I need to load this one up again and see how it plays. One of my complaints in most of the train and tycoon style games these days is they are too darn easy from a strategy perspective or they require casts amount of micro managing.
> 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.
> You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.
Although the AI players have some interesting limitations – they'll never connect a city you've already connected to, and they'll never build a line that crosses one of your own lines. To be fair, I don't know how important those fudges are for balancing the game, and if so, how the playing strength of the AI players could be balanced in a more realistic fashion (plus considering that the game is from almost thirty years ago)…
For most cities, the first few loads often have enough profit to cover like 10-15% of the build costs, with the first year usually covering 25-35% of the build costs. After two years or so, with no other expansion, cargo trade will be dramatically reduced and the bulk the cargo will be passenger/mail cargo, but so long as you don't allow empty shipments, the line should remain profitable.
The fun comes from trying expand as fast as possible. But it's pretty difficult to actually fail.
The trade model in RT2 is broken in ways that make it fun, but also kind of predictable. You get paid a whole lot more for long hauls than for short ones, and you’re less likely to satiate demand that way. In most maps it makes more sense to deliver coal to a steel mill from 500 miles away than it does to haul it from the mine next door. This pushes you to build massive, sprawling rail networks rather than tight, efficient local ones. Which is clearly tuned for fun over realism. RT3 turns the knob toward realism in a way that sucks a lot of the fun out.
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.