25 ms·

Railroad Tycoon II

293 points by doppp 2y ago

legitster 2y ago
> 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.
- infecto 2y ago
  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.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I've played a railroad game that felt reminiscent of RRT, but after a while it just felt tedious, more like a slow incremental game than a decent train game.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    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.
    - legitster 2y ago
      > 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.
      - iggldiggl 2y ago
        > 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)…
      - mywittyname 2y 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.
        sevensor 2y ago
        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.
- kuon 2y ago
  It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.
  - legitster 2y ago
    I like Manor Lords. Yeah, I'm a big fan of all of the survivalist city-builders that have come out since Banished (Planetbase, Frostpunk, Timberborn). They don't remind me anything of RRT, lol. But I definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.
    - zem 2y ago
      'against the storm' is an interesting twist on the genre, if you haven't checked that one out yet
    - kuon 2y ago
      > definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer. That is what I meant by "it remind me of RRT". I feel "at home" when playing them.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart OpenTTD, Simutrans?
  - ta1243 2y ago
    RRT2 leaned heavily into the financial aspects, it was quite different to the original railroad tycoon. Personally I preferred railroad tycoon 1 to transport tycoon, but either way railroad tycoon 2 was different. I miss A-Train.
  - legitster 2y ago
    RRT2 focused much more on business and economics and less on routing puzzles and micromanagement. OpenTTD is good but very... sterile.
- throaway2501 2y ago
  it’s super easy though. i had a hard time getting into rrt games.
- kimiahk 2y ago
  Anno 1602 was my favorite game when I was young, I wonder what game type do you usually play? Official single player missons? Community custom missions or multiplayer?
  - legitster 2y ago
    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.
- zem 2y ago
  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.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    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 !
    - zem 2y ago
      thanks, that does look excellent!
- jcranmer 2y ago
  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.
  - legitster 2y ago
    There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.
- primax 2y ago
  I'd suggest trying Railway Empire and it's sequel. It's the closest successor I've found.
- ta_1138 2y 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.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > 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.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com. Sadly, for Windows only :(
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  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 https://www.protondb.com/app/7620
  - leg 2y ago
    I've played 100s of hours of if under Proton on Linux. Works great.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly. (Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      What would it be ? IPX ? Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?
      - jcranmer 2y ago
        I don't have the game or the manual in front of me, but my recollection is that there are actually four separate networking options, of which TCP/IP and IPX were two.
- Asooka 2y ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/linux-games-cd
squeedles 2y ago
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: https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/ https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/
ylee 2y ago
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.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  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.
  - b112 2y ago
    I hate you. Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.
      - mnky9800n 2y ago
        For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.
Neil44 2y ago
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/ https://www.openttd.org/
cprayingmantis 2y ago
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.
esafak 2y ago
Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.
- giarc 2y ago
  Ticket to Ride. Has a kids version that I play with my kids from time to time. There's also a very popular adult version plus lots of add-ons I believe.
- yread 2y ago
  There is also 1830 and few others https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/best-train-board-games https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/bes...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- v-erne 2y ago
  And for something between Ticket to ride and 18XX games you can try Age of steam - this is a lot better for when you really feel the need to build some railroads and just move stuff and not to have to learn how stock exchange works.
- jader201 2y ago
  In order of complexity: - Thicket to Ride series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-ride-official https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-... - Crayon Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail-system https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail... - Cube Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18979/series-cube-rails 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-steam https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/86/game-age-of-ste... - 18xx: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/19/series-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.
yxhuvud 2y ago
So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.
- avereveard 2y ago
  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
  - jdhawk 2y ago
    Also runs well under Wine!
- sandworm101 2y ago
  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. https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8 https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8
zeristor 2y ago
Was it Railroad Tycoon II which played Robert Johnson music in the background. Playing the game I developed an appreciation of it. At least I think it was this game that I can't forget...
mrighele 2y ago
> 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.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  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
  - wat10000 2y ago
    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.
- 2y ago
acjohnson55 2y ago
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.
- iggldiggl 2y ago
  > 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.
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    One day, I might have to go through the trouble to do this!
_joel 2y ago
Must have spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon back in the day.
wodenokoto 2y ago
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?
- int_19h 2y ago
  Warlords - especially the second installment - is generally considered one of the 4X classics of the 90s. The Age of Wonders series was heavily inspired by Warlords (and Master of Magic), and is still around.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Is there anything exactly like Warlords? I'd love a similar game, just more modernized.
flohofwoe 2y ago
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_Platinum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...).
Lammy 2y ago
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 https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE Here's a longplay where you can see it: https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc
suresk 2y ago
So many fond memories of this game - it was a really fun blend of railroad sim and economic sim that I haven't really found since. I'll never forget the "ding ding ding" sound that goes off when a train pulls into a station and earns you a bit of cash!
tdrz 2y ago
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!?
ge96 2y ago
So cool to have that small beginning (photo of him at the booth) to hitting success
tolerance 2y ago
Forget the game for a second. This man’s writing is so lucid that it made me think for a second that he was telling the tale of actual railroads.
mdtrooper 2y ago
Not it is the free software or open source version of this game, but OpenLoco https://openloco.io/ 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/ https://www.openttd.org/ .
nprateem 2y ago
It just kind of sucks I wasn't born 80 years earlier. I ran a simulation once. With my business brain and only a $20k loan in 1920 I'd have been a multi-millionaire within 10 years.
tntpreneur 2y ago
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.
louwhopley 2y ago
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?

293 points by doppp 2y ago

> 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.

infecto 2y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I've played a railroad game that felt reminiscent of RRT, but after a while it just felt tedious, more like a slow incremental game than a decent train game.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  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.
  - legitster 2y ago
    > 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.
    - iggldiggl 2y ago
      > 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)…
    - mywittyname 2y 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.
      - sevensor 2y ago
        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.
kuon 2y ago
It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.
- legitster 2y ago
  I like Manor Lords. Yeah, I'm a big fan of all of the survivalist city-builders that have come out since Banished (Planetbase, Frostpunk, Timberborn). They don't remind me anything of RRT, lol. But I definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.
  - zem 2y ago
    'against the storm' is an interesting twist on the genre, if you haven't checked that one out yet
  - kuon 2y ago
    > definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer. That is what I meant by "it remind me of RRT". I feel "at home" when playing them.
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
> and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart OpenTTD, Simutrans?
- ta1243 2y ago
  RRT2 leaned heavily into the financial aspects, it was quite different to the original railroad tycoon. Personally I preferred railroad tycoon 1 to transport tycoon, but either way railroad tycoon 2 was different. I miss A-Train.
- legitster 2y ago
  RRT2 focused much more on business and economics and less on routing puzzles and micromanagement. OpenTTD is good but very... sterile.
throaway2501 2y ago
it’s super easy though. i had a hard time getting into rrt games.
kimiahk 2y ago
Anno 1602 was my favorite game when I was young, I wonder what game type do you usually play? Official single player missons? Community custom missions or multiplayer?
- legitster 2y ago
  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.
zem 2y ago
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.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  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 !
  - zem 2y ago
    thanks, that does look excellent!
jcranmer 2y ago
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.
- legitster 2y ago
  There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.
primax 2y ago
I'd suggest trying Railway Empire and it's sequel. It's the closest successor I've found.
ta_1138 2y 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.
KronisLV 2y ago
> 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.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com. Sadly, for Windows only :(

red_trumpet 2y ago
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 https://www.protondb.com/app/7620
- leg 2y ago
  I've played 100s of hours of if under Proton on Linux. Works great.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly. (Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    What would it be ? IPX ? Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      I don't have the game or the manual in front of me, but my recollection is that there are actually four separate networking options, of which TCP/IP and IPX were two.
Asooka 2y ago
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 https://archive.org/details/linux-games-cd

squeedles 2y ago

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: https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/ https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/

ylee 2y ago

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.

linsomniac 2y ago
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.
- b112 2y ago
  I hate you. Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.
    - mnky9800n 2y ago
      For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.

Neil44 2y ago

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/ https://www.openttd.org/

cprayingmantis 2y ago

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.

esafak 2y ago

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

giarc 2y ago
Ticket to Ride. Has a kids version that I play with my kids from time to time. There's also a very popular adult version plus lots of add-ons I believe.
yread 2y ago
There is also 1830 and few others https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/best-train-board-games https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/bes...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
v-erne 2y ago
And for something between Ticket to ride and 18XX games you can try Age of steam - this is a lot better for when you really feel the need to build some railroads and just move stuff and not to have to learn how stock exchange works.
jader201 2y ago
In order of complexity: - Thicket to Ride series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-ride-official https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-... - Crayon Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail-system https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail... - Cube Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18979/series-cube-rails 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-steam https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/86/game-age-of-ste... - 18xx: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/19/series-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.

yxhuvud 2y ago

So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.

avereveard 2y ago
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
- jdhawk 2y ago
  Also runs well under Wine!
sandworm101 2y ago
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. https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8 https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8

zeristor 2y ago

Was it Railroad Tycoon II which played Robert Johnson music in the background. Playing the game I developed an appreciation of it. At least I think it was this game that I can't forget...

mrighele 2y ago

> 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.

jncfhnb 2y ago
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
- wat10000 2y ago
  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.
2y ago

acjohnson55 2y ago

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.

iggldiggl 2y ago
> 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.
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  One day, I might have to go through the trouble to do this!

_joel 2y ago

Must have spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon back in the day.

wodenokoto 2y ago

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?

int_19h 2y ago
Warlords - especially the second installment - is generally considered one of the 4X classics of the 90s. The Age of Wonders series was heavily inspired by Warlords (and Master of Magic), and is still around.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Is there anything exactly like Warlords? I'd love a similar game, just more modernized.

flohofwoe 2y ago

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_Platinum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...).

Lammy 2y ago

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 https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE Here's a longplay where you can see it: https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc

suresk 2y ago

So many fond memories of this game - it was a really fun blend of railroad sim and economic sim that I haven't really found since. I'll never forget the "ding ding ding" sound that goes off when a train pulls into a station and earns you a bit of cash!

tdrz 2y ago

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!?

ge96 2y ago

So cool to have that small beginning (photo of him at the booth) to hitting success

tolerance 2y ago

Forget the game for a second. This man’s writing is so lucid that it made me think for a second that he was telling the tale of actual railroads.

mdtrooper 2y ago

Not it is the free software or open source version of this game, but OpenLoco https://openloco.io/ 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/ https://www.openttd.org/ .

nprateem 2y ago

It just kind of sucks I wasn't born 80 years earlier. I ran a simulation once. With my business brain and only a $20k loan in 1920 I'd have been a multi-millionaire within 10 years.

tntpreneur 2y ago

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.

louwhopley 2y ago

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?