Spiritiual Successor to Railroad Tycoon?

[RoboZoom]

I just found this game, and am thinking about picking it up. Is this the spiritual successor to Railroad Tycoon III? I loved that game (many years ago)... does this play in the same spirit?

[coenvijge]

For me it is the successor. Track laying is a little bit harder to learn then other RR games, but building a network and running a corporation is great. You can develop your own style of playing and do the missions (scenarios) with a low number of trains, which is good if you like to micromanage them. Great game! (Just over 1000 hours now and not finished yet.)

[Murphy Law]

I would like to believe so, however it's not quite there yet.
It's more along the lines of RRTC than Railway Empire (which is NOT a Train game, it's a Trading game using Trains, like their other games. Think of it like Port Royal 3, where it's a trading game using ships. Same thing, just with Trains.) - I'm saying this to make sure people understand the difference in the two games, since they both share a look of similarity. If you want the Train game experience, go with RR Corp.

[chaney]

I almost agree with Murphy Law.

The initial goal of both games appears to have been to largely provide experiences like RT gave, but with some improvements and updates, and a little change of flavor. Neither has, respectfully, achieved that.

Railway Empire ended up going initially more in an arcade style direction, but through persistent community feedback ended up more of a puzzle game. It is absolutely a "train game" in my opinion -- the important elements of operating and managing a train company are all there -- although some are dominant (logistics) some are present (maintenance) and others are underdeveloped (train personnel, market.) If you like solving logistics problems with train artwork, it is well done. The signalling system gives excellent authority, and the conspicuous missing element is time tables. (Most similar games can't use time tables because mixed scales in time/space mean fundamentally different operating limits are present compared with real world operations. This makes it hard to keep everything "realistic" and intuitive and practical and fun.)

Railroad Corporation has stayed closer to the form of the RT line. The problem with RC is that the execution is inelegant and sloppy compared with the old Sid's titles. There are a lot of little work-arounds to things that are basic to logistics, and in particular the systems to control train motion (signaling) are opaque and don't give the player much authority. If you don't mind working around the feature deficiencies, the rest of the game play is a closer match to RT.

While we are on the general subject, you might also look at OpenTTD.

[genemead]

If there'd been any "spiritual successors" to RRT within the last 20 years, you'd forget about RRT and be playing them, wouldn't you?
Of course there hasn't been one, nor will there ever be. Just as they'll never be a "spiritual sucessor" to RC. There's been many updated train games since, but none are like the others.

RC is a really good game, but it's not fair trying to compare it to a 20-year old game (or RRT to RC for that matter).

[RoboZoom]

I mean, that was kind of the point of my question... to see if I should stop playing RRT and start playing RC instead because it itched the same itch :)

But I think it's kind of a crazy assertion to say that spiritual successors don't exist. Makes you wonder what was being thought when the term was coined with such conditions of impossibility

[lakerebg]

This is the closest to RRT that I have played and much better than Sid's Railroads. For more info check out hawkdawg. It is a Railroad Tycoon site, where you can still get RT2/3 maps and user patch 1.06. I have also been updating my thoughts on this game there. To me, this is the easiest game to lay signaled tracks that I have played. I would have copied my thoughts to this site, but Steam doesn't allow that. Nor does it allow links. If I am wrong, please tell me how to do it.

[chaney]

lakerebg, when you say "this is the easiest game to lay signaled tracks that I have played" are you typing about Railroad Corporation, or the Railroad Tycoon version you reference?

Railroad Corporation does *in some sense* have limited implicit signals but the way they work is opaque and very limited in authority to manage traffic.

[kverdon]

You may be right in that Railroad Corporation is a spiritual successor to Original Railroad Tycoon 1/2 in that it is a ghost of the brilliance those games achieved.