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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#81

Post by legitster »

kuon wrote: post #6
legitster wrote: post #2

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…

It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.

I like Manor Lords. Yeah, I'm a big fan of all of the survivalist city-builders that have come out since Banished (Planetbase, Frostpunk, Timberborn). They don't remind me anything of RRT, lol. But I definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#82

Post by bongodongobob »

mrighele wrote: post #33

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it. I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more f…

Huh, I've always just ignored the stock market and haven't had any issues.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#83

Post by ryandrake »

mywittyname wrote: post #70
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first…

> even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes. But you didn't do everything right. What makes OWTC different from most economics sims is that the goal is to quickly establish monopolies on the various planets. So unless you starved the competition of resources, pivoted to producing high-value products from cheap commodities, or speed run to offworld shipments, with an eye towards buying out everyone…

Yea, it's entirely possible that I'm simply expecting a different game and just don't find the current one's endgame fun or satisfying. I played it a few times, chugged along building a nice colony, and then suddenly the big full-screen "Haha you lose, your opponent bought you out on the stock market (which you can't prevent)".

I'm trying to think of any games that try to include an in-game stock market, where the gameplay doesn't eventually utterly hinge on playing the in-game stock market instead of whatever else the game was about. Looks like we've discovered a rule: "Take any game about anything, in any genre, and if you add a stock market, the game eventually becomes a stock market simulator instead."

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#84

Post by olyjohn »

giobox wrote: post #69
linsomniac wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.

I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.

The real problem with this setup was that a vanilla Pentium 3 would run circles around the dual Celerons. I had my Celerons clocked to something ridiculous at one point like 600MHz and still could not beat the Pentium.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#85

Post by wodenokoto »

The way the author talked about the feeling of if a sequel could live up to the original, and how it had been mostly forgotten, reminded me of Warlords, which together with civilization and rail road tycoon was the main turn based strategy games of my youth. I remember there was a sequel, but it would always freeze up on our computer.

... And I don't think I've stumbled on anyone on the internet talk its praise.

Was it just an oddity in my games library, or did other people place it along side the classic turn based strategy games of the 90s?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#86

Post by iggldiggl »

legitster wrote: post #78
mywittyname wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock management portion of the game adds a lot of depth. Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable, so long as you keep the number of lines between the two low enough. But they can be more profitable if you're smart about which cities are connected. But trying to acquire the entire company is actually pretty difficult. You can buy stock on m…

> Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable I would disagree. On hard enough difficulties intercity traffic is too seasonal. Also, continued traffic to the same city decreases the value of goods shipped there. So you still have to do some fussy industry routing as well to usually succeed. You're also racing against opponents to beat them to conne…

> You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.

Although the AI players have some interesting limitations – they'll never connect a city you've already connected to, and they'll never build a line that crosses one of your own lines. To be fair, I don't know how important those fudges are for balancing the game, and if so, how the playing strength of the AI players could be balanced in a more realistic fashion (plus considering that the game is from almost thirty years ago)…

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#87

Post by freedomben »

pantalaimon wrote: post #77
freedomben wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-( I'd love to buy the linux native version.

You probably don't, the old linux binaries are notoriously hard to get to function properly on a modern distribution. While the kernel interface remained stable across all those years, user space libraries have changed quite a lot, so it's much easier to run the Windows version with wine.

ah, that makes a ton of sense actually. Thanks!

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#88

Post by iggldiggl »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #43

I absolutely loved this game growing up. It scratched a similar itch for me as SimCity. The corporate layer wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it did give me some early insight into finance. The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.

> The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.

For a few euros (and less if you happen to catch a sale), the GOG version is worth it for the soundtrack alone. But yeah, 7-Zip doesn't seem to recognise the installer used by GOG, so you actually have to install the game to get at the soundtrack files.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#89

Post by Patrick_Devine »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #56
ylee wrote: post #8

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…

I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.

I still have my boxed copy (along with everything Loki produced) in a big box in the garage.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#90

Post by frankchn »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
lukevp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games aren’t going to suddenly start targeting only updated copies of windows 11 though… if they target even win 10 then they need to be API compatible with what’s currently there in windows. It doesn’t matter what new stuff comes out. Just like how we had to keep using ie6 compatible code for ages for the 5% of people still on windows xp even though it kept us from using modern web tech for everyone else.

Depends on how much Microsoft decides Windows Store and XBox App are relevant for game developers targeting the PC going forward.

Right now, they are not even making their own games exclusive to Windows Store or the XBox App (see MSFS 2024, Age of Empires series, Forza, etc...).
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