Here is my latest attemp to complete this challenge as fast as possible. I decided to play with hard settings this time, and it was a very interesting game that I'm far from used to play.
I never used a road vehicle in this game. Only (very profitable) trains to start with, then the oil rigs appeared just before the recession. My classic strategy perfectly fitting in such a scenario, I then got into boats to bring the oil to the (strangely) lone rafinery at the other side of the map. Again this was quite profitable so early in the game. Afterward I went airplane to transport the goods from the rafinery to a far away town for some major profit. In the same time I managed to build another link of profit with wood and goods.
This map was very hilly. I don't remember playing on such a map before. Thankfully the computer was very dumb and none came close to having more than one million at any given time. Only one of them was good enough to manage some good profit and I immediatly merged those 3 passenger trains he built to my own empire. I need to remember in my future games that passenger trains are very profitable once you hit electric...
Another interesting point about the computer is that they kept trying to go airplane (probably because I was already hitting all the few good train spots) and this helped me a little with the hills since they kept flattening them in a strange attempt to place an airport near all the major cities. Since it was too costly for them a lot of them went bankrupt very fast. LOL
Points of interest in the game: laughing as a computer was going bankrupt at about every 5 game years, cursing as I made a mistake in mountain levelling and "wasted" a million trying to split the mountain in two and paying a million to my "far away town" for commercial buildings when they decided to stop receiving goods at the airport. Fortunatly it only took 2 game months for the airport to accept goods again.
Edit: for those who are interested in knowing this, I began playing at 17:30 and ended the game at 2:30. That's 9 hours and a half playing straight to get this record. I'm tired now. :angel:
Anyhow, here is my screenshot: