End Game

I still have not been able to analyze what happened during the end game properly. However it was one of the most thrilling and invigorating experience that I have had recently.  So at the mega city stage the ranking was as below.

The final stage was as below

Two interesting things to note here. The first is that Sandport and Maybury who were in the first two at the city stage ended up being the first and second at the mega city stage. However the main thing is Sandport was about 50% faster than Maybury. That to me is a huge difference.
The next surprising thing was the performance of Liberty. They dropped from 3rd to 7th. From what we discussed during the game; the main reason for Liberty's bad performance was that they tried to deliver many goods based on the majority that an association had rather than delivering one good at a time.
I was in Rocksdale. Considering that we were in 6th place I think we did really well to get to the 4th place. We started out well. Then in between we fell to 7th place and then finally ended up at the 4th place due to the sheer determination of the people in Rocksdale. Personally I think we could have done better. The main people calling the shots was in a non European Time zone. So when the people in Europe got up then we started delivering different goods and could not decide on what good to deliver. This lost us a lot of time. It increased the occupancy rate of quite a few goods and it costs us a hell lot of money. End game wagons are not cheap. The number of wagons per train is also high. I had quite a few of my trains running idle because I just did not have the money to buy the wagons. Possibly having two people from a European time zone and two people in a Non European calling the shots would help a lot.
We have started in Rocksdale again. The core of Rocksdale is back and we have learnt from our mistakes. I am looking forward to playing the end game in Rocksdale again but before that I will hit the end game in Smoke Chamber.
Finally I have to thank the people who helped me learn along the way specially the people at Short Line.

Competitions

Every six hours there is a competition. These require you deliver a certain number of goods in a specified period of time. The time given is very generous especially at the initial stages. There are also city competitions where the top 10 cities as determined by a formula and not by the official ranking is split into two groups of five. I will deal with this topic later.

In terms of the daily competitions, there is a newbie quest given by William L. Smith to complete five competitions. The faster you do this the better it will be. There are also two categories of medals. One has to do with the number of completions won and the other with the number of competitions completed. You can focus on competitions to get these medals but this is not something I do. My approach is to mainly take part in competitions where the goods demanded are required by the city. There is nothing wrong in taking part in other competitions too but you may get a lot of flak from the people in your city. The bottom line is that you take part in competitions as long as it does not hinder the growth of your city and you are not being too selfish. A classic example of being selfish is to take part and win a competition that gives a bonus train. You will get the money equivalent of the train which is peanuts and it would be more beneficial to another person and your city if you do not win. Sometimes it is better to sacrifice prizes and competitions for the greater good.