging map, since the majority of the customers are in the northern and the southern corner, while there is only one customer in the right and the left corner. Again, the bad route is marked by a red lines, while the more profitable route is shown by yellow lines.

• Feel free to post your own highscore in our forums to compare yourself with other players. Have fun!

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David Becker