Railroad Tycoon 3 - greatest tycoon game of all time

[Vuyek]

I highly, HIGHLY recommend this one. It is a business simulator, where you build railroad and tracks for them. But... you also can buy and build any business type. The game is setup with different eras, and each era has a few scenarios for you to beat.

The best thing is, in the scenarios, you will have AI competition - and they are not idiots.

Also, you are NOT the company - you are a dude who FOUNDS a company. You may sell your company, make a new one, attempt to takeover AI companies.

It is an incredibly deep game, yet so east to understand... and so hard to master.

You can buy it for literally pennies. You must download Vista/Win 7/Win 8 Fix from
http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/ (read the instructions).

Game runs flawlessly once the fix is applied.

Highly recommended.

I know it is not 4x.... but this is a top 10 game of all time.

[Naselus]

I'd second that. Tho it had some issues - it was tough to get going, but once you were big it became very hard to do badly. There was a definite 'tipping point' that occured, usually around 10 years into your company's lifetime.

It was probably the toughest of the Railroad Tycoon games to get into initially tbh, understanding the economic supply and demand simulation was very difficult and if you messed up initially, then you'd slowly go bankrupt over the next 20 minutes as you gradually equalized cargo prices between all your stations. It was the only railroad game I ever played where, in some scenarios, it was better to NOT build a railroad with your initial money and instead set up a factory.

On the other hand, I still play it very regularly and wish that RRT4 was a thing, unlike the dreadful abomination that was Sid Meier's Railroads!... the less said about that Fisher Price shitshow the better.

[Vuyek]

"There was a definite 'tipping point' that occured"
That's why the scenarios have a time limit.
Also, RNG dependant - the AI opponent corporation may settle near you and take away your (soon to be) prime targets to connect....

[Gregorovitch]

I got RT3 when it first came out and a few years a go, like maybe 10, I had a major retrospective binge on it for a few weeks getting all the gold medals for the missions, I think I got most if not all of them.

No doubt RT3 has "legendary" status as game. It was a cracker, especially if you can go nuts over train games as I can sometimes. If it has one fault (aside from being as old as the hills visually) is that there is a basic formula IIRC that answers pretty much any scenario which is to start by buying businesses and building a decent portfolio of them before even considering the trains themselves. You're then so rich you can expand ridiculously fast to meet mission requirements and easily buy out any pesky AI companies in your way.

Today, though, I play Transport Fever 2 for my train fix. Although it doesn't have AI opposition the construction model, train management, financial management, town growth/management systems and most especially the graphical representation of the the whole game world as well as the lovely trains themselves lie within a different universe to RT3.

I'd say once you've played and got to grips with TF2 there is no way back to RT3 really unless you're nuts about retro gaming per se.

[Vuyek]

"Although it doesn't have AI opposition"

Aye, there is the rub.

Hard pass.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Vuyek:

"Although it doesn't have AI opposition"

Aye, there is the rub.

Hard pass.

Well, you do you, but having played a hell of lot of both these games I would say that the lack of AI opposition doesn't amount to hill of beans compared to the glory of what you get in TF2 that RT3 can't even touch.

[Vuyek]

RT3 is a BUSINESS simulator. With mergers, takeovers, stock, competition.

TF2 is a toy simulator. A shiny toy.

[Gregorovitch]

TF2 uses a different business model, i.e. a national rail service tasked with helping to grow the economy over about 200 years. The key game play challenges are town growth (which is driven by a combination of passenger links, goods supply and pollution control) and logistics (how to shift all the goods and passengers that need shifting with limited space to build infrastructure).

It's not hard to get started and making money per se is not hard but growing towns to max pop and still meeting their demand for goods and train/bus services is very difficult, much more difficult than winning RT3 scenarios IMO unless you cheat by freezing time.

Plus, as you say, the game is drop dead, the trains are gorgeous to look at and ride in.

[Naselus]

Honestly, while I played it a fair bit and enjoyed my time with it, I don't think TF2 is really a challenger to the crown. It's a lot closer to a Transport Tycoon successor than a RRT successor - and despite the subject matter, there was very little in common between RRT and TT.

If anything, RRT is closer to something like Capitalism 2 than it is to Transport Fever tbh.