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![]() ![]() To a veteran Tycoon player, this may seem like automation that plays the core game for you, like Master of Orion 3 or Dungeon Seige. You can specify exactly what the train will ship, as you could in earlier games, but normally you'll just specify something like "at least 1 car and no more than 4" and the train will automatically pick up whatever is most profitably at this moment. This means deciding what to ship is far, far more complicated than before, and to that end Railroad Tycoon 3 introduces automation. If there isn't a steady demand at the destination and a steady supply at the source, the value of shipping from point A to point B can evaporate. As you ship goods to a station, they go down. As you remove goods from a station, the prices go up. ![]() You can also trans-ship goods, leaving them off at a station to be picked up by another train that will bring it the rest of the way. This has all sorts of interesting effects, since it's now possible to ship stuff halfway to a destination and still make money. The value of shipping cattle is the difference in prices between stations. If there's a meat-packing plant at point B, the price of cattle will go up the closer you get to point B. If there's a lot of cattle at station A, the price of cattle will be low. There's still an incentive to connect large cities at long distances, because you do get nice passenger revenue that way, but it's not the only thing you do.įreight cargoes, on the other hand, use a supply and demand system, which is also new. You can't just ship them willy-nilly to Timbuktu and make serious cash. Passengers and mail have specific destinations in mind now. It's a major overhaul of the graphics, to a real 3D engine, but it's also a major change of the economic system. Railroad Tycoon 2 suffered from this as well. The elaborate system of cargo conversion, where iron became steel became finished goods vanished as unimportant beside building a long, unbranching passenger railway. Passenger revenue was just too much of a killer source of income, because you could pick up passengers from anywhere in your rail network, and ship them as far away as possible as fast as possible and maximize your income. In some ways, this was a bad thing, because Railroad Tycoon had some serious flaws. It didn't tinker much with the core game design, it just updated the graphics to a pseudo-3D engine and provided more sophisticated track-laying tools. However, Railroad Tycoon 2 was a credible updating of the original game. Just look at what happened to Master of Orion 3. Normally I sneer when a name is highjacked by an unrelated developer, and for good reason. Sid meiers railroads make industry profitable series#Not so long ago, Phil Steinmeyer decided to cash in on, er, revive the series with Railroad Tycoon 2. Railroad Tycoon and Civilization are what made Sid Meier a household name in gaming, and Civilization came about because Sid was messing around with the Railroad Tycoon engine. OK, that last one doesn't exist, but few games have defined a genre quite as well as this. There's a reason why many later developers chose to ape that name with Rollercoaster Tycoon, Transport Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, Pizza Tycoon, and Brothel Tycoon. For its time, it was a great and groundbreaking game, and not just because it featured the designer's name in the title. A long time ago, in game store far away, I bought Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon. ![]()
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