I was playing against two Tycoons and I had all the good resources on my side of a river. After we got into the 1920's there was track going all over/under/around/atop everything and everywhere. It was almost impossible to follow and looked awful. One Tycoon had bridges with almost vertical rails onto bridges with very quick sweeping turns down. I'm surprised the trains could navigate them.jturie wrote:
You can sort of create crossings by connecting track segments close together, but it's not the same.
The only reason I thought of sharing competitor's track is to allow you to get to a new town or resource without having to build overpasses or extensive bypass track. Given the small map scale, I think it would start getting busy. I don't want you to be able to go into a competitor's station, just use stretches of their track. It would be a bear to implement within the restrictions of the track laying and routing logic in the software...
What would improve Railroads! ?
Remember railroads is sdaorliar spelled backward
I don't think these have been mentioned, I support most of what has been suggested.
1. My number one issue is the 'instant' tracks. I would love to see a maximum track per month based upon work required. So the more land moved and/or bridges/tunnels etc built, the less track that gets laid.
This would require a player to evaluate the outlay to reward and also consider alternate routes, as it is, the most direct is the only choice.
2. Maintainable of tracks, as it is now, everything is fixed with more tracks, part of the issue is above, but so is the fact that it costs nothing over time.
1. My number one issue is the 'instant' tracks. I would love to see a maximum track per month based upon work required. So the more land moved and/or bridges/tunnels etc built, the less track that gets laid.
This would require a player to evaluate the outlay to reward and also consider alternate routes, as it is, the most direct is the only choice.
2. Maintainable of tracks, as it is now, everything is fixed with more tracks, part of the issue is above, but so is the fact that it costs nothing over time.
Hi all - I am a bit disappointed with this game. Probably due in part to how much I loved the RRT games and that I was hoping for some sort of RRT 4. This has a Railroads Lite feel to it. The original RRT was one of only two games to ever keep me up through the night the first day I bought them (The original Civilization was the other:)). Below are some things that would, IMHO, make it better:
1. the ability to take over a rival in a stock manipulation and control its activities. In the original, it was really cool to eke out enough cash to buy > 50% of a competitor and raid his cash, manage it independently, buy your stock to avoid a margin call, or just have him run up its own stock price by forcing it to buy back its stock and then selling out my shares. Usually driving the company into bankruptacy along the way! These type of manipulations really added a historical "robber baron" feel. What is the deal with having to completely buy out a competitor? If you own >50% you should have control!
2. having to compete with a rival in order to have exclusive access to a town was a great mini-game in the original RRT. (i.e., who could haul the most loads in a short period of time to and from a town)
3. larger maps!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4. Tweak game speed and longevity! I really like the bidding process for upgrades but the duration of the advantage it gives to you isn't long enough to be worth it in some cases!
5. Larger maps would allow for pesky new startups to challenge the player! tough call - Buy out the new competition or build that transcontinential link?
6. Longer more "epic" games have been mentioned earlier and it would be nice to be able to manage a massive empire that took days to create.
7. Graphics are nice but if I had to use one word to define games from Sid and his colleagues over the years is "gameplay." With few exceptions, I have always felt that gameplay was the guiding principle behind the success and that it was the primary goal. Railroads! feels a little lacking in this area but maybe next couple of patches can improve on this aspect of the game!
Cheers to all!
1. the ability to take over a rival in a stock manipulation and control its activities. In the original, it was really cool to eke out enough cash to buy > 50% of a competitor and raid his cash, manage it independently, buy your stock to avoid a margin call, or just have him run up its own stock price by forcing it to buy back its stock and then selling out my shares. Usually driving the company into bankruptacy along the way! These type of manipulations really added a historical "robber baron" feel. What is the deal with having to completely buy out a competitor? If you own >50% you should have control!
2. having to compete with a rival in order to have exclusive access to a town was a great mini-game in the original RRT. (i.e., who could haul the most loads in a short period of time to and from a town)
3. larger maps!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4. Tweak game speed and longevity! I really like the bidding process for upgrades but the duration of the advantage it gives to you isn't long enough to be worth it in some cases!
5. Larger maps would allow for pesky new startups to challenge the player! tough call - Buy out the new competition or build that transcontinential link?
6. Longer more "epic" games have been mentioned earlier and it would be nice to be able to manage a massive empire that took days to create.
7. Graphics are nice but if I had to use one word to define games from Sid and his colleagues over the years is "gameplay." With few exceptions, I have always felt that gameplay was the guiding principle behind the success and that it was the primary goal. Railroads! feels a little lacking in this area but maybe next couple of patches can improve on this aspect of the game!
Cheers to all!
I used to do this in the original too. What better way to gain cash than to fleece an opponent (as in the days of the robber-barons), or to start buying an opponents stock and then selling it quickly while the price was still high.RRT fan wrote: 1. the ability to take over a rival in a stock manipulation and control its activities. In the original, it was really cool to eke out enough cash to buy > 50% of a competitor and raid his cash, manage it independently, buy your stock to avoid a margin call, or just have him run up its own stock price by forcing it to buy back its stock and then selling out my shares. Usually driving the company into bankruptacy along the way! These type of manipulations really added a historical "robber baron" feel. What is the deal with having to completely buy out a competitor? If you own >50% you should have control!
I too agree that 50% (or maybe 60%) should be enough to control the opposition railroad company. As it is, an opponent needs only to have 10% of their own stock to keep you from attempting a stockmarket take-over. This is way too low.
Advanced route planning
As in other games of this kind, it should be possible to plan the routes of the trains more precisely: in what direction they should leave the stations and what way they should choose at intersections and switches. These features should be enabled in the route planner, by the way it would be a much better way to plan routes in the main game by clicking on the desired tracks the trains should follow (as in the Jowood games like Industrial Giant).
As it is, it is almost impossible to plan even a simple loop traffic, because the trains refuse to take the alternative route. They just will turn around at stations and star in each others face until eternity.
As it is, it is almost impossible to plan even a simple loop traffic, because the trains refuse to take the alternative route. They just will turn around at stations and star in each others face until eternity.
Most important for me would be (sorted by importance):
1. Making it easier to select parts of the track. For example, at the moment it is a pain to select a crossover.
2. An undo function
3. Fighting with your opponents for the right to connect cities, like it was in RRT1. When two builded a station at the same city, a time of competition began, where the one who fullfilled the needs of the city best within a certain amount of time would have won.
4. Re-routable goods
5. Harder difficulties - but not just by lowering my starting money or raising the maintenance costs for trains. Some examples about things I would like to see influenced by the difficulty:
-- Making it harder to get a city upgraded
-- Earnings for shippings related to speed of delivery and distance.
6. Ability to place your own signals
7. Making it possible to create one way tracks
8. Ability to zoom out further
9. Bigger maps
10. More complex bonds system.
11. More complex economical system in general.
1. Making it easier to select parts of the track. For example, at the moment it is a pain to select a crossover.
2. An undo function
3. Fighting with your opponents for the right to connect cities, like it was in RRT1. When two builded a station at the same city, a time of competition began, where the one who fullfilled the needs of the city best within a certain amount of time would have won.
4. Re-routable goods
5. Harder difficulties - but not just by lowering my starting money or raising the maintenance costs for trains. Some examples about things I would like to see influenced by the difficulty:
-- Making it harder to get a city upgraded
-- Earnings for shippings related to speed of delivery and distance.
6. Ability to place your own signals
7. Making it possible to create one way tracks
8. Ability to zoom out further
9. Bigger maps
10. More complex bonds system.
11. More complex economical system in general.
In my view there are two vital things that would make the game infinitely better.
1. Bigger Maps (much bigger!)
2. Slower passing of time (and slower earnings/expenses)
As the game stands you have towns and industries all on top of one another and your track curves and junctions etc are essentially the whole route. Spacing everything out would make things so much better. In addition making the progression of time (much!) slower would give you time to think about the routes you have and watch them perform etc rather than the sort of headlong rush that happens now. The rate at which earnings are made and expenses incurred would of course have to be adjusted to fit the new timescale.
If these two things could be added then it would improve the game beyond measure in my view - many of the other suggestions here would also be great, but these two are the 'killer' changes I think.
1. Bigger Maps (much bigger!)
2. Slower passing of time (and slower earnings/expenses)
As the game stands you have towns and industries all on top of one another and your track curves and junctions etc are essentially the whole route. Spacing everything out would make things so much better. In addition making the progression of time (much!) slower would give you time to think about the routes you have and watch them perform etc rather than the sort of headlong rush that happens now. The rate at which earnings are made and expenses incurred would of course have to be adjusted to fit the new timescale.
If these two things could be added then it would improve the game beyond measure in my view - many of the other suggestions here would also be great, but these two are the 'killer' changes I think.
1) Not only be able to put in your own signalpost but also being able to manually override the signals just like in the original Railroad Tycoon. Of course train should also be able to crash if you make mistakes...
2) Making complex switch-configurations doenst seem to work very well. Now when you try to switch over double-tracks, the AI starts making a bridge. Odd.
Grtz, skeuri
2) Making complex switch-configurations doenst seem to work very well. Now when you try to switch over double-tracks, the AI starts making a bridge. Odd.
Grtz, skeuri
OK I think there a few simple things that could make this very addictive and fun game even better.
For singleplayer only, and both of these have been stated before:
I have no idea if these ideas are easy to implement or impossible, or if they are even of interest to the devs, though I sincerely hope they are. You guys have built a really cool game and I think this game engine has aa huge potential, the visuals are gorgeous and i love just setting up a few twisty winding routes through the hills and valleys with tracks crossing each other over ravines and whatnot, just watching the train chug away, load and unload cargo, etc
Now how long before I can expect to see an updated version of Sid's SimGolf?
[/list]
For singleplayer only, and both of these have been stated before:
- Larger more "spread-out" map - same number of cities and resources, just further apart
- Slower passage of time with earnings scaled appropriately (trains would still travel the same "real time speed")
(I really like the visual appeal of having the trains scaled larger than is realistic giving it that model railroad feel, however it does get a bit too claustrophobic when you are playing by yourself or against the computer)
For any game: - 3-way switches, this would make station design alot simpler and would mean the train does not have to see past 2 different switches just because I wanted to allow two different options for travel
- Waypoints (or some other way to more clearly specify the route of the train) Right now the routing doesn't seem to take into account any problems with flipping direction at a station, and also does not account for other trains on the route... so on a nice circular track with 3 trains running on it I will get deadlocks just because of the linear distance being shorter on one side.. in reality the whole route would be very smooth and efficient if the trains just kept traveling one direction
(In situations where I've been lucky enough to have 2 or more resources positioned nicely I've been able to setup circular routes that work very very efficiently with each train picking up 2 cars from each resource and moving on.)
Having a station behave in "roll in, roll out" manner means getting alot more throughput for you 3-tracks, unfortunately we don't have enough control of our routes.
I have no idea if these ideas are easy to implement or impossible, or if they are even of interest to the devs, though I sincerely hope they are. You guys have built a really cool game and I think this game engine has aa huge potential, the visuals are gorgeous and i love just setting up a few twisty winding routes through the hills and valleys with tracks crossing each other over ravines and whatnot, just watching the train chug away, load and unload cargo, etc
Now how long before I can expect to see an updated version of Sid's SimGolf?
[/list]The original post summed up many things that made the original RRT so good. As someone else said, this game has the RRT Lite feel about it.
After years of playing shooters and adventure games and space conquests and saving the world from all manner of baddies, I wondered why I still looked back on Railroad Tycoon with such fondness. Surely my memory of playing a train game must have been distorted because it was the first proper pc game I played?
After playing Railroads! for a few days (and suffering innumerable crashes and jerky graphics) I can remember that the original game had excitment and reward and a clarity about the gameplay that I have searched for ever since. Maybe I need to give Railroads! more time but so far it seems like the game is playing itself with very little input from me. The trains seem to take their own route independent of where I want them to go and it is impossible, on the scale the map is drawn, to place the track and the switches accurately. You kind of throw the track at the location and it settles where it wants.
I once tried to install RRT on a machine with a dos emulator and revisit the game. Of course the screen was too huge for the graphics and the trains whizzed past so you couldn't even see them, but I do wish that Railroads had been RRT reimagined - just as it claimed on the box. Bring back gameplay!
p.s. Does anybody know if RRT has been re-engineered for a modern computer and where I could find it? I want to crash the trains not the game.
After years of playing shooters and adventure games and space conquests and saving the world from all manner of baddies, I wondered why I still looked back on Railroad Tycoon with such fondness. Surely my memory of playing a train game must have been distorted because it was the first proper pc game I played?
After playing Railroads! for a few days (and suffering innumerable crashes and jerky graphics) I can remember that the original game had excitment and reward and a clarity about the gameplay that I have searched for ever since. Maybe I need to give Railroads! more time but so far it seems like the game is playing itself with very little input from me. The trains seem to take their own route independent of where I want them to go and it is impossible, on the scale the map is drawn, to place the track and the switches accurately. You kind of throw the track at the location and it settles where it wants.
I once tried to install RRT on a machine with a dos emulator and revisit the game. Of course the screen was too huge for the graphics and the trains whizzed past so you couldn't even see them, but I do wish that Railroads had been RRT reimagined - just as it claimed on the box. Bring back gameplay!
p.s. Does anybody know if RRT has been re-engineered for a modern computer and where I could find it? I want to crash the trains not the game.
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markofjohnson
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 9:14 pm
1) waypoints - markers on the track where trains don't stop but are part of its route. So we can control routes, make loops work.
2) should be able to delete track even if a train is routed on it. the train could just stop at the break line it does when it has a head on?
3) track layout undo
4) bigger maps and ability to zoom out
5) how do I make the spline tool work? Once by accident I was laying out track and it went into a strange spline curve mode where I could change the curve. Never ever managed to go that again in many hours of play!
6) stock buyout - if I buy up my own stock it just seems to be a waste of money - if I get bought out I still end up a looser. the whole stock system seems broken.
2) should be able to delete track even if a train is routed on it. the train could just stop at the break line it does when it has a head on?
3) track layout undo
4) bigger maps and ability to zoom out
5) how do I make the spline tool work? Once by accident I was laying out track and it went into a strange spline curve mode where I could change the curve. Never ever managed to go that again in many hours of play!
6) stock buyout - if I buy up my own stock it just seems to be a waste of money - if I get bought out I still end up a looser. the whole stock system seems broken.
Start laying track by left clicking and releasing ... extend the track how you want then left click hold , move mouse around.5) how do I make the spline tool work? Once by accident I was laying out track and it went into a strange spline curve mode where I could change the curve. Never ever managed to go that again in many hours of play!
You buy up your own stock to make it harder for another person to buy you out. They need to pay 2 times the amount to buy stock from you. There are some strategies to buying and selling of your own stock.6) stock buyout - if I buy up my own stock it just seems to be a waste of money - if I get bought out I still end up a looser. the whole stock system seems broken.
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teraflop122
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sun Nov 05, 2006 12:55 am
There are two things which I simply can't stand in the current game:
- When I click "Keep Playing" I want to keep playing! Either that, or they should change the button to "Keep Playing for another couple decades- then stop playing."
-Alternatively, I'd like to have a Train Table mode that includes the economic system- assuming that the Train Table mode also never ends!
Did I mention I don't like being forced to quit a game?
- When I click "Keep Playing" I want to keep playing! Either that, or they should change the button to "Keep Playing for another couple decades- then stop playing."
-Alternatively, I'd like to have a Train Table mode that includes the economic system- assuming that the Train Table mode also never ends!
Did I mention I don't like being forced to quit a game?
Great list so far, got a couple comments / ideas...
> Re-routable goods (drop at a station, pick up by another train)
This really translates to a 'Warehousing' or 'Stockyard' mechanism. You could purchase a 'Stockyard' which would cost maintenance each month. This stockyard could hold x number of trolleys (maybe you could purchase 3 sizes of stockyards or something). This would also require a mechanism in the routing screen to say 'drop off x number of y-type at stockyard' and 'pick up x number of y-type trolleys at stockyard' (y being the type of good ie coal).
> Buy exclusive cargo rights from base good manufacturers
This is larger issue that might be able to be broken down in a couple components. Do you REALLY want exclusive access or is this a way to resolve when you are the only player supplying an industry with raw materials but your competition is grabbing up all the end product before you can. Or also when you purchase an industry but your competition is grabbing all of its product.
I personally feel that when you own an industry, you should have first dibs on the product. Not sure what the monetary mechanism is whereby you get money if your competition moves your product out of your factory - doubt its more favorable than you moving your own product. Maybe this could be combined with a stockyard option to allow your industries to fill up your stockyard first, then spill over into generally available goods.
The Ascaron games do both of these options VERY WELL. Patrician III (one of the best trading sims ever!) and Port Royale.
> Re-routable goods (drop at a station, pick up by another train)
This really translates to a 'Warehousing' or 'Stockyard' mechanism. You could purchase a 'Stockyard' which would cost maintenance each month. This stockyard could hold x number of trolleys (maybe you could purchase 3 sizes of stockyards or something). This would also require a mechanism in the routing screen to say 'drop off x number of y-type at stockyard' and 'pick up x number of y-type trolleys at stockyard' (y being the type of good ie coal).
> Buy exclusive cargo rights from base good manufacturers
This is larger issue that might be able to be broken down in a couple components. Do you REALLY want exclusive access or is this a way to resolve when you are the only player supplying an industry with raw materials but your competition is grabbing up all the end product before you can. Or also when you purchase an industry but your competition is grabbing all of its product.
I personally feel that when you own an industry, you should have first dibs on the product. Not sure what the monetary mechanism is whereby you get money if your competition moves your product out of your factory - doubt its more favorable than you moving your own product. Maybe this could be combined with a stockyard option to allow your industries to fill up your stockyard first, then spill over into generally available goods.
The Ascaron games do both of these options VERY WELL. Patrician III (one of the best trading sims ever!) and Port Royale.