Railway Empire - Railroad Tycoon from Kalypso

Damn, X-crossings are so far away on that roadmap.

Finished chapter 3 , the Mississippi has been bridged!

Love the view in this game…

I liked that in this chapter, I had to get logs from a logging camp to a town, set up my own lumber mill in that town to make logs into lumber, then send that lumber to where the bridge was needed. :)

What happened with this game? Your updates kinda dropped of the map?

I started playing other games, as I wait for the full USA map to leave beta. :)

As we have released our development-roadmap recently and therefore more complex features coming to Railway Empire in the near future, we would love to share what we have so far.

Because of this, we created a public beta-branch, where you will find our latest builds.
Please be aware that these builds released on the public beta-branch are still in development!

Here are the new features, you can expect and playtest already:
New Features
New Map “America”

  • In “Free mode” and “Sandbox mode”
  • Build your empire from coast to coast

New 100-years-era “1830-1930”

  • Grow your empire from 1830 to 1930
  • All locomotives in one play
  • Re-balanced science tree in this 100-years-era
  • Overall time re-balancing to fit new timescale

Are they changing the original campaign or just added a new sandbox? This doesn’t obsolete the current campaign, correct?

No changes to the campaign. I need to get back and play chapters 4 and 5.

They will eventually be adding some track and switching improvements that will change the game (campaign and scenarios), but they were at the far end of the roadmap.

I couldn’t quite get the top rating. Game makes a good first impression. My trains were waiting on the parellel tracks for longer than I expected. I may not have connected the tracks to the station in the most optimal way, or maybe I needed another place with parallel tracks.

Finished Chapter 2.

Still feels really good connecting up cities and resources. I’m finding that I’m letting my rail network become a mess though. I’m also finding that I can’t tell how many trains the passenger / mail demand warrants. I see the table that displays passenger and mail destinations, but for some reason I don’t see the connection to how many rail cars it requires to fulfill that demand. Unless I go in and manually set the cargo, if I don’t have enough trains to satisfy the passenger and mail demand it can become difficult to move other types of cargo between cities.

For example, in chapter 2 I was feeding lumber to Washington from a rural resource. I then had a line between Washington and Baltimore (which grew to multiple lines). I fed more lumber to Washington than what was needed, but the trains from Washington to Baltimore didn’t really want to carry the lumber. It would do a little bit here and there, but it seemed like Baltimore could of handled more.

Chicago has a bunch of wheat there because I’ve been delivering it. I’m connected to Madison, which can use some wheat, but it never seems to pick any up, and I can only specify the goods Chicago actually produces. Is there a way to get the train to deliver wheat from Chicago to Madison even though Chicago doesn’t produce it?

Don’t allow the 1st train to drop off wheat in Chicago. Make it deliver it directly to Madison.

Or put a warehouse on the map for wheat dropoff/pickup.

I didn’t want to send the train all the way to Madison. I thought I might need to use a warehouse to do it, but I haven’t actually used one yet.

I ended up not needing to get the wheat to Madison. I was able to grow it to the next level anyway, so i could build a lumber mill to get wood to export for the bridge over the Mississippi.

:)

Yeah you can’t piggyback goods from station to station, I remember trying to do that in the tutorial with the corn.

Whoa 1.2 patch out of BETA.

Build across America!

Other highlights:

Added: Demolishing tracks and stations now gives a refund
Added: Town list overview
Added: New option to list all trains for a selected station

Still to come:

Does the town list take you to a location when you click on it? For me, having to scour the map looking for a particular city killed a lot of the enjoyment.

It DOES! :D

Also possible bugs are still in game, seems I lost a town north of Memphis in my casual testing free play game.

Ok wow is the entire America map huge. HUGE!!!

Also I don’t remember these 2 info screen options before, are they new?

Whoa that looks awesome!

I just finished the campaign and had a very tense Chapter 5. My network was a spaghetti mess. I don’t use warehouses enough.

I was merrily achieving the tasks when I realized I had neglected the needs of San Francisco. The final task was to move passengers from SF to a city across the map. Well, if the population is small there isn’t a huge number of people who want to travel to the target city. I sent my first train across to the target city and it had a whopping 3 people on it.

I took out a large loan and made a crazy connection to a beer supplier up the coast. Then I did the same for another resource. I had to get some of SF needs filled so I could grow the city. Slowly but surely their population grew but I didn’t have a lot of time. It is a long trip across the map so I made another train. It ended up having like 8 people on it.

Then I noticed there were some traffic jams so I had to quickly make some 2 lane areas to get rid of the backups. I was in my final year and I made a couple more trains for the trip. I needed 4 more people with my train approaching the target city in the beginning of December. I was hoping the damn thing wouldn’t have a random breakdown because that would screw me over. The cargo unloaded and I got the victory screen.

This is a pretty darn fun game. Thanks to @lordkosc for bringing it to my attention.

I played a sandbox game using the entire USA map - the one where there are still costs, not the one with unlimited money. It was pretty enjoyable. The game gives a bunch of goals to reach by certain years. Getting them gives you a better rating at the end. It felt like they were randomly generated, but maybe they stay consistent.

I played against 3 AI at normal difficulty and just rolled them. I ended up buying them all out well before the end of the game, so I could just build where I wanted to after that. I ended up connecting all cities to my network. Once a city gets advanced enough it doesn’t seem like 1 large station is enough to keep it fed with all the goods it wants. Maybe my network was just too inefficient because it was hard to keep it from becoming a spaghetti mess. I kept trying to solve traffic jams.Since the tracks are represented wide proportional to the map itself, placement becomes the greatest challenge.

The game gives different data to track, but it always felt I had so much I needed to do that concentrating on a small thing like the wait time of a single train seemed out of place. Maybe it becomes more relevant when playing a smaller scenario at a higher difficulty. I didn’t need to really try to optimize my routes, like using dedicated passenger routes with dining cars. I didn’t really pay much attention to what research items I selected or hiring employees in general. Still, it was fun to have the entire map to work with - but the more focused challenges of the scenarios may make for a better game.

@lordkosc, do you know how to interpret the express mail table on the city details window? It lists columns like +passengers per week, and some percentages - but the numbers don’t make a lot of sense to me. I was assuming the percentages represent what % of the passengers your line is satisfying. Also, if a passenger wants to get to a city several cities away, will they ride to one city and then transfer to another train by waiting at that station?

That has me excited to get into it when I’m done with my current game obsession.

I just tried the first scenario in The East and had a great time losing. I could see where maybe I need to focus more of my resources to meet the task that I failed on (delivering 100 dresses by a certain date). I’m not sure I’m doing a good job eliminating bottlenecks in my stations. Maybe I can improve by assigning specific tracks more frequently. I did start putting in bypasses around cities.

@lordkosc, have you tried the scenarios yet (not the campaign)? What do you think about them.