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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1357 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).

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.

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