I played a few more hours of it this evening. Long story short, if you loved the first game, you’ll love the second one. It has a good balance of network building and business management. It’s not as complicated as some other transportation games, but I think that works in its favor since it is much less fiddly as a result. For people who love these kind of games, it’s as addictive as hell.
I think I’ve almost finished with the first campaign scenario. My only real complaint is that it seems like it’s a bit too easy, but that’s probably just because I haven’t played against harder computer opponents. Also, some of the campaign objectives involve delivering specific goods to certain cities, but I haven’t found a way to control the specific goods moved by freight trains and I don’t entirely understand the logic of how they decide what goods to pick up.
A friend of mine is buying it on Steam tomorrow and we’re planning on trying out the online coop. I could definitely see that being a lot of fun.
It’s not super intuitive. If you set the train’s mode to manual loading, you can choose the goods they pick up and/or drop by clicking on the station in the list of waypoints on the left hand side.
So far I’m enjoying it a lot, but I can’t tell how much is new given how long it’s been since I really played the first one. Some of the track laying fiddliness I hoped would be gone is still there - for instance some track layouts that are allowed when fully laid out are treated as invalid depending on how you build them, which is just dumb, and makes it much fiddlier to make tweaks to an existing network.
There’s an ingame manual that is pretty comprehensive. Aren’t these just like strategy guides?
I tried playing cross platform multiplayer with a friend but we couldn’t get the game codes to work. Might be because the games are using different version numbers, but can’t seem to find any new updates on my Xbox. Hope this gets fixed soon.
I finished the first chapter of the campaign. There are still some mechanics and systems I haven’t quite got a handle on, in particular efficient warehouse use. They’re built into stations now, I can’t remember if that got patched into the first game. I kind of brute forced this chapter with warehouses everywhere and lots of short routes ferrying finished goods between them. I suspect that’s not going to be viable later on given the six item limit and I’ll need to use longer direct lines. But that in turn is going to require getting a handle on how to handle many lines running through a station. I ran into a few situations where once I had more than four I couldn’t run through routes, because I didn’t have enough room for an 8 track gridiron. I may need to develop a system for through tracks, but I like having two for freight and two for express.
I just finished it as well. Learned quite a bit from it and my rail system ended up being disorganized, ha. Through the end of it, I kept on telling myself that I would do a better job with the next one. Then I discovered that the 2nd chapter basically starts with an unorganized mess of short rail networks that you need to sort out!
Playing this game makes me really want to bring my copy of Age of Steam or Railways of the World for a board game meet up tomorrow. I’m not a huge train fanatic or anything, but they certainly make for good games!
Warehouses were separate buildings in the original. This made my track network insane, so giving stations a warehouse helps. They did have the 6 item limit.
They were definitely separate to begin with. But there were lots of changes to the game post-launch and I remember there was a reworking of warehouses at some point. Just don’t remember if that included bringing them into the stations/cities.
One of my all time favorites (in fact my base game is from the original run when it was Railroad Tycoon), and the western US map is genuinely one of the best designed maps for any train based board game.
No. Warehouses stayed seperate but there was an option to build stations and warehouses with a pre-made signalling setup so the trains would automatically select a platform to arrive at. They came with 4 tracks and it was possible to traverse into any platform through the multiple sets of points. They did take a lot of space though.
Are water towers still a facility on the track or can trains refill at a station? I’m really hoping for the latter!
