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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1895 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

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Best version of Railroad Tycoon? I've been hankering to give it a proper go, having only played one of them in my youth (where I quickly went bankrupt).

You may want to check out Transport Fever 2 (soon to be 3). It's made by Germans I think, who presumably thought that Railroad Tycoon was too simplistic.

Transport Fever 2 is pretty but IMO in sandbox mode it's only worth playing with custom maps manually set up such that the supply chains make more sense. Otherwise the only brickmaker sets up shop three years' journey from the only stone quarry and the game makes this work by paying you absurd amounts of money to make the delivery. The economy generally makes absolutely no sense and I find it breaking suspension of disbelief. Also the game tends toward death by micromanagement when you have to manage the maintenance and depreciation schedules of countless individual buses (e.g.) across the map. But, the sheer beauty and ability to zoom in to street/rail level make the game worthwhile. If you do want to generate and edit custom maps be sure to watch some videos because there are hidden settings to make them extra gorgeous.

In general I find that TF2 makes for an excellent train table sim, but the game elements themselves don't fit right and mainly serve as a fig leaf.

Contrast with Sid Meier's Railroads! which I think is a fun and awesome game despite its age, where laying rail is more intuitive and supply chains make sense because industries tend to spring up near their inputs. The challenge is in competing with AI rail companies, which adds a very fun layer to the game including poaching their vital industries at auction and buying out their stock. Maybe selling some of yours for capital to expand, which makes you vulnerable to takeover in turn. It's fast-paced: a normal game lasts half an hour to forty-five minutes. IDK why this one never got more love but I played the heck out of it when it was current. Installing it now requires some tampering with files and third-party patches IIRC.

2, I think. Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder

Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder

They must be using a peculiar definition of "best". It's a good game. It's elegant in its simplicity, and it's amazing how large you can make the system using so few rules. The UI is historic, and hilariously bad. It has been hugely influential on transport games.

But it's not Railroad Tycoon 2. The depth and complexity is just much higher there. The game gains so much by having an amazing campaign. It gets genuinely difficult towards the end. It has been more than a decade, but I still remember only beating some of the later missions by starting right out the gate with pump-and-dump stock shenanigans, and using the proceeds to execute a hostile acquisition of one of the competitor railroad companies...

I played a bunch of Railroad Tycoon 2 (it got a Linux port back in the pre-Steam-Deck days when that really meant something), but IIRC I usually exploited the AI's poor stock-trading capability in the other direction - my usual game style somehow (I forget how; it's been decades) would quickly convince the AI that my stock was nearly worthless, and also left the AI convinced of that for a while after I'd started pulling in decent profits. So I could issue shares at the start of the game to fund a good running start, buy back my whole company for pennies on the dollar after the stock price crashed, and then issue and rebuy shares judiciously at elevated prices to fund expansions thereafter. The actual rail building was fun, but it felt like I was financially "cheating" to pay for it.

My classic strat for economic advantage in RTII was to build up my railway to a profitable network. Then when I had enough capital I would invest in the really killer advantage: "tunnels" you could build by using the lay track feature to change elevation of terrain. In this way you could cut through mountain passes to lay flat track that would in time be massively profitable, but in the short term cost your company millions in losses. If you sold all your stock before doing this, the effect on the stock price of your company seeing losses in the millions in a given year would instantly crater it to $1, at which point you could easily rebuy all the shares. Then going forward your company would be even more profitable than before because the one-time loss incurred in "tunneling" through the mountains would be repaid by the much faster and flatter route.

Once I had dominant control of my own company I would then pause and create subsidiary companies with my excess personal funds (every two years was the minimum) to create AI-ran companies which would just run low-profit goods to my stations and use the AI bonuses to make money. Then I would without unpausing be re-elected chair of my main company.

To be fair, many Greek shippers use this strategy IRL to this day, so it's not fully unrealistic.

I just play Factorio for my train fix these days.

Same (just got to Fulgora for the first time) but I'm increasingly feeling a desire for something like factorio plus population management. A colony rather than a crash site. Trains are more fun with conductors and passengers rather than fully-automated engines and cargo that could just as reasonably be carried by bot or belt.

When I do want the train fix, I edit the settings such that resources patches are at maximum scarcity but also a bit richer. Trains should be all about those long journeys between nodes. It can be done. And this way there tend to be big stretches of unspoiled countryside along the way.

Also a big fan of the cargo ships mod.

Check out Captain of Industry (light colony sim elements in that every facility needs people to work it and you have to grow food and provide housing for them), or Sweet Transit (the game is nothing but moving passengers around from place to place so they can go to their jobs and whatnot).

Songs of Syx is about managing populations and supply chains, but it doesn’t have micro-scale factory puzzles as a core loop. Might or might not be of interest.

But I’ve been dying for a Rimworld hybrid where you shepherd your colonists through Minecraft tech mods. Single-tile machines fed by cables and pipes, not scaling factories. I can dream.

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