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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#121

Post by BlueTemplar »

ryandrake wrote: post #83
mywittyname wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ga…

That was one of my initial fears with Shadow Empire, but it somehow doesn't manage to devolve to only that... I guess because there's a variety of brakes applied on trading like trading houses' limited stocks (including in credits), the way how price discovery is gradual between trading regions and not instant cross-planet, and the way they rip off the major factions by taking large trading margins ?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#122

Post by pxc »

SoothingSorbet wrote: post #119
pxc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions. Besides the many issues wi…

> It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system) While I agree that Windows has long since abandoned UI/UX consistency, it's not like that is unique: On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs. I'm sure libcosmic/iced and others will…

> On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs.

And you can choose to install GTK+, Qt, and Electron apps on Windows or macOS, too. That has no bearing on the consistency of the desktop environment itself (not on Linux or on macOSa or on Windows). That fact is simply not relevant here.

You could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle/preinstall incongruous software— those are operating systems that ship applications based on multiple, inconsistent UI toolkits. But that's neither universal to desktop Linux operating systems nor inherent in them. Many cases that do serve as examples by the definition above are still not comparable to the state of affairs on Windows— for instance, KDE distros that ship a well-integrated Firefox as their browser— are on the whole much more uniform than the Windows UI mess.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#123

Post by sandworm101 »

yxhuvud wrote: post #18

So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.

RT3, in 3d, made it a model train simulator. Going first-person on a locomotive, puting the camera close exactly like every kid has done with every train set, that was a revolution. I saw that joy once again a few years ago when nerdcubed tried a VR model train simukator.

https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#124

Post by primax »

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…

I'd suggest trying Railway Empire and it's sequel. It's the closest successor I've found.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#125

Post by ta_1138 »

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…

There was a Railroad Tycoon 3, made mostly by the same team in the same office in Fenton. The changes to a more free-flowing tracks didn't necessarily make the game better, and were a headache for most of the production.

I was also told that there were attempts to make the economic simulation far more dynamic, simulating that the cargo could leave by other transport methods, as you'd find in a more serious economic simulation. That just made the game worse: The more efficient the market gets, the harder it is to find the profit, and the more likely that an old 'good' route suddenly stops making money, which is just annoying in a single player game.

It's a common problem with market-centric games: Good simulations make everything unfun, as most of the enjoyment comes from easily finding opportunities or getting away with misbehavior that would make real-life barons very difficult. This is IMO why you don't find many spiritual successors: Most steps forward would be steps back when it comes to making the game fun. So you'll find games focusing just on the tracks, but as puzzles (like the Train Valley Series). Optimizing routes trading items (spaceways), or outright market manipulation (Offworld Trading Company). Doing it all at once basically demands copying the game with newer graphics.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#126

Post by ta_1138 »

esafak wrote: post #16

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

The shortest, simplest equivalent I know that has most of the same 'spice' is Chicago Express/Wabash Cannonball. At first you think it's a game about building a company that tries to get to Chicago first to claim the prize money, but then you realize that this is really about making money, and that maybe the best thing for you is to completely wreck any and all attempts to have anyone, ever, get to Chicago. Plays in an hour, instead of 3+ in your typical train game with this kind of mechanics.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#127

Post by dlevine »

linsomniac wrote: post #36
runlevel1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium? EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE

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.

About a year later, I got the P3-550 that overclocked to 733. Not quite as good of an overclock in terms of percentages, but I ran that machine for 5 years with no issues.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#130

Post by cyberax »

kbolino wrote: post #76
pjmlp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already control enough studios, PC and XBox market. SteckDeck compatibility relies on "emulating" Windows ecosystem. Remember DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.

They bought a lot of companies and are doing their level best at running them into the ground. Xbox is a dying platform. They may try some things that they've tried before (GFWL) but they're not going to succeed this time either. Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

> Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

I can see companies sending out hardened Linux distros to hardcore Valorant players for official tournaments and such.

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