Product Details
 | Sid Meier's Railroads! |
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Product Description
Sid Meier's Railroads brings back the Golden Age of railroading! Combining the best of real-world and model railroads, you'll be in charge of building your own railroad empire, running everything from steam-powered locomotives to more modern diesel and electric trains. Manage your cargo and your bottom line, all while engaging in corporate warfare against rival tycoons, slick entrepreneurs and robber barons. Cities and industries will grow up around you, while you lay track and route trains, haul raw materials to market and carry manufactured goods throughout the land. Challenge historical giants like Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, and others in single-player scenarios Ruthless real-time multiplayer LAN and Internet play -- buy out your rivals or cash in favors to sabotage their shipments!Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2392 in Video Games
- Brand: 2K Games
- Released on: 2006-10-16
- ESRB Rating: Everyone
- Platform: Windows XP
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.00" h x 5.50" w x 7.00" l, 1.05 pounds
Features
- Sid Meier-designed railroad tycoon game
- You're in charge of building your own railroad empire
- A variety of play modes including the "sand-box" modeling mode, real-time LAN and Internet play
- Railroads! delivers a strategy experience that will cater to both RTS gamers and locomotive fans alike
- Engage in corporate warfare against rival tycoons, slick entrepreneurs and robber barons
Customer Reviews
We Expect Better From Sid
I've spent some good time
with the game now and, despite the fact that I'm about as big a fan of
Sid Meier's work as you're likely to find, have to admit disappointment
with this game. When it comes right down to it, the game seems more like
Sid's golf game than the original RRT. It's shallow, fast and just not
nearly as fun as you'd hope.
Of course it's not all bad. The
graphics are beautiful, the music is great and you actually get a real
manual. The game looks nice and plays nice, even on a system which is
not a true gaming rig. The animations are great as well and I love how
each of the train cars at a depot have to be filled individually with
coal or grain or whatever the case may be. The patent auctions are well
done as well.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the
game:
First, the game moves too quickly. For example, if you play
the Eastern USA scenario, you may start in Baltimore. You can
immediately join with Washington, plunk a depot in Washington, and get a
little Grasshopper to run a single mail car and a single passenger car
back and forth. By the time the train has made its first run from
Baltimore to Washington, you'll have enough money to connect to your
second city (Baltimore to Frederick). So you do that, and get your
second train. Give it four or five minutes and you'll be able to either
double the line between BAL and WAS or create a third line to a nearby
resource. Within fifteen minutes you will have connected to every city
and needed resource in the vicinity. By then your opponents (assuming
you are playing against two) will have pretty well done the same so that
every good-sized town has at least one connection. The opponent
railroads are a complete mess, with weird overpasses and tunnels all
over the place. Much like the previous iterations of RRT, the AI seems
to deal with brute force rather than sophistication.
Second, the
maps are too small. RRT and RRT2 had a real epic feel. RRT2 was
especially good with this, allowing you to make huge railroads
stretching across an entire continent. The maps in SMR are tiny in
comparison and few in number. This could be my single biggest point of
disappointment. It contributes, of course, to the first problem, since
you now have three railroads stuck in just a small corner of a country.
Third,
the financial game is shallow compared to previous RRTs. The same is
true of the economies. There doesn't seem to be much sophistication in
this. Also, it is very easy to make great deals of money and, because
the game moves so quickly, if you take a few minutes to look around the
map, you'll probably find that suddenly you've got a couple million
dollars in your account. This may be less the case in the more difficult
European scenarios, but certainly I haven't had any trouble making
money in the US of A. The stock market offers buy and selling. There is
no splitting, no short selling or anything else. There are ten shares
per company and that's it. I may just be missing something, but it also
seems difficult to know how much different resources are worth, which
ones are the most valuable, and so on.
Fourth, there seem to be
some problems with routing. It's not unusual to see trains getting all
plugged up near stations, even stations with three tracks running
through them. The crossovers kind of work, but not as well as you might
hope. When a station gets enough traffic running through it (and that
may be only 5 or 6 trains) it can really begin to bog down so trains sit
endlessly without being able to unload. There have also been times when
the little "end of line" roadblocks have refused to go away, even in
the middle of a station. That means no trains can run past the roadblock
out the other side of the station. To this point I haven't found an
easy way of resolving this. I think it will prove difficult to have
stations with a large number of trains accessing them.
Fifth,
laying track is so automatic it's almost disappointing. Unlike previous
games, there do not seem to be a lot of premiums in placing bridges or
tunnels. A track running from Phoenix to Flagstaff, which requires at
least one major bridge and a couple of long tunnel sections, will only
set you back about $500,000. That wouldn't get you very far in previous
RRT games, and I think it's better that way. It used to be more
important to find just the right route (anyone else remember running
trains through the mountains to California in RRT2?), but now it hardly
matters anymore. Terrain gets smoothed, tunnels get dug and bridges get
built just like that. You can just smack a track wherever you want one
and the game takes care of the rest.
Sixth, there is no campaign.
This is hugely disappointing as the campaign in RRT2 was one of the
best parts of the game (with the exception of those stupid puzzle ones
where all you had to do is route trains). The individual scenarios have a
list of objectives, but if you are not looking for them, you won't find
them and won't heed them. I don't think you ever get reminded of the
objectives and they don't seem to have any real bearing on the game.
They are just there. Once you finish a scenario there is no connection
to the next one--you just start over. All-in-all, this is pretty
disappointing.
So overall, I think it has the makings of a great
game...they just didn't finish it. The game itself is so good in the way
it looks and the way it plays. It pains me that they kept it so
shallow.
PS - One more thing. I forgot to mention the strange
fact that the economies are not modified depending on the era. So be
prepared to funnel steel to an automobile manufacturer in 1830...and one
that is based in a city filled with 20th century skyscrapers.
Build the Greatest Railroad in the Tri-County
Area!!!!! Or, "They're writing copy for some other Railroad game."
I don't know what
marketing person wrote the description on the box, but their pants are
on fire.
The greatest railroad building game of all time is back
in a vibrant 3D world
- well, it is in vibrant 3D. Huzzah. If the
greatest railroad building game of all time is "back", it's returned
battered, bruised, and totally unrecognizable. It's like the bloody,
huddled figure of a long-lost friend collasped on your doorstep. You
want to cradle it in your arms and scream "Why? Oh, why?" over and over
again while shaking your fist at the sky.
delivering exciting
multiplayer options,
- exciting = existing; options = option.
in-game
customization tools,
- Ha! "Should my locomotive be purple? How
about green? So pretty!" That is the extent of these "in-game
customization tools". Even your starting city is picked for you!
streamlined
interface,
- Streamlined = Lacking in Content. The so-called
interface offers an intriguing variety of useless menus and pointless
reports. But they're in vibrant 3-D!
and unmatched gameplay,
-
Unmatched by what? Pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity. "Sid Meier
presents: Sisyphus! In vibrant 3-D! With multiplayer- push a boulder up
hill for eternity with a friend! And customizable! Well not really; we
pick the hill for you- but if you want to push a more colorful boulder,
we can do that!" Actually, Sisyphus did it for eternity, and I played
Railroads! for about three hours.
that's easy to learn yet
challenging to master.
- Easy to learn... oh my yes. Challenging
to master... if you leave your monitor turned off, or if your keyboard
is in another room. After my first attempt, I cranked the difficulty all
the way up. And then I turned off my monitor and pretended I was
playing RT2, or solitaire.
Combining the best of real-world and
model railroads,
- That doesn't even make sense. It is a computer
game, not tabletop trains, not Amtrak. It is not like tabletop in that
you are expected to earn money. It is not like Amtrak in that you are
expected to earn money. It is not like tabletop in that you have no way
of "driving" the train. It is not like Amtrak in that your network may
span two states. This is not a "I'm an engineer!" sim, and it's not a
business game.
However, it is like tabletop in that the cities
are about four inches apart, and that your train is typically in three
stations at once, but I do not know that's the "best" part of model
railroads. (It's like Amtrak in that it is highly overpriced.)
Sid
Meier's Railroads! puts you in charge of building the greatest rail
empire in the nation
- HA! HA! HA! You can run an astonishing
Pittsburgh-to-Chicago route; Washington DC-to-New York City is an
exciting, seven minute option. The maps are so small that, perhaps,
"greatest rail empire in the state" would be possible. This game would
be tolerable if you could at least go from NYC to Chicago, or manage a
transcontinental line. Nope. The European maps are even worse.
while
engaging in all-out corporate warfare against rival tycoons, slick
entrepreneuers, and robber barons!
- all-out corporate warfare =
all-out corporate lie. There are no bonds, no options, no short selling,
no stock issuance, no nothing. There is "stock", and there are ten
shares of it. No more, no less. They might as well have done away with
that aspect entirely, but then we couldn't claim to have all-out
corporate warfare. You can't even use another company's tracks or
stations. So all-out corporate warfare is a bald-faced lie.
So
disappointing!
Did anyone at Firaxis
play RRT3? RRT4 this is not!
SID!!! SID!!!! Did you ever
play RRT2 or RRT3 or Locomotion?????
In the media excitement
leading up to the release of Railroads!, preview authors often commented
on the possibilities stemming from Sid Meier and his reconnection with
his old game, Railroad Tycoon. I, too, was ecited. I had spent many
hours playing the original, Railroad Tycoon 2, Railroad Tycoon 3, and
Locomotion. Locomotion wasn't the game I was expecting, and Poptop
stopped developing the Railroad Tycoon genre after releasing the
Coast-to-Coast expansion for RRT3. However, after playing Railroads for a
few solid hours, I'm must say that Sid has disappointed me.
Poptop
released Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3. After they released RRT2, they made
some awesome changes to RRT3. The economy was dynamic in that goods
would move even without a railroad, if the demand was high enough for a
good. That same dynamic isn't in Railroads; you get paid for moving
goods (supply and demand does play a role, but only on a global scale).
Poptop created a tool by which you could see the amount of the goods on
the map and the price difference between different points. Again,
nothing like it in Railroads. Poptop allowed players to upgrade all
engines of one type into another type with two mouse clicks. Sid has no
such tool, so the player must upgrade each engine one at a time. RRT3
(and RRT2) had an interface that meshed with the game (For example,
setting routes was handled in one window and it was easy to stay on top
of things); Railroads seems clunky and a throwback to the original.
Finally,
my biggest complaint is the rail system. In the original game, there
were signals that allowed trains to move; the system was simple, and if
you double tracked, trains did pretty well. The genre expanded with
Transport Tycoon. In TT, there were some serious signal and track work
(for examples of what I'm talking about, google Transport Tycoon). RRT2
and RRT3 simplified this and put in place a hierarchy; trains that stood
higher in the hierarchy would pass over trains that didn't. Signals
weren't used. It wasn't as sophisticated as TT (or Locomotion, TT's
successor), but it made gameplay simple, and maps could accommodate
massive amounts of trains without the tediousness of trackwork late in
the game. With Railroads, the signals are back however, in TT, you could
make smart signaling decisions (one way signals, non-reversing trains,
and loops). In Railroads, the signals just indicate whether a train can
proceed or not (and you can't place them, like you could in the
original! They just appear at intersections and at stations). Even then,
if a train has stopped at a signal long enough, it will just decide to
move forward. The design of the rail network attempts to replicate the
original Railroad Tycoon, but the genre has moved on. If a game is going
to use signals, then give the player some control over them! If the
game isn't going to use signals, use waypoints! Both RRT3 and Transport
Tycoon advanced the genre using these tools; Railroads lacks both.
There
is more to this list, and I'll add to it as I think of them, but
Firaxis and Sid Meier have really disappointed me with this game. It
seems that they brushed up the original with new (I admit they are very
cool) graphics and sound, but the gameplay hasn't really kept up with
the time (Did anyone at Firaxis actually play RRT3 or Locomotion?). If
you're thinking about buying the game, I advise you to first download
and try the demo.
Railroad Tycoon 4 this is not!
Andrew
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