Railroad Tycoon II
(filfre.net)293 points by doppp 9 days ago
293 points by doppp 9 days ago
There was a Railroad Tycoon 3, made mostly by the same team in the same office in Fenton. The changes to a more free-flowing tracks didn't necessarily make the game better, and were a headache for most of the production.
I was also told that there were attempts to make the economic simulation far more dynamic, simulating that the cargo could leave by other transport methods, as you'd find in a more serious economic simulation. That just made the game worse: The more efficient the market gets, the harder it is to find the profit, and the more likely that an old 'good' route suddenly stops making money, which is just annoying in a single player game.
It's a common problem with market-centric games: Good simulations make everything unfun, as most of the enjoyment comes from easily finding opportunities or getting away with misbehavior that would make real-life barons very difficult. This is IMO why you don't find many spiritual successors: Most steps forward would be steps back when it comes to making the game fun. So you'll find games focusing just on the tracks, but as puzzles (like the Train Valley Series). Optimizing routes trading items (spaceways), or outright market manipulation (Offworld Trading Company). Doing it all at once basically demands copying the game with newer graphics.
> RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart.
Aside from OpenTTD, the only games that come to mind are more modern in both their looks and how they play, but they might be worth a shot regardless.
Transport Fever (1 and 2) - the first game can be found for cheap, the second game has quite possibly the best UI of any game in the genre, plus you get trains, trucks, boats and planes, large and pretty maps with towns that develop into proper cities over time.
Mashinky - a more grid based game with trains, trucks and planes, as well as an interesting token based economy system, where you unlock new types of resources as you move along within the game world and therefore have to build out your network gradually, ensuring that everything works okay as it scales up.
Train World - a pretty recent game about trains, which has a larger scale than any of the other games I've played in the genre, might need a bit more polish but is pretty promising! It is focused purely on trains though, so is a bit more of a focused experience when it comes to actually laying out the network and setting up lines.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic - a slightly different genre (city builder), but it puts you in charge of both the economy aspect, as well as city building (and utilities like electricity, heating, water and sewage, which can be toggled on/off), production chains of various resources to use or export, transportation for citizens and a bunch more stuff. There's a lot of different mechanisms, but it doesn't feel horribly complex if you have some time to sink into it and it's quite lovely.
Honestly I also liked OpenTTD, but couldn't really get past the UI long term, it has that classic feel sure, but just wasn't quite as pleasant to use as in some of the other games.
Speaking of older games that never had a successor that quite managed to capture what they did well, there's also SimTower, where the main successors are Yoot Tower (which never really made it out of Japan) and Project Highrise, which just doesn't scratch the same itch.
one of my all time favourite games too. for me the best aspect was that I felt I was playing out the story of how railroads helped settle a continent, so its spiritual peers were civilisations and to a lesser extent simcity. the closest modern game I've found that captures that same sort of evolving story + open ended management aspect is stellaris.
You might want to look into Shadow Empire (2020), which, among things like wargaming, planetary simulation, roleplaying and leader management, also features a complex logistics system (with also railroads), as well as stock market like trading !
I usually just open up a random map and fart around. It's just a fun, chill city builder for me.
The subsequent Anno games are amazing as well, but Anno 1602 scratches the same itch and can run on an ancient laptop when travelling. Also, it's not locked behind Ubisoft's cancerous PC launcher.
> and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart
OpenTTD, Simutrans?
The stock management portion of the game adds a lot of depth. Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable, so long as you keep the number of lines between the two low enough. But they can be more profitable if you're smart about which cities are connected.
But trying to acquire the entire company is actually pretty difficult. You can buy stock on margin, but the rates are oppressively high, so it only makes sense to do so in short burst between expansion phases. But there's still risk, the economy can go south or the expansion may not be as profitable as expected, and if that happens, there's the risk of loans being called and your stock being liquidated.
I'd say most of my enjoyment of the game stems from the effort to amass a personal fortune. Eventually, you do learn how to execute various securities frauds, which is pretty entertaining itself.
> Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable
I would disagree. On hard enough difficulties intercity traffic is too seasonal. Also, continued traffic to the same city decreases the value of goods shipped there. So you still have to do some fussy industry routing as well to usually succeed. You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.
It's not necessarily rocket science, but it's an enjoyable enough puzzle in it's own right.
it’s super easy though. i had a hard time getting into rrt games.
I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home.
In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients available for download that use the retail version's assets. Despite the valiant efforts of Wine and related projects, the world would have to wait 15 more years before Proton leveraged Wine technology to bring quasi-native games to Linux, and 20 years before Steam Deck made it the norm or close to it.
That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.
Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium?
EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE
Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.
I remember Corel Linux!
It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark.
I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, and working on the Steam Deck (which ships with KDE Plasma) at a contractor for a hot minute to bring gaming back as well. At least on the personal level it was an impactful product :-)
I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.
What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-(
I'd love to buy the linux native version.
You probably don't, the old linux binaries are notoriously hard to get to function properly on a modern distribution.
While the kernel interface remained stable across all those years, user space libraries have changed quite a lot, so it's much easier to run the Windows version with wine.
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.
However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see which company has bigger budget to spend on lawyers, whatever.
WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it.
So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!
There's a good chance that if that if Microsoft doesn't act soon enough, and a lot more devices running Steam OS are released, Proton might become the de-facto platform against which many new games are developed, and which engines target.
At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.
Agreed. I actually think it might be too late at this point since it takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier.
Microsoft can't realistically deprecate/remove Win32, so all they could do is entice with new APIs. That will work for some games, but especially with the frameworks in place, they'll have to be really good to get people to abandon Steam Deck compatibility to use them.
Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it.
DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.
Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.
On the other hand building Linux binaries and keeping them running for years without maintenance has proven far more difficult than emulating Windows.
For an example track down the ports Loki games did many years ago and try to get them running on a modern machine. The most reliable way for me has been to install a very old version of Linux (Redhat 8, note: Not RHEL 8) on a VM and run them in there.
> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.
Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US).
The problem at the core is that Linux (or to be more accurately, the ecosystem around it) lacks a stable set of APIs, or even commonly agreed-upon standards in the first place, as every distribution has "their" way of doing things and only the kernel has an explicit "we don't break userspace" commitment. I distinctly remember a glibc upgrade that went wrong about a decade and a half ago where I had to spend a whole night getting my server even back to usable (thank God I had eventually managed to coerce the system into downloading a statically compiled busybox...).
They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.
Microsoft can easily do another go at it.
That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms.
As reminder,
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...
Was the Linux port made by Loki Software by any chance? That shirt lived company did a lot to make Linux viable for gaming. They developed a bunch of new libraries to help with porting and open sourced them. SDL was one of them.
Edit: OpenAL was another one of their libraries.
Still keep this on my box and crack it open now and again. I also pulled the music out of the distro and put it into my listening rotation while working. You have to add your own hawk screech sounds though :-)
I’m a total sucker for network optimization train games though. Love the crayon rails games which I wrote about here:
> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market.
This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it.
I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more focus on the mechanics of transportation. Too bad, because I really loved the graphics and some of the mechanics of the game.
This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes. Kind of a let down.
> even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes.
But you didn't do everything right. What makes OWTC different from most economics sims is that the goal is to quickly establish monopolies on the various planets. So unless you starved the competition of resources, pivoted to producing high-value products from cheap commodities, or speed run to offworld shipments, with an eye towards buying out everyone else, you're not playing to win.
The matches are sprints, not marathons. And faction abilities are critical to victory. You really have to chose matches that favor your faction if you want the upper hand.
Yea, it's entirely possible that I'm simply expecting a different game and just don't find the current one's endgame fun or satisfying. I played it a few times, chugged along building a nice colony, and then suddenly the big full-screen "Haha you lose, your opponent bought you out on the stock market (which you can't prevent)".
I'm trying to think of any games that try to include an in-game stock market, where the gameplay doesn't eventually utterly hinge on playing the in-game stock market instead of whatever else the game was about. Looks like we've discovered a rule: "Take any game about anything, in any genre, and if you add a stock market, the game eventually becomes a stock market simulator instead."
That was one of my initial fears with Shadow Empire, but it somehow doesn't manage to devolve to only that... I guess because there's a variety of brakes applied on trading like trading houses' limited stocks (including in credits), the way how price discovery is gradual between trading regions and not instant cross-planet, and the way they rip off the major factions by taking large trading margins ?
I would argue that OTC without a stock market is barely a game - it would just a race for resources.
IMHO the problem with OTC is that there is not enough opportunity for financial shenanigans. If someone successfully corners the market on the right commodity, there's a runaway leader problem with not much you can do. The game wrapping up early is a grace in those situations.
It may not be enjoyable, but for about a century, railroad schemes were often as much about entrepreneurial fundraising, land rights, and corruption as about actually delivering infrastructure - it's thematically correct.
Colm Meaney delivers an entertaining performance with regards to this in 'Hell on Wheels'.
There are parts of Pennsylvania that briefly got violent with each other over gauge changes (and thus, which town had a rest stop, and no doubt, which investment would prove profitable). The "Erie Gauge War".
Depends on the rail road. Most were as much about what government subsidies they could get (federal, state and cities all did various things as they saw any railroad as key to their success).
A couple railroads started because there was money to be had in transporting things. They picked routes that made a lot more sense (a compromise of geography and the cities served) even today when we don't have to refill the steam engine with water ever few miles. These are the exception though. Most were trying to get the upfront money and not thinking about the long term success.
I’ve never played this game but it reminds me of some railroad game I did play where you could put all of your money into a commodity, and that would raise the price of the commodity… which would start causing the overall value of your assets to explode exponentially… which allowed you to justify absurd loans from the bank… which compounded in a loop where you could start to break the math of the game as the price of coal detached from reality and your market cap soared into the quadrillions and beyond…
Good times
I don’t think you could quite do that in RRT2, but it wasn’t too hard to abuse the system.
The article mentions that the trains are just representative and in-game journeys can take over a year. What you do is, as soon as the game starts, spend every penny of your company’s money on the longest line you can afford, with one train hauling the most valuable cargo. Try to make it take a little over a year to arrive. As the individual you’re playing, sell all of your company’s stock.
Ongoing maintenance costs will quickly put your company in the red. By the time the end of the year comes around, your company is basically bankrupt, and the terrible fiscal report will devastate your stock price.
Now buy all of your company’s stock practically for free. Proceed to the next year, where your train soon arrives, your cargo pays off handsomely, the debts are more than paid, and your company is on a very healthy position with a very healthy stock price. Enjoy the rest of the game with a substantial personal fortune you can pour into your company if you want to focus on building, or use to wreck competitors if you’re up for that.
Huh, I've always just ignored the stock market and haven't had any issues.
Yeah, that reminded me how too easy diplomacy (in particular tech trading) can make almost everything else pointless in some strategy games...
I've been playing a bit of Open Transport Tycoon recently, the trains are by far my favourite aspect and probably the most detailed in the game too. Getting all the track layouts and signalling to be efficient is a challenge under ever increasing demand. https://www.openttd.org/
I also really love this game. It's what originally taught me a lot about the workings of trains, different capabilities of locomotives, the need for sidings due to monetary cost of double-tracking everywhere, etc.
The article mentions the existence of the PSX and Dreamcast ports but does not mention that the DC version is actually re-done in a fully-3D engine as opposed to the traditional approach of the PC version where the 3D models were pre-rendered to 2D graphics covering the multiple angles of rotation. It's one of the Windows CE based Dreamcast games! https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE
Here's a longplay where you can see it: https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc
RRT3 economy was great with the addition of the moving of goods outside the rail system it made everything much more organic and realistic as you couldn't just gauge prices anymore
RT3, in 3d, made it a model train simulator. Going first-person on a locomotive, puting the camera close exactly like every kid has done with every train set, that was a revolution. I saw that joy once again a few years ago when nerdcubed tried a VR model train simukator.
One of the best games I have ever played! I still open it sometimes and wonder why I could never find another strategy game that would hook me just as much.
Also learned as a kid about stock and dividends, which proved quite useful later on. There was a bit o geography and history in it as well, plus the music! Why were our parents complaining about us gaming so much!?
I’m so glad to see this game getting some love. It’s been a constant for me ever since I found it at Dollar General when I was a kid.
In order of complexity:
- Thicket to Ride series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-...
- Crayon Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail...
- Cube Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18979/series-cube-...
- Age of Steam (with hundreds of print-n-play maps available): https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/86/game-age-of-ste...
- 18xx: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/19/series-18xx
There are (several) other “train games” that are mostly one-off implementations with a train theme (often route/network building and/or tile placement, but sometimes not), but all of the above are families of several games that share a common system (components) and board game mechanisms, so once you play one, it’s often easy to understand/pick up on others in the same family.
The first, Ticket to Ride is probably the most accessible, and therefore one of the more popular options. But the others definitely offer a deeper experience, if you can handle the (increasing) complexity.
The shortest, simplest equivalent I know that has most of the same 'spice' is Chicago Express/Wabash Cannonball. At first you think it's a game about building a company that tries to get to Chicago first to claim the prize money, but then you realize that this is really about making money, and that maybe the best thing for you is to completely wreck any and all attempts to have anyone, ever, get to Chicago. Plays in an hour, instead of 3+ in your typical train game with this kind of mechanics.
There is also 1830 and few others
https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/bes...
I absolutely loved this game growing up. It scratched a similar itch for me as SimCity. The corporate layer wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it did give me some early insight into finance.
The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.
> The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.
For a few euros (and less if you happen to catch a sale), the GOG version is worth it for the soundtrack alone. But yeah, 7-Zip doesn't seem to recognise the installer used by GOG, so you actually have to install the game to get at the soundtrack files.
One day, I might have to go through the trouble to do this!
About the only game from the 90s which I still play regularly, IMHO it's pretty close to the perfect computer game since it strikes just the right balance between simulation and 'arcade-y' fun - and all the modern 're-enactments' I tried so far somehow don't manage to capture the essential of what makes Railroad Tycoon 2 so much fun (the Platinum version runs great on modern computers btw: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...).
Not it is the free software or open source version of this game, but OpenLoco https://openloco.io/ is great, and I hope that this game in near future will have a free assets like as OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/ .
There doesn't seem to be any mention of 2006's Sid Meier's Railroads! which seems to be an evolution of Railroad Tycoon.
I've played "Railroads!" for countless hours - it's an incredible game, especially when LAN'ing with others.
Any reason why this game might be left out?
I have played this game for tons of hours. I wish I could play and enjoy it like I did the first time when I was a kid.
> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com.
Sadly, for Windows only :(
If you are running Linux, it seems to work well with Proton, though I didn't check it myself: https://www.protondb.com/app/7620
What would it be ? IPX ?
Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?
The Linux version would almost certainly not run on any current Linux. I have a vague memory of trying to run the demo nearly 20 years ago and it failing due to requiring some now-deprecated X11 extension. If you want to try, the Internet Archive does have a Loki software demo CD, which includes Railroad Tycoon 2: https://archive.org/details/linux-games-cd
This worked for me last month on a Mac M2: https://www.portingkit.com/game/278
The way the author talked about the feeling of if a sequel could live up to the original, and how it had been mostly forgotten, reminded me of Warlords, which together with civilization and rail road tycoon was the main turn based strategy games of my youth. I remember there was a sequel, but it would always freeze up on our computer.
... And I don't think I've stumbled on anyone on the internet talk its praise.
Was it just an oddity in my games library, or did other people place it along side the classic turn based strategy games of the 90s?
> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one.
RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may be the oldest PC game I regularly open up and play for fun.
The gameplay is still so good. The fact that the game is so open-ended and also so cutthroat, combined with the procedurally generated maps means it always feels fresh to play, even all these years later. The UI has aged but has not gotten in the way.
And yes, as reviewer describes, it absolutely nails the theme. The sound design, the visuals, the music, the historical setting. Things feel gritty and real and tough. Just like the game's treatment of Robber Barons, the game perfectly balances romanticism with cynicism. The game made me love trains.
I still remember learning as a child how stock trading on the margin worked when I simultaneously made and then lost a massive fortune attempting to buy out a rival.