There isn't a computer game that can wave a wand and restore that same sense of visceral delight. And, frankly, the revival of model railroad trains can't bring it back, either. They no longer hold their favored position as the most complex simulation toy in the household. Hell, there are kiddie cars with gear shifts, out there. Miniature kitchen ranges for kids, so sophisticated that they can bake nutritious meals, which puts them ahead of McDonald's on a one-to-one face-off.
But what computers can do is provide at least a visual sense of that remembered excitement, embellished by an extensive terrain that certainly no train set ever equaled, and only the mind can surpass. They can also give us a strategic game based on supply and demand, corporate and personal financial growth that no five-year-old ever conceived of, unless it was a five-year-old Milton Friedman. These are the elements that combine to make Railroad Tycoon 3 such a strong title. If you're already an Railroad Tycoon aficionado, then you know about its general gameplay, though there are major changes both in appearance and under the hood to this latest release we'll need to consider together. You'll find the new title a puzzling challenge, especially if you jump in without preparation. Others who have never played Railroad Tycoon before will simply be thrilled with the result; so let's start with a brief discussion about what the series can provide to anyone who plays it, before we examine the bill of particulars.
What is Railroad Tycoon?
Microprose released the original Railroad Tycoon in 1990. It was an enormous success for its designers, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, who wanted to add more gameplay and a greater sense of entertainment to the strategic challenge of earlier text-based "build America during the Industrial Revolution" simulations. Unfortunately, Microprose was long on creativity, but short on marketing skills, and few games they developed ever received a second release with upgraded features. (Railroad Tycoon Gold fell laughably short.) This was Railroad Tycoon's fate until PopTop Software appeared a number of years later. It's development team consisted largely of gamers who truly enjoyed the original Railroad Tycoon, and wanted to create a fully updated version.
This, they did, in 1998, with Railroad Tycoon 2. It was a graphically attractive game on isometric landscapes, in which the player, controlling a public company, connected cities and resources by rail. Covering a timespan from the early 1830s through modern times, the title faithfully mirrored (within gaming conventions) the distinctive limitations of different engines, making allowances for fuel economy, repairs, grade climbing, acceleration, reliability, etc. There were many kinds of resources to pick up and deliver from cities and industries across the world, as well as buildings that could be added to stations in order to improve their functionality. Players could also issue stocks and bonds, and compete with railroad companies run by competitors. With a sandbox mode, individual scenarios and multi-scenario campaigns, Railroad Tycoon 2's popularity soared. It remains an excellent release, and a good, inexpensive holiday gift for a person with a low-end PC.
It's the Economy, Stupid
Now I happen to like both the original Railroad Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon 2. A lot. I praised them highly in magazine reviews at the time of each release. But one of the issues I had with these titles was their treatment of passengers and mail as essentially inanimate freight with a fast economic decay rate. (Actually, that describes some of my editors all too well.) It was extremely unrealistic the way people would board a train and go wherever you wished, provided it was a city. The mechanics were simplistic, since the further you went, as quickly as possible, the larger the revenues. Starting in Boston, passengers would pay less to arrive in New York City than in Trenton, New Jersey. I mean, come on!
This isn't the case in Railroad Tycoon 3. A more sophisticated economic model now gives passengers and mail specific destinations; so that people won't use a train that goes between Chicago and St. Louis, if they want to get to Peoria. It won't do any good to protest that Peoria is one of the dullest places this side of heaven. If they want to go to Peoria, you'll have to drop a line and a station there, or hook up to an existing railroad system run by another player. True, you'll split the passenger fee with an opponent, but you'll gain as well, when they use your lines for deliveries. (This marks quite a change from Railroad Tycoon 2, where using an opponent's rail system was regarded as anathema because of the expense.) Otherwise, if you can't get to where passengers and mail need to go, they will simply not show up, and find alternative methods of transportation.
This puts a whole new spin on Railroad Tycoon-accepted wisdom, which since the Dawn of Time has followed the mantra of "passenger link first between two relatively close cities; add more passenger links; add links to cargo resources: success." No longer is this the case. In fact, most potential passengers won't even consider your rail line when you start it up (which makes good sense in the early years of rail, but looks very strange in later scenarios where you'd expect instant value recognition). It takes a couple of years or longer to develop local awareness of your sterling efforts on behalf of local citizens and their transportation needs; and potential passengers will react positively or negatively to an engine's design, affecting its popularity. In the meantime, you can do a tidy little business moving other, slower cargo. Railroad Tycoon veterans take note of this, because if you were expecting pretty 3D images and economic business-as-usual, you will be unpleasantly surprised.
You also have to take into account now the competing transportation mechanism of river travel. As children of the Industrial Age (Well, my editors are. My own origins are lost in time), modern folk tend to forget that energy sources existed before the advent of fuel-driven engines. Yet river travel was relatively cheap and extremely swift by contemporary standards, even during the European Middle Ages. Norbert Ohler, in his excellent The Medieval Traveler, singles out a merchant who moved his supplies over 200 miles in 943 CE in three days, while the legendary emperor Frederick Barbarossa covered a distance of 84 miles by boat in a little over a single night. These were not atypical instances. Where the market could bear the cost, barging services provided quick access to distant ports; while during the mid 19th century, newfangled steamboats plied broad, deep rivers with a frequency and speed that was staggering.
Though you'll never see them listed as such, these are your direct competitors in Railroad Tycoon 3. Particularly where passenger traffic is concerned, if you don't get quite where people need to go, or don't get there fast enough, the nearest river could well become the biggest threat to your business. Connecting in turn to a port provides benefits to different kinds of traffic in Railroad Tycoon 3, but it also comes with the proviso that you and your railroad do what you do extremely well and swiftly. The market will no longer treat you like the only game in town, and that's a very good thing.
Another plus is the new auto consist manager. It's a rules set that looks at your routes and determines what cargos, pickup and delivery points make the best economic sense for each train. There's some flexibility built in, as well. You can instruct the manager to pick up freight, express (passengers, mail, troops) a specific cargo or all of it; to include a caboose and/or dining car, or none at all. You can tell it to wait at a given station for a pre-determined amount of cargo, or to send the train at once to wherever the best financial deal awaits. It's also possible to set the maximum number of cars on a given train, and to turn off the manager altogether, continuing with freight micromanagement as in Railroad Tycoon 2. This is easily one of the best features in the new game.
Another change is the radius of interest you can expect to generate cargo, outside of your stations. While passengers and mail will only show up in the highlighted station area, industry owners from farmers to auto plant manufacturers outside that area will tend to move towards you if there's no better alternative for distribution. This effectively means spending less time figuring how you're going to place a few stations up at the top of mountains where only gnarled hermits live and coal miners work. (You'll still need to get relatively close, but you won't have to worry about including every resource in your station radius.) Some Railroad Tycoon veterans may fear loss of strategic complexity, but I find that directed passenger and mail service offsets that.
You could buy secondary industries in Railroad Tycoon 2, which fed off the cargo supplied by other sources, but Railroad Tycoon 3 lets you build them. If there's excess grain from a Farm nearby, invest in a Brewery to produce much-prized alcohol, or setup an Electric Plant to use the coal and oil that's being transported on your rails. The industries are very expensive, but once you build them, you fully own them, and can even upgrade them to increase profits. The only oddity to me is the speed with which these industries are constructed. Trains are purchased from a supplier, so you'd expect them to show up instantaneously. I'd like to know how a Lumber Mill achieves the same feat.
Playing With Real Trains
Phil Steinmeyer has been quick to point out that Railroad Tycoon 2 was "2.5D," since it offered 3D terrain but could only display it in 2D. Granted, but that can be said equally of many 2D games over the years, including older RTS titles that displayed flying units isometrically: so what? They were still 2D, for all graphical purposes, which is what the designation means. The new 3D engine in Railroad Tycoon 3 does a lot to bring the game to life. Not so much in the terrain, which is fairly dull. (And understandably so; placing a lot of different trees, animals and variously shaped outdoors thingees with full animation would have placed the game's resource requirements beyond much of its audience.) Rather, it's the variety of train engines and the shifting terrain that give Railroad Tycoon 3 an added visual distinction.
PopTop Software clearly realizes this. They are especially eager to communicate that sense of individuality about engines. Railroad Tycoon 2 in some of its incarnations shipped with a foldout display of the various car types, and what cargo they held. Railroad Tycoon 3 ships with a display of all the engines, with their various statistics for acceleration, reliability, etc. There was no need to provide the latter in Railroad Tycoon 2, because you never really saw the different engines in gameplay, but in Railroad Tycoon 3, they're highly visible. Each is distinctive, the more so as you can lock the camera on it and watch the train trundle along over the terrain. It's a great deal of fun, but the camera angles chosen by the game when you click to view or lock on a train aren't always very good. Like so many action-oriented graphical adventures, they seem to have a knack for ignoring large objects, like railroad stations and such, which can get in the way. This still needs tweaking.
If the engine and a few other cars (dining, caboose) remain personalized as well from Railroad Tycoon 2, the cargo-bearing train cars have lost their personality in the latest release. Instead of each car having its own unique shape and color according to its cargo, all of them have been standardized on the big screen, with a cargo-specific logo superimposed over a generic car type. I understand the reasons for that; on a somewhat more realistic 3D screen, with engines that look comparatively true to life, a rainbow of cargo cars would look bizarre. As the logo is only on the sides of the cars, however, they're difficult to read from most angles. Fortunately, you can check the train consist display at the bottom of the screen, where it's displayed in miniature.
More problematic is the shift away from buildings in Railroad Tycoon 2 that each had their own size, shape and color, with a heavily oversized footprint on the isometric landscape. In Railroad Tycoon 3, buildings are smaller and look far more alike, with differences in shape that aren't always apparent at first glance. Usually an unobtrusive brown color, they tend to fade into the landscape when you pull the camera up to gain some distant perspective, and a feeling for the best regional movement of cargos. While you can call up a colored overlay displaying geographical supply and demand, it only shows the effect of a single cargo at a time. This is far less helpful than the map overview in Railroad Tycoon 2 that added colored titles to as many business types as you wanted at once, and allowed you to view them all from a considerable height. This made it easy to find all granaries and meat processing plants in the American Mid-West, for example, and plot your track-laying accordingly. It's true that the auto consist manager we've already discussed will pick up and move cargos to your best advantage, but it isn't infallible. The auto consist used on one train won't know that you want to leave a load of grain for an industry you own, rather than bringing it to another industry for an apparently better profit, for instance.
Railroad Tycoon 3 cargo-related structures also tend to cluster more than in earlier releases. That's a realistic touch, but it can make it impossible at times to deliver your cargo to individual industries you've purchased, rather than their neighbors in the immediate vicinity. Few things are more frustrating than visiting a station to drop off a load of steel, only to discover that it doesn't go to that Tool and Die Shop you own (thus raising its profits) but to the Auto Plant, next door.
All this is not a rant in honor of the Good Old Days. (Which were just like the Evil New Days, except that there weren't any sexually transmitted diseases, and you had to watch out for the Plague. I'm losing my thread here, aren't I?) I'm definitely a fan of Railroad Tycoon 3's new look, but it has to be said that in moving from 2D to 3D, it seems some solid ideas were discarded.
On the other hand, we all know what a burden track placement has been in Railroad Tycoon's past. In fact, I've done a survey of every person on the face of the Earth, and each one that ever played Railroad Tycoon 2 (you know who you are) had trouble laying track at some point in their gaming career. It could have been when you tried to match up two distant stations, or that attempt to scale a mountain without moving suddenly at a ninety degree angle to the terrain. Or possibly it just happened when you reached for that glass of 21-year-old Glenfiddich, Havana Reserve, and your weary, trembling hand slipped. Whenever it occurred, however it happened, the screams of anguish that tore from your throat were understandable. Nobody likes to save every ten seconds when placing track, in the hopes of avoiding a costly mistake. And nobody can live with themselves if they've made such a mistake, without saving.
So the new Undo button in Railroad Tycoon 3 is a great idea that's been long overdue. It removes successive track changes you've made with each click, working very much like the Undo in Microsoft Word. (PopTop's Phil Steinmeyer will probably get a call from Microsoft's attorneys alleging infringement of copyright in the morning.) You can delete each span of track you've put down since entering track-laying mode, but nothing earlier, which is as it should be. Otherwise, the system would be open to abuse, and players would remove track that's proven unprofitable years after first being laid.
Track itself is easier to place in Railroad Tycoon 3. True, there are difficulties in working around river basins in mountain valleys, but I found fewer difficulties stretching track and curving it to suit my needs. You can also build tunnels, and create bridges that span over cities without interfering with rails and buildings on the ground. Spans are optional, fortunately, so if you want to turn them off and try to join up with an existing rail system, it's your choice.
Finally, since we're discussing graphics, the redesigned interface is more colorful than its predecessor and groups icons a bit better, but otherwise changes little. I'm not sure I agree with PopTop that moving from a separate ledger screen to a ledger overlay on top of the main screen is a noteworthy development, since you still can't play the game with the overlay in place, anymore than you could while studying a separate screen.
Miscellaneous Gripes. If You Disagree, Sue IGN.
I haven't got many problems with Railroad Tycoon 3 that aren't mentioned above, but there are still some issues we should cover because of their importance to gameplay.
First, you can't bulldoze a competitor's buildings, but you can bulldoze "unowned" structures anywhere in the playing world. This means you can effectively cripple an opponent by removing the industries that supply his stations. Given the cheesiness of this situation and its immediate repercussions to game balance, I'm inclined to think bulldozing buildings should have been optional for multiplayer and eliminated in singleplayer mode, at least around rail lines you don't own.
Remember how in Railroad Tycoon 2 one of your trains could leave cargo at a station, and pick it up with another train, chaining trains to build loads of supplies? Not so, in Railroad Tycoon 3. The economic engine is far less forgiving of dumped cargo, and disposes of it quickly. It's too bad the various kinds of storage facilities you could purchase at stations in Railroad Tycoon 2 were eliminated; who knows why.
I also question whether the support buildings (Service Towers for water and sand, Maintenance Facilities for oil and general repairs) should have been forcibly separated from stations, where they were in Railroad Tycoon 2. They slow down trains to little more than 1 MPH, wherever they're placed along a line. I've ended up building short spurs out of my main stations, adding smaller stations with support structures just to deal with these problems on short runs. But when you're moving perishable cargo over long distances, support buildings are necessary en route. Your trains literally grind to the equivalent of a halt. This change really reduces the combined value of long runs and highly perishable cargos, regardless of supply and demand.
Why were managers removed? Fans of Railroad Tycoon 2 will recall that these guys often gave you specific small advantages (or larger advantages combined with added disadvantages) in gameplay. Two would show up every two years, and you'd have the opportunity to fire your current manager and engage the services of a new one, if you wished to do so, and could afford the cost. Admittedly there was nothing realistic about it: Bat Masterson never increased the security of railroads across the US, and Andrew Carnegie didn't make bridge or station building much cheaper. But station managers were both an element of strategic gameplay and fun. I wish they'd been made optional in Railroad Tycoon 3 scenario creation and sandbox mode, rather than simply removed altogether.
But my biggest gripe remains the AI opponents. They are adept enough at recognizing a good time to sell a stock short, but are only marginally capable when it comes to railroad growth. Unless a scenario deliberately starts an opponent with extra funds and/or a few choice station locations, they're apt to make many simple mistakes and repeat those, over and over. They were bad enough in previous releases, but in Railroad Tycoon 3 your AI-driven opponents seem to be even more incompetent than before. Balancing finances and expansion in particular seems beyond their grasp. (Ironically enough, the AI in Avalon Hill's underrated 1993 game, 1830: Railroads & Robber Barons, was better. Bruce Shelley helped in the product design.)
