I have Railway Empire, which I like but at a certain point tracks tend to get too congested. Sometimes trains don’t behave how I think they will. The campaign or DLC scenarios can feel a little too rushed.
There are several games out there, do any of them do it better. There is Transport Fever 1 and 2, Railroad Corporation (which doesn’t seem to get a lot of positive reviews). Are there any others? I still have the old Railroad Tycoon games that I played way back when, but not recently. I’m more drawn to the solving of logistical problems, or problems of efficiency than I am buying out another company’s stock.
So I do think RRT3 does a pretty good job of it. Yes there is absolutely the economic side, but smart, and evolving, route planning helps. Identifying where to lay double track, when to go for express routes, what hubs to make central, and which are pass throughs. I really enjoy the track laying aspect, and feel it holds up well still.
Railroad Corporation definitely had a rough start and certainly still has some strides to make. However, the fact that it has seen continual updates to improve it has been good. It is a better game than it was at launch, but probably still has improvements to make to match or beat Railway Empire.
Also, it’s not really in the same category of game, but it’s definitely about logistics and it does have trains — The Colonists, as discussed on the city builder thread.
The A-Train DS game was nice. The A-Train games in general are all about efficiency, although that might make them more of a puzzle game series, especially in later iterations. IE, you aren’t that free: the constraints of the goals are heavy on you.
There is a Windows port of the DS game on Steam, and it seems to be 60% off right now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/492090/ATrain_PC_Classic__APC/
For pure logistical problems, I’d go to wargames instead? Most civilian ones can’t get around the private economical aspects. But in SSG games, you got another sort of competition, eh.
It took me 30 years to get around it, but the first Railroad Tycoon is my favourite. The simple pleasure of connecting sources and watching tchootchoos go tchootchoo.
If you want that without having to draw the roads, there is Brian’s LOGistICal?
Mashinky is totally playable and stable right now. The trick here is, you don’t make money, you make different things that get more complicated to make, the farther you go, and you need that better stuff to buy better trains and addons for your factories.
It actually has some signalling now, both of the two-way and one-way variety, to allow for more complex rail networks after the March update. Admittedly, the train pathfinding still has some room for improvement to handle the increased room for complexity though, so not perfect in that regard yet.
Railroad Corporation is quite good now. I’m really proud of the developers for taking our suggestions and making the hard decision to literally retool some of the core routing and track laying (which they initially said they didn’t want to do as it went beyond the scope of their game).
To be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the campaign of Railroad Corporation more than Railway Tycoon as it has carry-over elements between missions.
Perfectly valid! However sometimes it is nice to go the other way, as it allows better difficulty tuning, since doing too well or too poorly can render a mission either impossible or trivial.
A lot of the steam reviews suggest no challenge, weird things with supply/demand (e.g. you can keep shipping goods to a factory that isn’t making use of them). What’s your take on that?
