Hello Everyone,

This is my first guide, and actually my first post on these official forums, so bear with me if I do anything wrong. I have been ghosting on here awhile, and playing the game for some time. I believe I have found an excellent way to layout an island to prevent traffic jams and use a transportation system effectively. Enjoy!

--FritoPatata

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my Transportation Guide. The purpose of this guide is to assist players in optimizing their transportation networks to achieve maximum profit and minimal commute time, all while taking the needs of their Tropicans into account.

Any good Presidente knows that the less time a citizen spends sitting in traffic, the more time they can spend working! It is the only way to maximize your profits and turn your island into the gem of the Caribbean!
Assumptions

1. The person reading this guide is familiar with the Tropico 3 UI and has a few campaigns or sandbox modes under his or her belt.
2. The player does not mind going in depth into the system Tropico 3 uses for transport.
3. The player keeps harsh judgement to themselves, because the theories put forth in this guide are just... theories. I am not a developer, this is all based on observation as well as plenty of hands on experimentation.

Logic

1. All things equal, a Tropican will take the shortest route to their destination based on speed.
2. A tropican works any time that they are not filling a need, such as food, religion, entertainment, etc.
3. A tropican will pick the best housing available that they can afford balanced with the closest housing to their place of employment. In the game guide, this is indicated as they will only pay rent equal to 1/3 of their family income. So... if you have a college educated worker making $18, you should set the price of his intended housing to $6. If you want an educated married couple to move into a place, you should build nicer homes (mansions or condos) that go for $12 (i.e. 1/3 of their combined income) It is rare to get such a couple, as often Tropicans will marry without regard to social class, so you are safer setting rent for your most expensive dwellings to the following formula: (C/3) + (HS/3) = Rent. Beyond setting rent, you must make the housing convenient enough to a Tropican's employer that the gain in housing quality exceeds the increase in commute time.
4. If a tropican can more easily walk to work, it is best to let them do so to keep cars off the road. This should be balanced with when a car makes a trip faster and is worth the addition to traffic.
5. Raw Materials should be given the fastest possible path to factories, and in turn factory goods should be taken to the dock for export as quickly as possible.
6. Based on the above ideas, the ideal place for a Tropican to live is as close as possible to work while keeping their needs in check and in the best manner possible. The tropican also should not reasonably interfere with the transportation of materials whether raw or finished.
   

The Model


Click here to view the image in its largest size 1200 X 800
Some terms I use that I should explain:

• AOE Jobs- Jobs that have an Area of Effect. Buildings like this would be the TV Station, Newspaper, Police Station, etc.
• Skilled Non-AOE Jobs- Jobs that do not have an Area of Effect, but require at least a high school or college education. Buildings such as this would be the Armory, Immigration Building, etc. This grouping does not include services.
• Basic Services- Services that a Tropican will seek to fulfill such as healthcare, religion, etc.
• Education- The High School or University fall into this category, seperated from basic services to serve this guides purpose.
• Production (Green Zone)- Anywhere that raw materials are extracted. This could be a farm, mine, logging camp, etc.
• Industrial Zone (red zone)- Anywhere that raw materials are refined into a finished product. This includes all the games factories.
• Tourism Zone (gold zone)- Zone reserved for Tourist housing and attractions such as hotels and spas.
  

The idea behind this layout is first and foremost that your construction workers and teamsters have priority on the fastest route across the island. With rare exception, they will be the only ones using that road in the center of the map which will allow them to quickly get anywhere they need to go on the island, especially to the Tourist and Industrial Zones. For the Upper class zone and the Production zone, they will walk, and will not have far to go.

Basic Services are placed in the center of the map on the north side of the expressway. This puts them close to their employees which are generally high school and college educated. Education is put on the south side since the student of such places live in low class housing (with social security edict). The disadvantages are that to get basic services, the lower class dwellers will need to cross the street on foot. However, this keeps them close enough to walk, and the design of the road system is such that getting in a car would not make sense. You can prevent the upper class folks from having to cross the road by positioning a few high class dwellings near the two schools and making sure they take up residence there.

On the north side, the skilled workers live close to where most of them will work. Which is in Skilled Non-AOE Jobs, or AOE Jobs. The position of these facilities allows them to walk to work, and in the case of AOE Jobs, allows both sides of the road to receive full benefit. In the case of factory workers, they hop in the NW garage and take a car East to their place of employment. There will be a few uneducated types living here to work in the central entertainment district, but they will probably marry into families to where they can afford the housing. The Entertainment can be set to high quality, so the rich tropicans get good service quality values and also pay you back top dollar. Some workers will go to work in the tourist zone, they will be able to travel very quickly from North to West, as most traffic on that section of road will be upscale tourists that like to wander. Assuming the nicest entertainment is up here, the positions of the hotels in the tourist district may seem flipped. This is not the case assuming you are going to provide them with their own brand of entertainment in their respective zone. This will discourage them from going into local territory. Some will venture out anyway, but that is the case with the tourist in this game.

On the South side, the lower class lives close to their assumed jobs in farming, mining, and construction. They are provided with cheap entertainment in the center of their housing, and are given easy access to education should they decide to move up in the world. Cheap tourists may find their way here, but will be discouraged due to the flipping of the hotels. Since most jobs in the Industrial zone are intended for the middle class, most of the travel happening from South to East is going to be raw materials. There will no doubt be some middle class families living there, but again, you can monitor the living quarters and evict as necessary. A few living there is not the end of the world. Most travel will happen from South to West so that workers can take their jobs in the service industry catering to tourists.

Guard Towers are placed in the four corners for maximum protection, and i recommend an army base in either the Skilled Non-AOE job area or near one of the AOE job areas linking to the Island Expressway for their transport. The Power Plant is placed there mostly for environment reasons, since skilled workers will need to reach it, it is the longest commute of the grouping.

Intersections
Intersections are the bane of transportation networks in real life and in Tropico. Metropolitan areas around the world have gone to great lengths to improve their transportation networks by providing highways and public transportation to reduce the gridlock caused by a busy intersection. Unfortunately for you, El Presidente, such technology as on/off ramps, multi-lane highways, railroads, and even stoplights do not exist in your island paradise. Beyond that, your people lack anything more than a rudimentary understanding of traffic laws, often stopping in the middle of a road to drop of a passenger or even doing a U-Turn on a busy street!

To combat the damage an intersection can cause to a road network on your island, you need to spend some time at the beginning of a game looking at the various overlays and seeing where the most profitable sections of your island are located. Once you have found them, you need to think ahead and decide how you will provide quick transportation between them and your industial sector/dock so you can get paid! You also need to consider limited vs. unlimited resources. Will this section of island only be valuable as long as the mineral or oil deposit lasts?

The main thing I am advocating in my model, is a clear and traffic-free route for your raw materials to make it to the factories and the finished goods from the factory to the dock as quickly as possible. Thus, it is important that you make every effort possible to provide a continuous stretch of road from raw materials, through production, all the way to export with as few intersections as possible. While it is important for your people to get to and from work as quickly as possible so they can produce and refine the goods, they often work in shifts, and usually half of them will be working at any given time (averaged out). But, all the production in the world doesn't mean anything until those goods get to a dock. In a perfect world.. your production pipeline should look like this:

Click here for the full size picture

Once you have exploited all non-renewable resources (which i advise doing early on) that are not in your raw materials production area, your model should look like the one above. The sooner the better. By that point in the game, your treasury should be fat, and you will be able to move your dock to a place more convenient for shipping and less convenient for immigration, since you will be more likely to count on your citizens reproducing for your workforce.

Early on however... it is pretty common to have it look like this...

Click here for the full size version
A mess, through and through. You will have choke points caused by intersections between the gold mine and raw materials, another one at refining, and then a third near the docks. Not to mention that it is possible to have these goods going right through the population area. The good news is that since it is early in the game, gridlock is probably not much of a concern, and your average gold mine will be depleted fairly quickly. The iron or bauxite mine is likely to hang around longer, which is why you should exploit this resource immediately.



Conclusions

I plan to add more to this guide, and will be reserving space below this post for that purpose. I also plan to make a custom map intended for proof of concept. I realize that no Island is perfectly shaped like this, and that light adjustments will need to be made (i.e. a gold mine in the Upper Class area) but this is more so a method for showing the most efficient way to move people in Tropico 3 than it is an island blueprint. I will be editing this main post with more details and thoughts as I encounter them. For now, play with the layout, and tell me your observations... by doing this we can all become better players and make the island of our dreams!

**UPDATE November 9, 2009** Added section on Intersections and their effects. Also made some clarifications in #3 of my logic section.

**UPDATE November 10, 2009** Completed a screenshot guide to creating an island using the model. This guide was done mostly on my flickr account, which anyone can view for free, in order to save the load on the servers when loading this thread.

**UPDATE November 12, 2009** Uploaded island save game file for those interested in a live demo.

**UPDATE November 17, 2009** Provided the results of an experiment on the island loop method. Made some major gameplay discoveries!

The Transportation Guide in Action, an Example Island

I have created essentially a rough walkthrough of how to apply my principles to an actual Tropico island, in a guide that is narrated on my flickr account. This was done to spare some of the load time when anyone wants to pull up this thread for reference. Viewing this guide on flickr is open to the public, and does not require registration. The guide is best viewed by starting with the picture in the upper left of my Presidente and scrolling through one by one, reading descriptions where needed and viewing the largest versions of each image to see everything clearly.

Click here to go to the full transportation guide on Flickr

Here is some eye candy for you however...

The Giant Loop Theory
One of the things that has been dicussed in the forums off and on to combat traffic is to build an entire island in one giant continuous loop. While this would certainly take away the threat of intersections (and resulting traffic jams), The actual practice of this would be quite difficult. It is hard enough to actually build a loop considering the terrain difficulties on most islands, much less the fact that you would be wasting a huge amount of space as you move closer towards the center of the artificial circle you are creating.

You could contend that you could build a loop in name only, and build something that indeed does not have any intersections, but contains a long series of S curves that wind back into themselves over and over, creating a coil like appearance in your population zone. While this would save on wasted space, it is likely you would create such a long stretch of continuous road that any traffic jams you are avoiding are nullified by the sheer length of a citizen's commute time.

These two points do not make the loop a bad concept, in fact, even in my main guide i use a series of loops to create some areas where traffic is not a concern. So last night I decided to try out a double loop theory. In this model, a large loop surrounds a smaller loop, and garages are used as a "bridge" between the two loops. All services are contained within the smaller inner loop so that Tropicans will only visit there if they work there or if they need to fulfill needs. In order to go to work (for those working in an industrial sector) they will need to take one of the garages that are attached to the outer loop. The design layout looks like this:


For the full size image, click here

As you can see in the above model, citizens will travel along the inner loop to all services. They will also use the inner loop to connect to garages that will take them to jobs on the outer loop. By doing this, you prevent intersections at any point, and you can maintain a good usage of space while keeping traffic and commute times to a minimum. Perfect right? Wrong.

Unfortunately there are gameplay and coding limitations that get in the way of this working the way it should. When trying it out last night, I gained some new knowledge on how the AI in Tropico 3 is programmed, and what limitations there are. They are as follows:

• Tropicans will attempt to take the closest garage to where they live or work. Always. They do not consider the pathing of the cars.
• If the closest garage is not connected to the network of where they need to go... THEY WILL EMERGE FROM THE GARAGE ON FOOT AND WALK TO WHERE THEY ARE GOING, EVEN IF ANOTHER GARAGE IS ON THE WAY.
• Tropicans will NOT change garages, the AI is not programmed to do so.
  

These discoveries render the idea of an inner loop used as a small taxi service halfway useless. The initial thought was that the tropicans could travel along an inner loop to get to all their services as well as get them close to a garage on the outer loop to take them to work. While they did indeed use the inner loop garages to get to services, any tropican not living close to an outer loop garage instead would attempt to WALK all the way to work instead of walk to a garage with an accessible outer loop connection, and take it from there.

I encourage all of you to check out the progression of my little experiment last night on my flickr account. I have well documented screenshots posted as my experiment progressed. It does not require registration to view these screenshots.

Click here to go to FritoPatata's Flickr page

Anyway, this design is not totally scrap worthy, as I encountered a method which is a hybrid of my original transportation design and the double loop method. The layout is as follows (and can be best seen in the Flickr guide in action).


Click here for the full size image

In this model, you create two intersections, one at each apex of your loop. These are the only two real chokepoints on the map, and usually only one at a time will get really backed up. I found this method to be extremely effective in creating my experimental city, Isla De Loopa.

Reserved for Expansion.

Wow, you went all out! Very excellent guide. There are a few items I have questions on. Planning out a big city/state like this is all well and good but rarely does the terrain play nice. Secondly, I commend the frequent placement of garages. You seem to appreciate their power. However, just having them spaced along might not be leveraging them to their greatest effect.

Still, I'd love to see some screenies of this plan in action and see what the traffic patterns look like.

Just started up a new city in god mode to take screenshots and show how i can adapt to an island. Will be posting them sometime over the weekend.

One of the things I want to show are the evolutionary steps from young city, medium city, powered city, large city, large city with tourists. That is what I'm working on now. Screenshots so people can see the design evolve.

Well done. It looks like a highly efficient island set up. I'll have to try it out but from the looks, it would go well. Only thing is how would we know how big to make the housing loops, also, I like how you took traffic and congestion issues into account. I wonder how the main thoroughfare will hold up with 500+ people.

@ Fritopatata I think what I'd like to see to better grasp this is a real world island (you know real world as in Tropico 3 map) wiht the buildings that are listed on the "Model" above to see how it all fits together. I think that might be quite useful to see if possible, as it would give a sense of distance between objects, and how it all interacts with pollution and beauty etc. Perhaps best to post a screenshots of said Model using the real world map and then supply the save game file if possible so that others can learn by the example of seeing it on their own computers running properly.

Just something to think about if you have the time FritoPatata

Quote:3. A tropican will pick the best housing available that they can afford. In the game guide, this is indicated as they will only pay rent equal to 1/3 of their family income.

Not completely true. A tropican will usually pick the closest, not really the best they can afford. You can easily see this affect in the tutorial. put a clinic beside a tenement, then build a house/apartment a few lenghs away. the doc will goto the tenement, not the better places. You can even kick him out of the place, he will go back to the tenement over and over, since it's closer. only when the tenement is full will he goto the apartment (the next closest building).

computertech Wrote:

Quote:3. A tropican will pick the best housing available that they can afford. In the game guide, this is indicated as they will only pay rent equal to 1/3 of their family income.

Not completely true. A tropican will usually pick the closest, not really the best they can afford. You can easily see this affect in the tutorial. put a clinic beside a tenement, then build a house/apartment a few lengths away. the doc will go to the tenement, not the better places. You can even kick him out of the place, he will go back to the tenement over and over, since it's closer. only when the tenement is full will he go to the apartment (the next closest building).

Pinstar Wrote:[Pinstar's Guide: Residential Zones]...

As for shacks poping up near work, As long as said work has road access of some sort, that is less likely to happen. Further, if people are ignoring housing to build shacks, you may just want to spread these zones out and dot them along your populated area. I haven't found shacks to be too common when using these.

...

So road access cancels out the closeness proclivity?

CoconutKid Wrote:

computertech Wrote:

Quote:3. A tropican will pick the best housing available that they can afford. In the game guide, this is indicated as they will only pay rent equal to 1/3 of their family income.

Not completely true. A tropican will usually pick the closest, not really the best they can afford. You can easily see this affect in the tutorial. put a clinic beside a tenement, then build a house/apartment a few lengths away. the doc will go to the tenement, not the better places. You can even kick him out of the place, he will go back to the tenement over and over, since it's closer. only when the tenement is full will he go to the apartment (the next closest building).

Pinstar Wrote:[Pinstar's Guide: Residential Zones]...

As for shacks poping up near work, As long as said work has road access of some sort, that is less likely to happen. Further, if people are ignoring housing to build shacks, you may just want to spread these zones out and dot them along your populated area. I haven't found shacks to be too common when using these.

...

So road access cancels out the closeness proclivity?

From my observations, as long as you have a well designed transportation system (i.e. garages that are not overcrowded and roads that are not stuffed with cars) a tropican will pick the housing option that provides them with the best housing quality. Usually, they will also pick the one closest to their work, but by building adequate garages they are always close to their work!

The reason my model works in this scenario, is that it maximizes getting the different social classes as close as possible to where they work, and providing minimal travel/congestion.

I want to highlight again, however, that my model is a rough layout, and just an idea to shoot for. I myself have yet to create a "pure" example without putting god mode on. Not to mention the terrain constraints. Even if you can get half of it right, it makes a world of difference to your traffic congestion.

FritoPatata Wrote:From my observations, as long as you have a well designed transportation system (i.e. garages that are not overcrowded and roads that are not stuffed with cars) a tropican will pick the housing option that provides them with the best housing quality. Usually, they will also pick the one closest to their work, but by building adequate garages they are always close to their work! ...

Remembering always that the roads are really cheap and the cars are totally FREE!

A great game, but not connected with the real world. How many real world cities are longing to have such a system?

But I digress from T3. Sorry.

Housing is a little complicated. Even with good transportation, a pep will usually choose the closest housing regardless of price.

Take the example of a factory at one end of the island, an apartment complex on the opposite end (priced so the worker can afford it) and a tenement right in the middle of the island. When the factory worker gets out of school and takes their job, they are more likely to take up residence in the tenement, even though they can afford the apartment, due to the distance. However, as long as the factory has road access, the worker will take the apartment before building a shack if the tenement isn't an option.

It is only if the factory is far away from any road will the worker ignore housing and build a shack next to the factory.

Pinstar Wrote:Take the example of a factory at one end of the island, an apartment complex on the opposite end (priced so the worker can afford it) and a tenement right in the middle of the island. When the factory worker gets out of school and takes their job, they are more likely to take up residence in the tenement, even though they can afford the apartment, due to the distance. However, as long as the factory has road access, the worker will take the apartment before building a shack if the tenement isn't an option.

It is only if the factory is far away from any road will the worker ignore housing and build a shack next to the factory.

I would 2nd this. That seems to how it really works, as i said before.

computertech Wrote:

Pinstar Wrote:Take the example of a factory at one end of the island, an apartment complex on the opposite end (priced so the worker can afford it) and a tenement right in the middle of the island. When the factory worker gets out of school and takes their job, they are more likely to take up residence in the tenement, even though they can afford the apartment, due to the distance. However, as long as the factory has road access, the worker will take the apartment before building a shack if the tenement isn't an option.

It is only if the factory is far away from any road will the worker ignore housing and build a shack next to the factory.

I would 2nd this. That seems to how it really works, as i said before.

This is definately how it works. Many times, I build a seperate village in a high beauty area with all the services just for my wealthiest tropicans. I jack up the rent on these condos and mansions really high, and the area is always remote. They never opt for the cheaper housing in the city as long as my transportation network is well stocked with a garage on each end.

A new section on Intersections has been added to the main guide. Check it out!

HUGE UPDATE

A new guide with an example island and all sorts of screenshots is live and open for viewing! Please tell me what you think of this guide and how I can improve it. In the future, I will be taking this massive city and expanding it to the limits of the island.

Amazing, just amazing. I'm just playing this island at home, you have fit three or four times more economy in it than I ever managed :-)

Nice FritoPatata,
Have you uploaded the saved game somewhere? I'd like to check it out first hand while Im also taking a look at the narative. Nice work, nice update.

Odd. Looked at the flicker screens, missing alot of traffic. I have i similar setup (very similar), but i get extremely overloaded traffic simply by the docks being in the area, and everyone going to and from housing.

@City Builder- I will try and find a place I can host the save game file and will post here when I find one. Right now I'm not at the computer the game is on so, maybe later tonight.

@Computertech- Traffic comes and goes in phases on the island. Once in awhile I get some teamsters from the various garages throughout the city trying to contribute to the efforts in my industrial zone. They may come from as far away as the tourist zone and cause a few bottlenecks. I attribute the low volume of cars on the road to giving my Tropicans incentive to live close to where they work and walk. Also, general island traffic totally avoids the industrial zone. The only cars in the area are people going to and from work and teamsters running goods back and forth.

In general, it seems traffic was an afterthought for the developers of Tropico 3 or else they would have instituted some means to help control it. By forcing people to take certain routes, you can artificially improve traffic on your island.

I agree. I had my residential zone connected to the rest of my city in three places...and the middle road was always choked with traffic. What did I do? I demolished the main road and that split the traffic to the outer two roads.

Perhaps traffic wouldn't be so bad if we didn't abuse garages so much, but it is so fun to do so

Maybe in the EP we'll get traffic lights and busing.

(11-11-2009 04:57 PM)FritoPatata Wrote:  In general, it seems traffic was an afterthought for the developers of Tropico 3 or else they would have instituted some means to help control it. By forcing people to take certain routes, you can artificially improve traffic on your island.

I agree, there are some times that I end up deleting part of a street and building a round about street so that it essentially cuts off people from overcrowding one particular street and forces the ones that need to get somewhere to go the round about route to get there, thus spreading out traffic a bit.

You can use http://www.mediafire.com to share files that are the size of the saved files. I just checked it by uploading a sav file without logging in or anything, once you've uploaded it, there is an option that will tell you the url to give to others (post here) to let them download it. No rush, just trying to assist you to find someplace to host it.

Kalypso-Bob says:
Well done, this guide is really great, thank you! Still can't believe it's the first time you did something like that!

Awesome CityBuilder, I will use that site to upload my save game file when I get home.

@Kalypso-Bob- This is just my first guide for Tropico 3. I have written other FAQs and Guides for other games I have played. I like to get involved in the various communities when I play, simply because a lot of the people i interact with daily have no interest in my gaming life, and I need an outlet to share hints, tips, and fun experiences.

Also... with this post/view, the topic is now elite! (1337 views)

*Achievement Unlocked*

Nice tips and pictures FritoPatata but i have some questions :

I just started playing Tropico 3 a few days, and i am a truly noob in Tropico 3 . The first few times i played, my countries were in big debt and never get up. Then I read your guide, and figure out that i need road and garage, teamster to transfer goods to the port. And my country's economy improved. But I dont know why the money keep going down all the time, and i have to wait until i recieve money from the exports to build more buildings then im in debt again, then have to wait to exports again. What did you do to keep your treasury always going up?

Take that money you are getting to build more industry before you go back in debt. If you look at his pictures, he had like 8 (?) canneries which means there is probably like 16-20 coffee farms out there. Eventually you get to the point, like he did, where the ship comes in and ships out $150K+ in exports. Have fun trying to spend all that fast enough...

(12-11-2009 08:11 PM)hdphan Wrote:  Nice tips and pictures FritoPatata but i have some questions :

I just started playing Tropico 3 a few days, and i am a truly noob in Tropico 3 . The first few times i played, my countries were in big debt and never get up. Then I read your guide, and figure out that i need road and garage, teamster to transfer goods to the port. And my country's economy improved. But I dont know why the money keep going down all the time, and i have to wait until i recieve money from the exports to build more buildings then im in debt again, then have to wait to exports again. What did you do to keep your treasury always going up?

Your situation reflects the thoughts of everyone when they first picked up a Tropico game whether T1 or T3 (god forbid they start with T2), so don't worry! You may be new but you're not a noob! Tropico has a complex economy that requires a good start to setup your future economy.

A couple things to keep in mind, you should only build an extra teamster office later in the game when you have a whole lot of goods to get to port. Your cities start with a teamster office by default, which gives 6 teamsters. Each garage you make provides another 2 teamsters! It is not until your economy becomes truly robust that you need another full fledged office to keep up.

Second, it is important to police your employee wages and service fees early on. By default, you uneducated workers each make $5, you should immediately raise this to $6. Then raise the price on your cheapest housing to $2, because all tropicans will spend up to 1/3 their income on housing. The next thing you should do is get a restaurant going, and raise the service fee on that to $6, which is equal to the income of your lowest paid tropican. By doing these 2 simple things, you guarantee that your citizens are paying back into the system, and helping cut the maintenance cost of your buildings. Keep this up throughout the game... If you decide to give uneducated workers a raise to $9, increase your cheap rent to $3 and your service fees to $9.

Third, it is normal to go into debt early on. You are given up to -$10,000 to spend until they cut you off from spending, and typically you will get most of that back in the form of foreign aid unless you have taken traits that hurt your relationship with the superpowers. The key to a good start is to pick a crop that you can use as your "cash crop" by looking at the terrain and seeing what it is suited for growing. Once you find it, build 2 or 3 farms that will havest that crop. Keep in mind, it takes 3 years for farms to yield full production... so in the meantime you will want a small source of immediate income. This is where mining comes in. Find a good node of any type (I don't recommend exploiting a gold node until you can afford a jewelry factory), build a road out to it, place your mine (connected to road, it has its own garage), and voila! If no mining nodes are available, i generally turn to ranching cattle. It will help feed the populace, as well as produce a small amount of income quickly. I find that ranching is very underestimated in this game. Keep away from oil wells at the beginning as they require college graduates to work on them.

I hope all this helps get you going, feel free to respond with any other questions.