Too easy

[Crow]

Maybe it's just 20+ years of playing these games, but I found RC2 fun, but only until I finished the single player campaign. Primarily this is because the game is too easy. There is no chance of failure or making a wrong decision unless you just cannot read.

Personally, I would look into a couple fixes to make the game a little less easy:
1) Make it so commodities that are supplied and demanded in the same city either cannot be sold there or are sold at greatly reduced prices. Currently my strategy is to go around and buy up all of these industries immediately because they produce massive passive income the whole game and pay for themselves in mere minutes.

2) Make selling products much less profitable. Currently, I can start a railroad and set up 2-3 trains running a single product in one direction and make $1M after only a few minutes since each run makes $20,000 or more each with just 4 cars.

3) Make operating trains and the railroad more expensive. Increase maintenance or fuel costs or both. Add or increase track/signal maintenance, building maintenance, corporate office expenses, etc.

4) Make all office tasks more expensive. Right now I do not have to make choices when it comes to research, lobbying, or geology. I have so much money that my strategy is always "do everything as quickly as possible" which isn't a choice at all. I should have to make hard choices about where to spend my money on research, lobbying, or geology to get the most benefit. I would increase all of these things by 10x at least.

I really like RC2 for a lot of reasons, but I've already stopped playing it because I finished the single-player campaign and the sandbox just doesn't offer any challenge that keeps me engaged.

[jhughes]

Well, I would mention it is Early Access .. I'm sure they plan more missions.

[gardlt]

Agree 100%.

About #2, I think that part of the problem here is the buffers. They might be good to manage industries, but what we need is high-volume dissuasion. Dumping a lot of cargo in a short time should give only a little profit. Instead, we can earn millions in a great ponzi scheme.

The classic games in this genre had the third dimension "time" in their profit model. Infinite demand is fine, if there is demand structure that will only allow a few loads to be delivered before demand craters to minimum throw-it-away prices.

The game is too industrial. Anything is possible, but I think it's unlikely that the team has time to re-balance a lot of the game to focus it on railroading.

Here's an idea, the City Hall should have a budget per month it may expend on buying supplies. You can choose to supply for free just to see the town grow if you want, otherwise you decide whether to bring a higher volume of cheap cargoes or a lower volume of the expensive ones. And of course the city hall budget should be tied to town-size/population.