This thread is right up my alley. Longtime Civilization player going back to Civ II and a couple of thousand Steam hours on Civ VI and everything in between. Similar addiction to RR Tycoon series, on up to Railroads! And Railway Empire, again a couple of thousand Steam hours. Factorio and Satisfactory, thousands of hours. These games have been my cup of tea. But the one that really continues to scratch the itch year after year is Transport Fever 2. It took a while to “get it,” but once all of the intricate dependencies were understood it just never fails to engage me. Highly recommended, but do be patient and push through the rather daunting learning curve.
A key attraction for me is the ability to use real civil engineering considerations when building roads and railroads, and the maps are grand enough to make it quite satisfying to ride along on your vehicles as you move through the landscape.
I just fired up another Civ VI game to see if I’ve still got enough interest to check out Civ VII. Of course I will eventually, but I may wait for a patch or two.
I have adored this series since the very beginning, so I am a little bummed to say that I won’t be coming along for the ride this time. I guess I just arrived at a point in life where I’ve got too much that I want to do, and it’s hard to justify carving out time on the ol’ calendar for a gigantic time suck like Civ. I hope you guys will blow some shit up in my honor.
Interestingly I’ve never heard of Transport Fever. I like these crunchy resource management games, but I wonder if the focus on transportation only is a little limited? How does it stack up to something like Workers & Resources?
It felt that way to me at first, and even the number of commodities to transport is quite limited, and consequently the number of production chains seems rather paltry. But boy howdy does the complexity and intricacy become spectacular, with bazillions of big and little problems to solve and refinements to make.
It differs from games like Workers and Resources in precisely that way - production and consumption is handled by the “AI” and you focus on getting stuff where it needs to go. A limitation that seems confining at first but results in a real explosion of possibilities.
I agree with @RickJay that it seems a bit “dorky” from a lot of vantage points. And there are some ways in which it plays fast and loose with the boundary between “game” and “simulation,” but it has WAY more content than I have ever touched and I’ve played for over 2000 hours. It’s very solid and very high quality. But be patient, it isn’t a “quick to master” experience.
This discussion got me curious and it seems I played Transport Fever 2 for 6 hours. I believe it’s the one wherein I had two games, one that hauled rock and the later, with metro bus service.
I am reinstalling to see, and possibly spend more time with it now that I’m retired.