Yeah, Firaxis actively promoted it as the return of the series to them. What a disappointment that was. I liked RRT3, but it didn’t seem to be the most stable game in multiplayer. I don’t think we ever completed an mp game. It would always crap out at some point. I need to play around with RRT2 since I grabbed it during the steam xmas sale last year.
A technical aside: using the mouse at the edge of the screen to scroll the map is way too fast on modern computers. Use the arrow keys instead.
This and Tropico (which uses the same engine) were staples of my strategy gaming days. Pop Top, we miss you.
I could never get into III. It might have a more realistic economy, but the simplifications of II were part of what made it feel more like a game than a simulation, and they were easy to grasp. I hated the tower issue that Strato brought up, and I really hated how hard it was to build track in certain situations. Nope, it’s RRT2 for me all the way.
I gotta agree about that sand/water issue.
I loved these games. Just another example of a historical based game that people learned from yet it was extremely fun, rewarding, and even strategic.
I played the hell out of 2 in it’s various versions and I agree the maps in 2 were much better. But 3 did have some great economic models, and with the addition of factories it had me really theorizing on how best to get things done in game.
As for my favorite though, it’s still a toss up. Both of them were great. To be honest I only vaguely remember the first one, but I know it was a hit with me, and it only cemented the fact that, at the time, I LOVED nearly everything Microprose made.
I love RRT3, but sadly can’t get it to work with Vista. I’ve tried every trick I could find online and still no dice.
The copy I have from Steam works on Vista fine.
There are several threads devoted to the subject over on the Steam forums here. Depending on which version of RRT3 you have, it may be easier or harder to fix. I got the Steam version to run on Vista, but it’s been awhile since I did that and I don’t remember the details. I posted them on Steam but don’t see the thread.
I believe there were issues with hardware t & l with Nvidia cards. There is a site that has an engine.cfg file, for some reason pop top decided this should be a binary file, that you can download that has hardware t&l disabled. That seems to be the problem most people ran into from what I was reading the other day. I was able to go right in to the game on Windows 7 with an ati card. I am still below the post count for posting links, but google ‘hawk and badger railroad’ and that will get you to the site with the engine.cfg file.
that the one?
Yes. If you go to the RRT3 main page, there is a section where you can download a vista fix.
I tried that Vista fix before (and I tried it again last night), but it still didn’t work. The game never even gets to the intro screen, so the illegal instruction isn’t the issue. I suspect that either there is something wrong with my install disc or my particular DVD drive has problems with the copy protection.
On a whim, I decided to try the steam version as it was only $10. After using that vista fix, it worked just fine. Thanks, everyone, for inspiring me to try one more time!
Oh god I’ve forgotten how to play RRTCII.
A lot of you guys seem to like RRTCIII, but I don’t think it sold all that well. Any theories? Was the market just tired of railroad games?
Ask Phil Stein, he’d be the one to know :)
My conclusion from the long post below is: the quality of transport games of recent times have been fairly poor. If Phil Steinmeyer makes another RRT game though, I will buy it.
For me personally, I’m a little jaded with transport games right now. The list of transport style games that I have include
- Transport Tycoon
- Railroad Tycoon 1, 2, 3
- Industry Giant
- Transport Giant.
With Transport Tycoon, it was a phenominal success as far as I can tell without any hard figures. Considering it was good enough to lead to an open source project to keep it alive, an unofficial patch for the retail game that expanded its scope massively, and as a result, it just seemed to tick all of the right boxes. In the modern day, this game would need to work harder to appeal to the masses. It would need to make ship and air transport a lot more viable money wise. The biggest failing is that by concentrating mainly on rail meant that money was never going to be short unless there were major problems with the routing, such as massive cross continental routes that take a train all year to deliver their goods. Thinking about Transport Tycoon makes me want to go back and fire it up.
Where Chris Sawyer could have improved was with Locomotion. However, it flopped I believe. What did Chris do? Get tired of programming? I only played the demo of Locomotion before deciding it wasn’t for me. I remember it having a similar interface for laying rails as it did for rollercoaster tycoon. Trouble is, it wasn’t suitable for laying down vast stretches or rail or road from what I remember. The demo itself didn’t feel fun, and the comments over the internet were very quick to highlight the flaws in a poor AI, and building bridges everywhere.
Railroad Tycoon (and Railroad Tycoon Deluxe) did a lot in bringing in the genre to the gaming crowd. It wasn’t just a game about building rails, it was a game which brought the player into the setting of the time, rail barons and cut throat competition. Consider the meta game on the side which integrated nicely was the stockmarket. This was a successful formula. In fact, Microprose were great at bringing a particular setting alive (like Pirates!). Railroad Tycoon, the original showed that graphics don’t matter, it is the gameplay which is important. In fact, when Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 came along, I wished in some ways there was still an original railroad tycoon style display given the way tracks looked like rubbish when going through a moutainside. Graphical engine limitations I know, and on the whole, both Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 were prettier to look at most of the time, but building that rail through the wilds of Canada just didn’t look right.
Railroad Tycoon 2 was great in that it simplified many things from the first. No need for signals (even though in the first, signals were optional). More importantly, signals weren’t needed at either side of a bridge for when they would freakishly wash out in the first. Bridges in RRT2 simply imposed speed limitations. Nice and easy. The game I thought looked a lot better as well, even against RRT3. Having that fixed isometric perspective was good. The steel mills and nuclear power plants looked impressive, and it was nice watching that Maglev train hauling uranium from St. Petersburg to Warsaw. The last comment though should start to indicate that I am of course viewing RRT2 through rosy coloured glasses. The biggest drawback with Railroad Tycoon 2 though was the routing, and by extension, the economy model.
In many scenarios that play out, I could have 20+ trains after 10 years, dependant on how busy I chose to be. What would then happen to me is the game would become an absolute mess as far as efficiency goes. Where was the train hauling gravel? Is there a better cement plant to use? Why do I suddenly have 20 loads of coal sitting at my depot. It felt like my brain exhausted itself with the number of transactions it could make. Add in the random crashes that trains would experience, and that would compound the problem.
Railroad Tycoon 3 comes along and fixes that. The RRT purist in me initially hated the idea, but I have come to slowly appreciate it. Route the trains, and then allow the game to decide the most profitable consists to pick up, and let it all go. Of course, if necessary, the player could force a train to take a particular consist too if needed, though I think by that system, it would only take one particular consist (eg: it could only take coal, not both coal and iron). As mentioned earlier, I was not a fan of the water/sand towers and the engine yards forcing trains to stop. I was also more fond of the interface in RRT2 than I was in RRT3, but that is really only a small part of the game. Maybe the move to 3D hurt it? I admit, I find RRT2 to look a lot better than RRT3. Also, I still have some difficulty coming back to the game and understanding the economy (supply and demand) side of things. RRT2 was simple, haul lumber here, make money. RRT3 seems to be, haul some lumber here and you will make a small amount of money, along with half a load of clothes, and some coal for good measure. Simple, yet strangely, also a bit more complicated. Maybe I just need to sit down for a few dedicated days and play it to get it.
My earlier comments with regards to jadedness come from the last two games in that list: Industry Giant and Transport Giant, both from JoWood productions. I have since vowed to never touch their games again.
Industry Giant won’t run on my computer now unless I change my video display to 16bit colour. I won’t bother. I was one day curious about seeing whether I could get into it, but because of that, well, sorry, I’m a lazy person and I shouldn’t need to change my colour resolution for just one game. Pretty sloppy on their part. But when I got the game, it never did grab me. Making money felt too hard. In fact, I couldn’t even get past the first basic scenario. Obviously I was doing something wrong but I do not know what… I don’t mind a hard game, but when I fail and don’t know why, then I really want to know.
Transport Giant also won’t run on my computer. I think it is the Securom screwing me over. I tried just recently, and all I get is a clicking noise from the DVD drive, before the game tells me it failed to authenticate the disc. I looked for a No-CD crack (yes, I’m a pirating bastard in this case) and couldn’t find one that seemed to fit the Down Under expansion I had with it. The same problem exists with Transport Giant though, it never could grab me. The documentation was weak, and the game felt slow and boring. I vaguely recall playing this game one night a few years ago, and it was that slow and boring I felt myself nodding off. As it turns out, based on reviews, other people have pretty much given it the thumbs down. I also remember laying track was shit.
Finally, the other recent transport sim is Railroads. I never even bothered based on online feedback and comments. Played the demo for five minutes, it couldn’t even excite me. I had the box in my hands once, going for a fairly cheap price, but decided the money would be better spent elsewhere. Sorry Firaxis, I love your games, but this is one title best ostracised from the list of games you have done.
The open source version (Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe) has been out for a while. The multiplayer interface is actually kind of great. We had a thread about it and played for a couple of nights. Without a dedicated server it was kinda tough though.
Yeah, I saw that Pogo, at the time, I was out in the sticks with a connection that reached a new low for me, downloading at less that 300bytes/sec. I just haven’t had much of a chance to dig around for the Transport Tycoon install, which I think was needed for the Open TTD install.
Multiplayer is obviously the strength of Transport Tycoon given the fact the AI does a few crazy things. But when on single player, I generally won’t worry about having AI opponents, there is too much satisfaction to be had from sitting back and seeing a nicely run rail economy bringing in the dollars, without the ugly stain of poorly designed roads, and railbridges ruining the sight.
I loved Railroad Tycoon back in the Mac Plus days, and gave RT2, RT3, and Railroads! a shot. I could never get the track laid properly in either RT2 or 3, always ending up with a bit of 8% grade that would completely kill the layout. With no undo, it was a game breaker for me, so I never even got past the tutorials. Railroads! was just a mess, both in terms of concept (I want my railroads to span continents, not medium-sized eastern states) and execution (horrible, horrible AI on the trains). sigh I’d buy a game with modern interface and graphics that scratched that itch in a heartbeat.
As a complete aside, one of the nicest things about the original RT was its support for (small “w”) windows and multiple monitors. I don’t understand why more developers–especially of strategy games that have multiple screens of information–don’t take advantage of the native windowing system in Windows (or OS X, for that matter).
The original is no longer needed now that there is OpenGFX and OpenSFX.