Do games feel short to you?

[HighFive]

I agree there should be an Epic mode like in Civ 4. At the moment I have been short of time so I have only played short games but I will want to spend an entire weekend playing some time and it would be much better to have a proper long game for that. But wouldn't adding in an Epic mode be a lot of work for the programmer team?

[Wyke]

I have to agree whole heartedly here, the games do tend to go much too fast. This has an additional problem for me too. Being something of an old boiler myself it's the early days that more interest me then the modern day supertrains.
Due to suffering from the freezing/crashing bug I've not played the game enough to see any slowdown, but it does feel like the game is trying to speed past the interesting period, for me at least.

[stratfordwill]

I posted a quick mod idea for longer games in the mod forum. Basically, you just increase the train speed and play on super slow mode.

http://www.hookedgamers.com/forums/view ... =8334#8334

[Brad]

well there should be a way to zoom in and zoom out. Zoomed out you would not be looking at pretty 3D graphics but at overall picture. And the game isn't renderin all 20000 square miles of 3D only the small section you are looking at. The engine needs to be more flexible

[ledhed]

Please tell me I can play past the year 1970....before I throw tthe game disc to my dog....

[Falconer]

That's absolutely true, for MP the current length is great.

[Brad]

Why bother? There isn't much in the way of variety of locomotives to play with past 1950..............

[Jyrchi]

In singleplayer those games could be a bit longer, but in multiplayer, I dont think so. It kinda depends. I wouldnt want to play whole evening with my buddies, so this few hour game is good for me. Sometimes I lose my nerves when my rails fail miserably, so I think in multiplayer that few hours is just right. In singleplayer you can save and continue when ever you want, so it feels kinda short. Its also good that those years dont come to presens or future. In nowadays there is not so many much railroadbarons left and future would be too unaccurate.

[CaptainPatch]

A game takes a couple of hours to complete and I really feel like I'm missing out on so many opportunities. Don't get me wrong, I have lots of fun playing for those few hours, but wouldn't it be great if you could play for days on the same map, expanding, creating new businesses, battling it out with your competitors?

I would _love_ to play that kind of game with that much depth and duration. However, I doubt that we will ever be able to go back to that scale of game.

The longer a game runs, the more area it covers, the more competitors allowed onto the field, the faster the graphics load increases. As time passes, the more track gets laid down while the number of trains running on those tracks increases dramatically. And the AI has to track each and every one of those trains. The amount of memory the AI has to dedicate to playing traffic cop at busy intersections becomes staggerring. Just playing by myself against the AI (instead of other players, which is imagine is considerably more complex), I can only go for about an hour before the PC starts to hiccup and stall. Even with today's multi-Gb CPU's and 1 GB+ of RAM and video RAM, it takes a lot of memory to cope with that kind of geometric growth.

As for multiplayer considerations, I've always wanted to have a playing field that encompassed all of North America and allow scores of players. (One of the things that appeals to me about this historical period is just how many railroad startups there were during the period.) But how many players would be willing to jump into a game that requires double-digit hours to arrive at the final conclusion? I guess the designers realized that you couldn't expect _anyone_ willing to stick around that long, and that you would be lucky to get 4 willing to invest the 2-3 hours max that the current game would require.

[Before RRT, I used to play a Play-By-Mail game entitled "Continental Rails": 15 players starting on the East Coast in 1841. An average game lasted over 20 turns and each represented 2 years, and the networks eventually covered the entire USA. I had wished that later versions of RRT would eventually become a detailed version of CR, allowing for more competitors and span the entire continent and cover from 1830 to the near future. But with I know of how computers function, I realize that such a game is not likely to appear in my lifetime.]