For those of you who noticed my recent Civ4 thread - yes, I do have a lot of spare time at the moment. :eek:
I really enjoyed Railroad Tycoon 1, loathed Railroad Tycoon 2 and am now trying Railroads.
I understand the principles.
The manual says that trains will turn round faster if you build a ‘loop’ of track. How necessary is this?
Oh, and the website is the only thing slower on the Web than this board! 
I had two SDMB windows open, and they both responded before the Railroads site. :mad:
I’ve been playing Railroads for about 5 days now and in my experience, unless the loop of track is TINY the train can turn around on it’s own track much faster. If you have the money, it is worth it to upgrade the station if you can to speed loading and unloading.
Never played Tycoon 1, but Tycoon 2 drove me nuts - never could figure out the whole ‘investment’ side of the game.
I’ll have to look up this ‘Railroads’ you speak of…
Thank you. 
I loved the first RR Tycoon and played, but never really figured out the 2nd - so, what’s the verdict on this game ? Good ? Bad ? So-so ?
Inquiring mind (mine) wants to know.
There’s a demo available, Spiny. I just finished playing through it (decent amount of content). I enjoyed what I played of it, even though I know nothing about railroads and am not in the least interested in them. I might buy the game some day, especially if it’s fairly cheap or I’m itching for a strategy game (but with NWN2 coming out next week, I’m holding off on buying any other games.)
I like this one quite a bit. I haven’t tried the multi-player yet. It seems to take a lot of computer horsepower though. I have a gig of RAM, a 3500+ AMD AthalonXP, and 128M on my video card and it can really get to slogging after play for a couple of hours…
As a true nerd, I loved spending ages planning the best possible routes and track in Railroad Tycoon 1. Unfortunately the hastily-added Stock Market section was too easy to manipulate…
Railroad Tycoon 2 was very poor as it didn’t give me the ‘micro-manager’ challenge I wanted.
Railroads doesn’t let you plan any track. You pick a route and the computer builds it for you.
Yes, the graphics are jolly nice. But I’m a chess player. We like simple graphics and a decent thought-provoking game!
Also, in the tutorial, I built an unnecessary signal. I couldn’t see how to remove it. This is one problem with ‘spoon-feeding’ the game player.
I’ll test the game some more…
I almost posted a rant against this game when I first bought it a week ago. I’m still disappointed in it, but I’ve come to accept it for what it is: a simplified version of the first RRT designed for quick games of multiplayer.
glee, did you try RRT3?
Aha - that description of Railroads makes sense.
I missed RRT3 - would I have liked it?
It’s still one of my favorites. I’m afraid that I don’t remember much about RRT2 so can’t give a specific comparison, but there’s certainly more depth and challenge to the game than there is in Railroads. I think it’d be worth your time to check out the demo.
Ta muchly! 
Investments added a good bit of fun to the game. After stockpiling cash, I’d buy up shares in rival companies forcing them to burn cash to buy their shares to keep me from taking over. After all the stock was bought and the price maximized, I’d dump the stock, driving down the price while making a nice profit. The rival company would then unload at a loss and often go out of business. The only problem was a bug in the game that if a company went deep enough into the red, it would convert the figure to cash making it super rich.
In Tycoon 1 the cities grew over time as you served them but I don’t remember this happening in 2. I could be remembering wrong.
You can build the route however you want. Instead of dragging your mouse from the starting track to the final endpoint, just drag to some interim point and it will build to there. Just build your track in “pieces”. You can also customize the height of the track with the “+” and “-” keys to raise or lower the track-bed. I use this to get more level track when possible.
Also, you can delete sections of track as long as they don’t have a train running on them or scheduled on them. Just highlight the track section and hit delete. you may have to do it in several sections.
Hope this helps.
I finally found Railroads yesterday and have been playing off and on. I have all the games in this series, including Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, and this is becoming my favorite of the series.
I do miss being able to force a train to go to the next station on its route. If there is a “skip station” button, I can’t find it.
That sounds good and I will try it.
Thank you!