I really don't get why so many games that have numbers and calculations do not provide information about what the numbers actually mean or how do they correspond with each other. Of course in some cases it could be interesting to check and test something by yourself, but not when a single test for a guess could take more than 4 hours.

There have been a lot of forum posts about end game ratings, but most of them cover only some of the multiplier categories. Also, as far as I can tell, several of these ratings have been changed or reworked at a certain point. Thus I decided to put releveant and up to date information together in one place. If you find any mistakes or if you could provide any additional, but exact and proved numbers, please let me know I'll add them in the guide.

So, at the end of every game you will see the evaluation of your hard work; this evaluation is a number of score points that correspond to one of the 14 titles. The highest title (that is also a criteria for a lot of achievements) is President and it requires an overall rating of 30 or more points. The thing is, that maximum amount of pure points you can get on any given level is 20, then this number gets multiplied by 4 additional numbers and you receive a final score like this:


Multipliers themselves have nothing to do with your performance: mostly they are set in the map settings menu by yourself before starting the level. The game provides only a small hint about this fact, so if your choices were "incorrect", you will never get 30 points no matter how well you connected the cities or how fast you've merged the competitors. And so, this guide should help you avoid "incorrect" numbers.

Usually this parameter is the most important one, since it provides a base number that will be miltiplied afterwards. Maximum points you can get here is 20; exact amount depends on the number of objectives that you've managed to complete in half of the deadline. If you fail to meet the "half time" your score will start to get lower gradually, so the more time you spend past the "half time", the less points you will receive for the task (hence the numbers you may see in the end ratings menu could be non-integral like 16.5 or 19.9). To better illustrare this "half-time", I'll provide an example, because this term was quite confusing for myself as well at first.

- Scenario starts at January 1, 1873.
- You receive two initial task that require completion in 1873 and 1874 respectively.
- After you complete the abovementioned tasks you receive another two with deadlines of 1875 and 1880 respectively.

First thing worth mentioning is that "complete task in Year X", means "complete task until the end of December 31, Year X". If you fail one of the main tasks, you will have to restart the whole map or load a previous save. If you fail one of the secondary tasks, you will miss an opportunity to get extra points in the final rating.

Now back to the tasks:
Task 1 = 1873-1873 = You have 1 year deadline, so to get a perfect score you should complete it in 0.5 years. by the end of June 31, 1873.
Task 2 = 1873-1874 = You have 2 years deadline, so to get a perfect score you should complete it in 1 year, by the end of December 31, 1873.
Task 3 = 1873-1875 = You have 3 years deadline, so to get a perfect score you should complete it in 1.5 years, by the end of June 31, 1874.
Task 4 = 1873-1880 = You have 8 years deadline, so to get a perfect score you should complete it in 4 years, by the end of December 31, 1876.

This "half time" is not always 100% precise, especially on maps when tasks are revealed later in the game; sometimes the golden tick deadline could be way ahead "half-time", like several months or even more. So don't load previous save immediately after you "failed" to fulfill the criteria in presumed time limit, wait and see the actual results. But still, it could prove useful to keep a reference point in mind and plan your actions accordingly.

In order to tell whether or not you managed to complete the task in time, open Tasks menu and check the color of the tick placed near the objective: gold means perfect timing and maximum score for this particular objective, green means OK timing and score for this particular objective will be reduced.



Important thing to note here: you may receive a lot of tasks to complete, especially during Scenarios (they can be extremely long). So sooner or later Task page will be filled with completed tasks and then get refreshed to assign you with new ones. Funny thing is, that as for the moment only LAST page of tasks count towards the rating.

So imagine a Scenario with 26 tasks to complete. During the course of the game your first task page will have 8 tasks, the second task page will have 6 tasks, the third task page will have 7 tasks and the fourth and FINAL task page will have only 5. So even if you receive all green ticks on page 1, page 2 and page 3, ONLY ticks for the last 5 tasks on page 4 will actually count (end ratings will tell "Tasks completed 5/5"), so it's better to make sure as much of these as possible are golden.

Unless you are playing in the Free mode, consider this to always be x1. France DLC is worth mentioning here, because it has two President achievements - one for Scenario and one for 100 year Free Mode. In this Mode after you pick a map, a button labeled Advanced becomes available which allows meddling with a lot of additional settings.



UPD: I've finally made it to France DLC and decided to run some additional tests. It took about 5 IRL days of running the game in background, but it appears that now I have all Difficulty Rating multipliers that are taken into consideration when you choose to play Free Mode. Things that are NOT mentioned in the table below either have no effect on any rating (like Starting City, Snowfall - On/Off, Railway Network - Realistic/Normal, Settlements in Down Under DLC - On/Off or Refunds - On/Off) or affect other ratings (Competitors + AI Level is for Competitor Rating and Pause Mode - Manual/Normal/Trainiac is for Pause Mode Rating). Should you choose different options, the numbers will be multiplied accordingly. For example: Capital 3M + Tasks Trainiac + Service Costs 300% = x0.8 * x1.2 * x1.39 = x1.34 (Difficulty Rating at the end of the game)

                       

This multiplier is based upon several factors: number of AI opponents in the current game and AI difficulty you picked before starting the map. There could be from 0 to 3 opponents; difficulty can be Normal, Hard or Very Hard. It should be relatively safe to play on Very Hard. In most of the cases you will simply need more time to merge with AI competitor, they are still quite dumb in terms of making decisions.

This is predetermined and hidden rating for each map, thus it seems that the only way to check it is to finish the level and see the rating for yourself.

All Campaign missions have Map Rating of x1.5. These missions are Chapter 1 - Great Plains, Chapter 2 - The Early Days, Chapter 3 - Over the Mississippi, Chapter 4 - Civil War and Chapter 5 - Sierra Nevada. IMPORTANT: In Campaign missions you can't change AI difficulty, it will always be Normal. Also maximum number of competitors will be 2. Together with Campaign Map Ratings it means, unfortunately, that if you are aiming at President, you can't use Manual Pause Mode in any of the chapters.

All Scenarios available at the moment of writing this guide (all DLCs up to and including Down Under) have Map Rating of x1, with 2 exceptions:

1. US West Scenario called Gold Rush has no competitors, so its Map Rating compensates for that - it is x1.5 instead of usual x1.

2. Australia Scenario called Pioneering Spirit has no competitors as well, but its Map Rating is only x1.29! Which means that in order to get a President Rating, YOU MUST USE TRAINIAC PAUSE MODE. Spent almost a day for the map and got only 26 for a perfect game. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea by the devs...

Basically, across all maps where competitors are available it should be safe to assume that if you play on Very Hard AI dificulty, use Normal Pause Mode and complete most of the tasks in half time (about 1-2 tasks, depending on their amount on final task page, may still slip with green tick), President rating will be guaranteed. Additional calculations will be needed if you play versus 0 competitors or/and want to use Manual Pause, and if you do, whether you can actually allow several non-perfect tasks to happen or not.

I find this absolutely wierd, to say the least, that there is no rating for using Realistic Rail Network (really hard to place and properly manage as well as costing a lot of money) or Normal Rail Network (just connect two dots to place one line; that's all to be done for infinite amount of trains in all directions). But there is rating for using pause, where you can't even check and plan your tasks, because Task Menu is not a category that falls down to "pause allowed here". Really, no idea how something this absurd could happen, but, well, it did. So there are three options here:

Manual pause = x0.8
Normal pause = x1
Trainiac mode = x1.25

I personally found this game to be extremely boring. First couple of missions were interesting, because I was just new to the game and had to understand how things work (after 300+ hours, achievements be damned, some mechanics are still a bit vague, though). But then it was just repeating exact same things over and over, over and over again. All standard maps and all DLC are the same from the gamedesign point of view: you do exact same things almost in the same order. Almost all objectives are the same as well (grow a city, get X products to city, have 10 cities with population X, buy a competitor, create express line, etc). All changes are purely cosmetic (Beer becomes Rum, Cloth becomes Furs, etc.). The game has 8 (!) pretty expensive DLC, but only 3 of those introduce something you can call "new mechanics":

- The Great Lakes brings Snowfall option. This basically means that all your trains are effectively out of order for a couple of months. I haven't noticed any real impact of this, you just put the game on double speed and wait. That's all.

- Germany brings map segments. This means that the whole map is divided in "sectors" and in order to build anything in that sector you need to purchase it first. Found this addition to be extremely annoying more than once. For example, when you can't support even the most basic needs like Grain to a city, because the Farm that is located at 200m distance is in another sector, which you can't even buy at the moment, because scenario forbids that, so you have to connect a Farm that is like 1000m away. Other than that can't say this provides any real challenge, you just work with limited amount of cities and businesses until the game allows you to expand in Scenario or until you get enough money in Free Mode.

- Down Under brings custom cities. Here is the quote from Steam page: "Players can now establish new cities and this way arrange the economic system to their liking". This is not a complete blsht of course, but can't say real deal is that good. What really happens is that 90% of businesses on the map are unavailable at the start of the game. Their icons are greyed out, you can't build stations near those. Every X of total population available in all of your cities rewards you with a Permit. One Permit allows you to build a foundation of a city in one of the predetermined locations (of your choosing, yes) and only after you fully establish a city here (bring 15 Beer, 15 Fish, 15 Wood and 15 Grain), a certain number of businesses around this newly found city becomes available. I can't call this arranging the economic system - I need the closest resources, so I build the city and abandon it afterwards in half of the cases, because I just need the advanced business to get advanced materials to a city.

I think this game should be treated as a Sandbox game, so if you like those, perhaps you would like Railway Empire as well. I'd prefer a game like Transport Fever (part 1, not part 2) with relatively short, but very interesting campaign, where each of the mission presents itself with new task and new challenges.