Cheap Railroad Tycoon 2 (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Railroad Tycoon 2

For me it is a fascinating flexible strategy game
Railroad Tycoon II is extremely flexible. At one level you can play it as an exciting multi-user game with robbers robbing trains, trains blowing apart and ruthless AI opponents. At another level you can read through the book and understand much more about how the game was built and its capabilities. You can control the speed of play, I use the slowest speed and even then I find it too fast when running over 300 trains in the UK at the same time. For me using the book, RailRoad Tycoon II Official strategy guide and the game together meant learning about the map editor so I could customise other people's maps and make my favourite map of England much more accurate to play. The game itself becomes much more interesting as you deal with more levels of complexity. You can even eliminate the AI opponents and robbers. Introduce new events and generally create your own world.

The game shows its North American roots. My background being English is very different, nowhere in England is more than 50 miles from the sea. Fishing and ports are much more important. My personal wish list would be to add different types of ports and a fish cargo to the game.

But to enjoy the game to the full you really need the Official Strategy Guide. Is it likely to have a harmful effect. Don't know. I have spent many hours playing the game, I have even learnt a bit of geography whilst playing it, I now know roughly where a few places like Denver and Frankfurt are. Also I can tell you exactly where the mountain ranges that are going to slow down trains are as well. It also gives an introduction to economics, how resources interact with cites and manufacturing plants.

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Promising...
"Railroad Tycoon II" is the 1998 sequel to the 1990 classic "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon". Even though Sid's name has jumped ship, this is a solid sequel to a great game. The premise is simple enough: Build a railroad, buy some trains, ship stuff from where it is to where it's needed. Get rich.

From humble concepts mighty games are grown, and enriching this basic idea are things like: train quality, which forces you to choose between [cost], fast, good on slopes, or reliable; keeping demand high by supplying only small amounts versus the cost of connecting other places where demand is high; short routes with small payloads and fast turnarounds versus long routes with big payloads; buying and selling stocks to take advantage of economic trends; buying the businesses whose materials you're transporting; defending against train robbers or hiring shady characters and exploiting legal loopholes; and so on.

Basically, this premise works, and supplies hours of good, addictive fun. There's a lot of replay value as well, since you can take a different approach to each game. The graphics are (still, even in 2003) pleasant and communicative, and the sound is mostly good. The scenarios are pretty challenging without (for the most part) being crushingly hard, and the three levels of victories encourages replay as you try to "go for the gold".

The are a number of hitches, unfortunately. The manual and tutorial are really inadequate--which tends to sting given that most of the fan-supplied data on the Web is gone. The supply-and-demand process is actually somewhat opaque. (I did figure it out, but it took me a while and some research on the 'net.) Your board of directors is very gullible, not able to look ahead even a month (this makes them easy to manipulate). The stock market stuff makes it easy to lose with a thriving railroad and doesn't add much to the game that I've experienced.

Further, trains really only go from point A to point B. That is, say you have cattle yard (B) that needs grain and two grain farms (A1 and A2) that supply grain, you can't set up a train to pick up grain at A1, travel to A2 to pick up more grain, and then travel to B to drop it off. When the train stops, it's completely unloaded. This is never spelled out anywhere, and certain ways of setting up a train's route suggest otherwise. But in the above situation, your train will actually unload grain at a grain farm (for no money) rather than haul it another ten miles to the cattle yard, where it's actually needed.

The scale of the game is such that each train moves about 1/50th-1/100th of its actual speed. In other words, a trip that should take a week takes a year. This is probably a necessary abstraction(train-model fans will want to keep in mind that this game has NOTHING to do with their hobby) but it has the effect of exaggerating every mistake or mishap. Jesse James didn't just rob a single train, he robbed your entire route for the year.

All of this detracts a bit, but it's a testament to the strength of the concept and execution that this would still be a five-star game, even with these issues. The killer--the thing that made me subtract a star--is the track-laying interface. It's really easy to lay track you didn't mean to. There's no undo. It actually costs you to remove it. The way the UI figures out the smoothest route is dubious, and there's really no decent handling for the fact that finding the smoothest track is best done at the closest zoom while finding the shortest route is best done at the furthest zoom.

Coupled with some bugs that make stations seem disconnected, you can end up in a situation where you lose a game because the track-laying interface was not up to the task. And that's the only =real= sour lemon in this package. Again, though, even with this, there's still a lot of fun.

It'll definitely whet your apetite for "Railroad Tycoon 3".

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Like It So Far
I just got the game a few days ago included in a value pack. I am currently playing the campaigns and so far I am enjoying the game. Even my husband is playing it.
Pros: Sim type game
Different type of trains and several campaigns which I love
Is challenging for an average game player don't know about hardcore players
Con's: The game tutorial was okay, but wish I could find a way to start back at the beginning of it. When my husband wanted to play I had to tell him how to do it instead of him doing the tutorial because it wouldn't start back at the beginning
Other than that I don't know of any other cons since I have just started playing and haven't started the scenerios.
You do get tired of laying down tracks all the time, and have to zoom in and out.
So far I am really enjoying it