Sid Meier's Railroads!

I love railroad games. Fortunately Sid Meier's Railroads! is one of the better ones, dragging the original Railroad Tycoon into the modern age, better than the numbered sequels did.

Sid Meier's Railroads! (SMR) is a pretty game. Unfortunately that means it also has rather stringent hardware requirements, like a x800 Radeon or GeForce 6800 or better graphics card. As one reader already reported, this won't run on most laptops, nor on older PCs. But on my "last year's" PC it ran very smoothly and looked great.

SMR is both a very modern, and a very old-fashioned game. The modern aspect is the gameplay, which has been made very, very accessible, easy, and user-friendly. Everybody can play this, you don't need a masters degree in economics, nor do you need to study the game manual for hours how it works. The old-fashioned aspect is that while SMR has a multiplayer part playable over the internet, it is otherwise not very networked. There is not automated update, and the number of scenarios and maps is fixed, with no editor, and no way to download additional maps from a player community. Well, there are 15 scenarios, and the location of the resources changes every time you play, so there is decent replayability. But an editor would have been nice.

You are the president of a railway, starting with a terminal and a short line of track, plus a pile of cash. You make money by adding more track, all of which has to be connected to your original line, building more stations, and running trains between the stations. Laying tracks couldn't possibly be easier, you just first click to some point of your existing track, then to whereever you want to build the track to. The computer automatically calculates the best path, including grading, bridges and tunnels. If you don't agree with the computers choice, you can optimize by not building the whole track at once, but first building just the bit pointing in the direction you want, and then continueing from there.

The only fiddly part is double-tracking, adding tracks in parallel to existing tracks so that trains can pass each other. The double-track button lays the track, but does NOT connect it to the other track. You have to manually add the cross-over points. For example if you want to double track a station (recommended in most cases), you click on double-track, lay a bit of double track just where the platform is, then click on the normal track button and connect one end of the double track to the next signal point of the real track, and then the other end to the other signal point. If you build very complicated tracks, trains sometimes have problems with pathfinding, but on the standard single tracks you're likely to start with, everything goes well.

Every map has cities, ranging in size from village to metropolis. The price of goods in every city is the same, but the larger cities need more different goods. And you can grow a small town into a large city by providing it with all the goods it needs. The bigger the city grows, the more place is there for industry. You can just provide the existing industry with goods, but you can also buy out the existing industry to pocket the profit, or even build new industry on empty lots. Besides the cities there are resource nodes of many different types and sizes. These don't develop, but you can build a station there to get the goods. Some goods are part of longer chains, like coal first being made into steel, and the steel then into automobiles.

You start at an early period of railroad history, with slow steam engines. Depending on the end date of the scenario you might end up with TGV high-speed trains, new trains becoming available at the historically appropriate time. There are also random events, influencing for example the price of goods.

This is not a game for the hardcore micro-management fan. Sid Meier's Railroads! is a relatively simple game. It is more like a good-looking model railroad for people without a huge basement, with an easy game attached to it. Fun, but not too challenging. I like it. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:45 PM Permanent Link