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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#101

Post by BlueTemplar »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
red_trumpet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are running Linux, it seems to work well with Proton, though I didn't check it myself: https://www.protondb.com/app/7620

I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly. (Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)

What would it be ? IPX ?

Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#102

Post by kuon »

legitster wrote: post #81
kuon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.

That is what I meant by "it remind me of RRT". I feel "at home" when playing them.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#103

Post by luismedel »

sho_hn wrote: post #91
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 remember Corel Linux! It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark. I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, an…

Same here. The Spanish edition of PC Mag included Core Linux. It was the most pleasant install experience in much, much time (next, next, next, finish)

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#104

Post by jandrese »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #99
jandrese wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then the rights get dicey when they include third party libraries and development systems. Doom famously had issues with the sound library they used. Plus, with commercial software it often happens that the code only builds cleanly on one specific ancient version of a closed source compiler in a specifically tweaked build environment that has been lost to the ages. Having the source helps a lot, but it is not a…

Yet both of these issues seem to plague closed source software more than open source ? Doom wasn't developed with open source in mind, was it ? What open source software "only builds cleanly on one specific ancient version of a closed source compiler in a specifically tweaked build environment that has been lost to the ages" ?

On opens source projects the build system needs to be reasonable enough that anybody can set it up. There are lots of conventions and even tools to help people. On closed source projects it is just Joe the sysadmin who sets up the machines for everybody working on it. Also, open source projects rarely include requirements like "buy a license of this specific version of this proprietary library and install it on your machine".

Doom had the advantage that it was written by a really excellent team with some standout programmers, and it has had plenty of people maintaining the codebase over the years.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#105

Post by jcranmer »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #101
jcranmer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly. (Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)

What would it be ? IPX ? Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?

I don't have the game or the manual in front of me, but my recollection is that there are actually four separate networking options, of which TCP/IP and IPX were two.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#106

Post by vanjajaja1 »

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.

iirc those overclocks needed thermal paste to be reapplied, plus dust in case probably crushed airflow

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#107

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

Yeah, that reminded me how too easy diplomacy (in particular tech trading) can make almost everything else pointless in some strategy games...

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#108

Post by tdrz »

One of the best games I have ever played! I still open it sometimes and wonder why I could never find another strategy game that would hook me just as much.

Also learned as a kid about stock and dividends, which proved quite useful later on. There was a bit o geography and history in it as well, plus the music! Why were our parents complaining about us gaming so much!?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#110

Post by mywittyname »

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…

For most cities, the first few loads often have enough profit to cover like 10-15% of the build costs, with the first year usually covering 25-35% of the build costs. After two years or so, with no other expansion, cargo trade will be dramatically reduced and the bulk the cargo will be passenger/mail cargo, but so long as you don't allow empty shipments, the line should remain profitable.

The fun comes from trying expand as fast as possible. But it's pretty difficult to actually fail.

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