Alright Boyz, Sid Meier's Railroads First Impressions!!!

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

Better does not necessarily mean complex. Words like "much more nuanced and detailed" (from Anxiety) make me nervous. I want to lay tracks, watch the trains go, and build an empire, not spend all my time staring at a stock market screen. If I'm spending more than a few minutes every hour worrying about stocks, I'm not buying the game. That's my point. If most of the negativity surrounds having a less detailed stock market portion of the game, that isn't necessarily going to scare me off.

So again, is the game fun or not? I don't care how it stacks up to the others, I just want to know if it's any fun.

Civ IV has a lot of variation and things to deal with and pay attention to, but it's still very accessible and easy to play. Nothing you do in that game requires more than a few seconds of work at a time. That's what I want out of a Sid game.

I just played another scenario and it was blisteringly simple. My third win and I've played on harder levels, harder scenarios, harder track, and tons of opponents. It's just too simple and easy. Once you get a strategy down for winning one scenario you can do so for others and most of the scenarios have easy goals or hards goals all as a variation on a theme (deliver X of something to Y, connect X, Y and Z, buyout stock, etc.).

I am almost offended by this game's simplicity. It simply has no playability or replayability for me.

-Anxiety

[Airhog]

Saw this on another forum

The game can be made more difficult and the competitors can also be made tougher if you edit the XML files in your "Install Directory\Assets\XML" folder. Once there, edit "RRT_Difficulty.xml" and "RRT_Characters.xml" to make the game more of a challenge.

In the "RRT_Difficulty.xml" file, there is one difficulty which is not shown while playing the game and that is called "Insane (Testers Only)". Remove line 138, true, and that Insane level will now be selectable in the game. Tweak the modifiers to suit your taste.

In the "RRT_Characters.xml" file, each character is rated on 4 skills: Building, Finances, Operations and Robber (Robber Baron-ing). Most of the characters by default are idiots. The best one is "Sidney Bruce" who is rated all "4" (possibly the highest setting), but he does not appear in any scenario. Edit the others to all 4's or maybe make one of them all "5" to see how tough the competition get.

[bulletsponge]

Originally Posted by Airhog

Saw this on another forum

The game can be made more difficult and the competitors can also be made tougher if you edit the XML files in your "Install Directory\Assets\XML" folder. Once there, edit "RRT_Difficulty.xml" and "RRT_Characters.xml" to make the game more of a challenge.

In the "RRT_Difficulty.xml" file, there is one difficulty which is not shown while playing the game and that is called "Insane (Testers Only)". Remove line 138, true, and that Insane level will now be selectable in the game. Tweak the modifiers to suit your taste.

In the "RRT_Characters.xml" file, each character is rated on 4 skills: Building, Finances, Operations and Robber (Robber Baron-ing). Most of the characters by default are idiots. The best one is "Sidney Bruce" who is rated all "4" (possibly the highest setting), but he does not appear in any scenario. Edit the others to all 4's or maybe make one of them all "5" to see how tough the competition get.

thanks for that info

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by Brillig

After a couple of games, this game is fun, pretty to look at, and dumb with nothing under the surface. It's RRT Blonde!

Thanks for the review. That's the kind of information I was looking for. The routing issues you describe are probably enough to keep me away from it unless a patch comes out that fixes them.

[Brillig]

Originally Posted by Airhog

Saw this on another forum

The game can be made more difficult and the competitors can also be made tougher if you edit the XML files in your "Install Directory\Assets\XML" folder. Once there, edit "RRT_Difficulty.xml" and "RRT_Characters.xml" to make the game more of a challenge.

In the "RRT_Difficulty.xml" file, there is one difficulty which is not shown while playing the game and that is called "Insane (Testers Only)". Remove line 138, true, and that Insane level will now be selectable in the game. Tweak the modifiers to suit your taste.

In the "RRT_Characters.xml" file, each character is rated on 4 skills: Building, Finances, Operations and Robber (Robber Baron-ing). Most of the characters by default are idiots. The best one is "Sidney Bruce" who is rated all "4" (possibly the highest setting), but he does not appear in any scenario. Edit the others to all 4's or maybe make one of them all "5" to see how tough the competition get.

Good info, thanks...

Sidney Bruce is Sid Meier's alter ego, IIRC. So 4 is probably the max, I've just gone through and edited all of the others to 4.

As for the difficulty settings... looking at the XML, Insane is pretty silly. If it's beatable, than the AI truly needs to be scrapped... I'm not a huge fan of difficulty modes that just handicap you vs the AI anyway. Maybe I'm spoiled by GalCiv, but I like difficulty settings that make the AI play smarter.

I might tweak the Insane level to be a little more reasonable though. We'll see...

---

On a separate note, towards the end of the game I've been noticing "track-lag", i.e., significant pauses (several seconds) whenever new track is laid. At a guess, there's an internal representation of the track layout that the computer uses to determine routing, and every new piece of track or connection increases the complexity exponentially...

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by Brillig

This all sounds like a realistic and interesting improvement to the game... except the AI running the trains is mongoloid at best. I've had a situation where two trains were coming into a triple tracked station... and one train took a given track, while the following train decided to use the exact same track. Since the first train was turning around at the station, I ended up with a Mexican standoff. Since there was no way around the situation, I had to delete one of the trains! Be warned, wierd shit may happen if you use the highest routing difficulty. It's possible that this might become more intuitive with experience, but for now it's a colossal pain.

My way to solve that issue is to run track from the city/town to whatever you are going and not having any crossover. As long as you run paralell track, this is not a problem in stations. So, for example, I'll do this:


STATION STATION

Track ============================Track


Normally. If I need to run a branch line from the first station to, say, a resource or another city, I use parallel track like this:

STATION                                             STATION


Track  =============================   Track
Track ========
                       \
                         \
                           \
                             \
                                 STATION

And the two never meet. That way I don't need to worry about crossing trains. You can also use two stations in the same city if you need to.


-Anxiety

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Anxiety

My way to solve that issue is to run track from the city/town to whatever you are going and not having any crossover. As long as you run paralell track, this is not a problem in stations. So, for example, I'll do this:


STATION STATION

Track ============================Track


Normally. If I need to run a branch line from the first station to, say, a resource or another city, I use parallel track like this:

STATION                                             STATION


Track  =============================   Track
Track ========
                       \
                         \
                           \
                             \
                                 STATION

And the two never meet. That way I don't need to worry about crossing trains. You can also use two stations in the same city if you need to.


-Anxiety

This is the way I have been playing it and everything is working out fine. Here is a link to a guy who has done some research into the Hard Routing setting. I have been using medium since I started playing, so I have no experience with the hard mode. I have played about 15 hours of the game and have only ever ran into a deadlocked situation once. This is when I started using the strategy Anxiety talks about.

Also, the gamespot board is the only other board where I have found any discussion on the game.

[Alan T]

I found a nice little bug if you block an AI opponent into a city (where they can't expand their rail either way due to terrain or your track in a bad spot), the game will just crash. I had this happen in two different games with that scenerio.

That will teach me to horde all of the steel.

In other news, I decided to go back to playing some RRT3 to get a fresh feel for it. I fondly remembered playing that game for many many hours and wanted to refresh what I did and didn't like about it. Going back to RRt3 helps me realize just how much better looking and feeling the new Railroads is. The game is much easier to navigate and the controls to do things are far easier to get a good grasp on.

I just really wish there was more than just the same 10 or so resources every time. Its always pretty much the same push for the same resources in every game of railroads that I have played. You just have to figure out where on the map those resources are and develop your plan to expand to there. With RRt3 you had much more flexability to develop your rail strategy around what you had surrounding you. You wern't locked into the same resources as your only key.

After playing railroads, Im not sure that I can go back to RRt3 and ever enjoy it though, its just ugly. I just wish the -good- things RRT3 had with stocks and resources and such were implemented into this game.

Also does anyone know of any new scenerios out for railroads anywhere? I pretty much now am just playing the open ended scenerio with random map and city placement each time these days.

[Abe Sargent]

Railroads certainly is pretty that's true.


-Anxiety

[Brillig]

Well, while you can certainly route that way, it kinda blows the whole point of routing out of the water, neh? If every train runs on it's own separate track, not only is it inefficient as hell, it's uninteresting to build and boring to watch.

Addendum: Went over to the Gamespot forum and found this link

http://www.modalogica.com/default.as...stview&tid=703

which I think is the link that spleen referred to but didn't give. While I was there, I also found a few more interesting things. Such as - it's possible to endlessly buy/sell loop your own stock for infinite cash, and you can make the AI waste it's own cash by starting auctions for worthless industries.

Now I'm not entirely sure of the second, since I've seen the AI *not* bid for industries some times. But the first definitely works. Not a big deal for single player, but it certainly is a MP problem.

Also, crash bugs (I've seen a few also) appear fairly common.

All told, if you haven't got this game yet, stay the hell away from it. At least for two patches (the first is mainly stability issues, so they won't be fixing the broken game stuff until the second at minimum.)

[Fouts]

Somewhat related - Gametap just added Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum to their playlist.

[Brillig]

So, the first patch has been sent to QA, here's the current changes. Looking at the list, it seems that the initial release was, in fact, a festering pile.





Sid Meier's Railroads! Changelog
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|| v 1.010 (59214) || 27-Oct-2006 ||
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* AI - Added a negative value to investor level, to slow AI down if he's running away with a win.
* AI - Better AI train upgrades- only upgrade trains that have hit full load capacity at least once after the first 3 years of service. Also only upgrade when a comparison of max speeds, given the prior loadouts, proves the upgrade is actually faster.
* AI - Edited timing differences in difficulty XML
* AI - Fix for AI failing to initiate industry auctions.
* AI - Fix for AI failing to set a route in first minute of game.
* AI - Fixed AI bug where all its internal values for each good were mixed up, causing passengers to be valued at the price of automobiles, hence passengers were almost exclusively delivered.
* AI - Increased maximum AI auction bidding limits.
* AI - Less idling on Tycoon difficulty.
* AI - Track/train costs constant for all difficulty levels
* AI - Train's consist from a bought out AI will no longer have more than 8 cars on the routing screen.
* AI - Refresh mission status after each train added (ensures early delivery missions get added)
* Art - Correcting naming convention for Class 40 Diesel.
* Art - Fix for missing build-up animations.
* Art - Fixed rotating truck problem on ES1 and Crocodile locomotives.
* Art - fixed sorting transparency issue with Goods Car v1.
* Art - Fixes for the Iron Duke and Consolidation.
* Crash - Deleting both routes to a train will no longer crash the game when the train comes back.
* Crash - Deleting the section of track right before the train will no longer crash the game.
* Crash - Double left-clicking on an "Industry Buy" button no longer causes the game to crash to desktop.
* Crash - Fix crash when trying to hide auction that hasn't been created yet when going into routing screen.
* Crash - Fixed restart crash.
* Crash - If user changes the route to a depot the train is just passing the game will no longer crash.
* Crash - Long track is broken up into smaller tracks to address the "long track crash".
* Crash - Overlapping a track junction no longer causes a crash to desktop upon quitting to main menu or laying a parallel track off a piece of track.
* Crash - stopped a problem with improper links.
* Crash - The game no longer crashes after deleting a certain segment of track from the attached save game.
* Crash - The game will no longer crash if the player blocks AI's train track at the beginning of the game.
* Crash - The liquidate and merge overlay is no longer transferable to other parts of the game.
* Crash - User can no longer crash game by holding down the increase/decrease elevation keys.
* Crash - When bought out, don't try to update the main game interface if the main game interface does not exist.
* Crash - When deleting a track, there is no reason to reroute a train that is using that track if the train has already passed that track and will not cross it in the future.
* Crash - When Host or Client is bought out when on the "Train Upgrade" screen they'll no longer crash.
* Design - Mail price tweak.
* Functionality - Fix for rerouting issue. If you change your route by adding a new stop while you're loading at the first stop and the way to the second stop is blocked by another train, your train will no longer stop loading at the first stop and start moving towards the second stop (where it wouldn't unload it's cars.)
* Functionality - Fix for why sometimes both parallel tracks aren't added to a depot when dropped down.
* Functionality - Fixed tutorial progression stoppers.
* Functionality - If the user retires with an auction onscreen and chooses to 'keep playing' the current auction and all future auctions will now retain their functionality.
* Functionality - Making parallel tracks within looped track will choose the shortest path along the loop to build the track.
* Functionality - Opening the Trains screen (F4), clicking the Money sort button, and then deleting a train will no longer cause the sorting order to become randomized again.
* Functionality - Remove victory conditions that involve competitor stock when playing with no AI.
* Functionality - Stock buy/sell exploit fix.
* Functionality - The player who owns the industry now gets the bonus money, rather than the person who delivered the goods.
* Functionality - User is no longer able to place depot in the water in london on the GB scenario, leaving it inaccessible.
* Functionality - When player buys out another player, and they inherit the stock of the remaining player, the remaining player will now be shown as "bought out" if the player now owns all shares of that player.
* Graphics - cleared city and industry temporary track grid every time it moves.
* Graphics - Half the alert screen no longer disappears until space is pressed.
* Graphics - improved UpdateLeaders performance.
* Graphics - Minimizing then maximizing the game no longer causes the Minimap and Train Graph, on Roundhouse screen, to become corrupted
* Graphics - Updated Nvidia settings
* Graphics - While dragging a track and you loose focus of the railroads window in fullscreen and when you come back the ground texture will no longer go black.
* Interface - Added option to not show the era intro screen.
* Interface - Clicking on mission objectives takes you to the locatoin instead of re-opening the newspaper.
* Interface - Closing load dialog resets focus to load button.
* Interface - Closing options dialog resets focus to options button.
* Interface - Customize train screen now remembers apply all states. Setting apply all buttons, sets color and/or decal as default for new trains.
* Interface - "Event Log" box no longer comes forward when Player tries to "close" out the "Finance" screen.
* Interface - First auction bid is now the proposed value rather than being $10k+ than the proposed value.
* Interface - Game Alert Log can now be properly closed if a newspaper alert appears above it.
* Interface - In the button config option, the "Print Screen" key no longer appears as the "System Request" key.
* Interface - Interface can no longer get stuck on the screen if user presses escape and then an F-key.
* Interface - Newspapers are no longer modal.
* Interface - Now show trade-in value when you're upgrading a train.
* Interface - Optimization to keep the frame rate from dropping dramatically when objects are mouse-over or selected.
* Interface - Preventing the new train and the newspaper screen from appearing at the same time
* Interface - Removed the "show all player's floating text" option.
* Interface - The world now drops the initial depot before the era popup is closed.
* Interface - Selecting a city and having a "New Train Alert" pop up will no longer cause the selected city's resource icons on the mini-map to disappear.
* Interface - The in-game Pause prompt now updates after assigning a new letter to the Pause action.
* Interface - Update player name for game when changed on options screen from main menu.
* Interface - User can no longer assign arrow buttons as hotkeys.
* Interface - User can no longer enter over 20 characters of text for the Buyout Taunt Headline or Subhead in the Options menu.
* Interface - When rotating view, letting go of the center mouse button while over a large city icon now releases the "rotating camera".
* Interface - Zoom in and out keymap keys added.
* Multiplayer - Code fixes to address MP AI OOS.
* Multiplayer - Don't allow the game to access the internet if we're not playing an internet game.
* Multiplayer - Enabled AI players in MP.
* Multiplayer - Network and sync timing now floats - attempting to resolve the time error accumulation in slower machines.
* Multiplayer - Stuttery train fix: turn off vblanksynch in MP.
* Performance - Fixed small AI memory leak when a route is valid but the AI can't afford it.
* Performance - Improved city and industry placement performance.
* Performance - Improved mow field performance.
* Performance - Improved track overlap finding performance.
* Performance - Improving city and stockpile track cutting, which improves track dragging by ~25%.
* Performance - Increased performance of reflection and shadow generation.
* Performance - Roundhouse and feature screen no longer load animations (only affects non-precached option).
* Performance - Simplified track validation to improve performance.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|| v 1.000 (58110) || 29-Sep-2006 ||
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Initial Retail Release.

[wishbone]

It looks like their is a demo coming soon, file shack has it but you have to be a paid subscriber to get it. That should change pretty soon.

[spleen1015]

I hope that patch gets here quickly. Not getting the bonus money when owning an industry stopped me from playing.

[KWhit]

If anyone is tired/bored with this game, I'll trade you something for it. It doesn't sound up my alley as far as gameplay goes, but my 2 year old son is NUTS about trains and he has had a blast looking the movies on the website. I figured I'd get it and set it up for him to see all the neat trains, but I don't really want to spend full price on it.

[Undertoad]

Just wanted to ping the thread to say, the patch is out, and it improves the reliability and seems to address most of the problems.

I enjoy this game as something that is a little less requiring of my full attention. Sometimes it may feel like a tennis player playing ping pong, but I do like getting all the routes right and watching the towns grow into cities. It's more like model railroading than actual railroading, but model railroading has been a hobby for many people for years and years.

This is more imagination-based than strategy-based; just like The Sims, it calls for a certain amount of strategy, but the reward is not in developing the perfect strategy but in developing something interesting at the end of the play session.

Let's see, the only place I can get coal for my steel mill is halfway across the map... but if I get that line running well it will fuel my economy for the next 50 years... but the city already has three incoming routes and a big slow freight train will slow down this passenger route...

[cartman]

2K Games has released the original Railroad Tycoon as freeware. It is downloadable from their site:

hxxp://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html

[Mr. Wednesday]

So I tried out the demo, and was vexed by the occasional silliness of the routing. Being able to run double and triple parallel track is cool, but it doesn't really work right.