Sid Meier's Railroads!

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $7.99

Features:

• Sid Meier-designed railroad tycoon game
• You're in charge of building your own railroad empire
• A variety of play modes including the "sand-box" modeling mode, real-time LAN and Internet play
• Railroads! delivers a strategy experience that will cater to both RTS gamers and locomotive fans alike
• Engage in corporate warfare against rival tycoons, slick entrepreneurs and robber barons

Accessories:
Sid Meier's Railroads! Official Strategy Guide (Official Strategy Guides)	PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Fun While It Lasts: Performance Problems [Posted on 2007-10-23]
For people who are used to Railroad Tycoon 2 or 3, this is not the same game. Gone are all the intricate details and the sophisticated finances. The result is a game that is more fun to play in that the strategies are stripped down to straightforward financial plays. This makes the game much easier to learn, but less fun in the long run.

A source of disappointment was the lack of vertical integration of industries. One of the aspects I always enjoyed about the older RT games was that you could integrate nitrates -> fertilizer -> grain -> cattle -> food, making money every step of the way. In Railroads!, the operation is simplified to Cattle -> Food, and that's it. No fertilizers, no shipping grain to the cattle yard to increase production, just a simple operation. The real reason for this is that one of the game dynamics is that you are limited to 3 to 4 parallel tracks running through a station; to move all those other goods would be a logistical nightmare the game couldn't handle.

Speaking of nightmares, the biggest problem with the game is that it constantly crashes, even with all the updates. I have a brand new Pentium 2.33x1.33 dual core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 256MB graphics card and the son of a gun still crashes unexpectedly toward the end of the game.

The game is very fun, graphics and sounds are great, but you need a robust computer to unleash its full power. Even then, it might not work properly. It's a fun game that goes quickly (as opposed to marathon sessions of Civilization). That's because the developers concentrated on making it a "fun" game rather than a "realistic" game. At least that means a swift end to a failing railroad. Hopefully, the game remains stable long enough to get to that point; often it crashes by the time the map is filled up with rail lines.

The first Sid Meier game I didn't like [Posted on 2008-01-19]
I thought this was supposed to be Railroad Tycoon 4. It's more Railroad Tycoon 0.5. Even with the latest patch, this game crashes too much and is too slow and too buggy to be playable. Once my railroad empire gets more than a dozen connections, the game slows to a crawl, even on my relatively fast system. Literally after I place a section of track, there is a 10-second delay until the interface becomes responsive again, and this is with the game paused. Train routing is seriously flawed. Even with "easy" train routing enabled, if a train gets near its destination station, but that station has another train in it, instead of waiting, the train will turn around and circumnavigate the entire track system to approach the station from the other side! So a short delivery between two neighboring cities could take years of game time. I saw trains frequently move back and forth on a section of track and never reach a destination. The only fix is to delete the train and create a new one with the same route. I have better things to do with my time.

Easy and fun. [Posted on 2008-02-17]
This is one of those games that is just plain fun. Not much to think about... a lot of people have been complaining that it's WAY too easy, which is probably true. I still enjoy it though. If you feel like passing the time and not thinking too much, you'll like it. They could have done a lot more with it to make it more elaborate and challenging. *shrug* I like it! For under $20 bucks, it's not like you're dumping a whole lot of cash into it... if I paid $50 for it, I would have said it was a waste of money.

Try it. It's a fun little game.

Warning: it is not compatible with Windows Vista. It may crash every 10-15 minutes. If you run it in windowed mode and with the anti aliasing off, it seems to last longer. In fact, when I run it like that and play the European maps and the west coast, it doesn't seem to crash. Once I play in the midwest and the northeast, it crashes after a few minutes. Their response to this problem is to wait for Service Pack 1 from Microsoft...

Fun for Old Railroaders and for Soon to be Railroaders [Posted on 2008-02-22]
I bought this for my 12 year old son. Both him, and myself have become proficient on the older Railroad Tycoon II and when we saw that a new "Railroads" came out, I bought it for the both of us.

"Railroads" graphics are the big standout in the Railroads game. I have a 2003ish clean running Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz with NVidia graphics card and 1GB of RAM and I had to turn the graphics on this game to minimum in order to get keep the picture from being herky - jerky. It asks a lot out of the graphics card.

The older Railroads II game can go deeper into "complexity" or "Realism" than the Railroads game does, but that is ok because the graphics are like eating desert to the eye and there is plenty of strategy in the newer "Railroads" version.

Having read some of the reviews listed here, I am reminded of the commonly made comments heard when a really popular book is made into a movie. Railroad Tycoon II and III set a high standard for a deep simulation strategy game that takes tens and hundreds of hours to master. Most of the "grand masters" of RRIII most likely started with the original Railroad Tycoon and progressed through the different versions on their path to proficiency in RRT3. With the newer Railroads game, I can see a new generation of younger gamers getting hooked on Railroads simplier game play and graphics. Then when Railroads II comes out, I suspect it will attempt to bring this newest series of Railroad simulation to the level where Railroad Tycoon III left off.

For the time being, I can see a Sid Meier Railroad simulation fan playing both versions depending upon how much time they had for a game and how deep they wanted to get. So far we have not played RR II since getting the newer Railroads. ;)

Didn't live up to its hype [Posted on 2008-03-31]
There was so much hype for this game when it was first announced. With Sid Meier at the helm, it seemed like it was destined to be a hit.

Sadly, it is so buggy and is a severe disappointment. The game crashes tot he desktop every now and then. The gameplay gets choppy as more cities/trains are included within a scenario. This choppiness and crashing happens even on an Intel Core2Duo/Saphire x1900xtx machine (built it myself) and yes all my drivers were up to date. Laying out track, while it is easy, it can also get very frustrating. Making junctions is just as frustrating as well.

The realism factor is hardly present. When you lay track through a city, the city simply "parts the waves" so you can place tracks within a city. The animations for the cities as well as the industries are bland. The trains while moving on the track are nice, but when they reach their destination, the train sits there, then turns around and goes the other way. If it continues on its way, the train fades slightly then goes on its way. When the train reaches a junction, when another trains reaches the same point, it makes you hit your forehead eith the pam of your hand and say," Can't be." The trains look confused and seem like to just stop and go nowhere.

When you great a consist list (cars added to your locomotive), all you do is click. If you add passenger cars, you don't even see any people. Even when you are picking up raw materials at either factories or picking up mail, you don't see a soul.

There was a lot of hype that hobbiest who miss building their train layouts or for people who have an interest in the train hobby but don't have the room, there would be an option to build your own layout. Unfortunately it;s just like the scenarios but in sandbox mode.

For some people this game would appeal to them but others who love realism, tycoon, and business sims will be disappointed. By the way, this is not Railroad Tycoon 4.

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