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Railroad Tycoon 3 Review November 11, 2003 Jakub Wojnarowicz |
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Summary: PopTop took control of a moribund franchise and brought it back to life with Railroad Tycoon 2. However, lacking a significant period of time to distance the sequel from its predecessor, will Railroad Tycoon 3 impress as much? Jakub think so, and he goes over the changes that have kept this wonderful, charming franchise so fresh.
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
Trains
My love of trains is boundless. Two of my greatest regrets stem from this fact. Firstly, one of my dreams is to have been around in the days when steam giants like the 6-4-4-6 S1, 4-4-4-4 or the colossal, famous 4-8-8-4 “Big Boy” plied the steel arteries of the world. Second, my immigration to Canada as a 6-year-old has removed me from the fantastic railroads of Europe, whose memory still lingers.
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Thus, the Railroad Tycoon games have always held a special place in my heart. The first was a classic that I thought could not be surpassed, and it was with great trepidation that I bought the second, only to discover that PopTop got the formula down pat. Thus, imagine my consternation when I heard that they dared mess with the delectable mix of trains, stock markets and tycoon goonery. A new economic model? Custom scenario rules? This new-fangled ‘3D’? Bloody murder fermented in my mind, O my brothers and only friends.
Not to worry
First of all, unlike previous games that suffered a terrible collapse in the transition to 3D, Railroad Tycoon 3 has only benefited from it. The 3D engine allows players to lay track in natural curves, rather than angles of 1/8th or 1/16th of a circle, as was true in the previous games. This also means that it’s possible to wind your way through the valleys among hills, rather than brute-forcing over, or paying for an expensive tunnel. Most importantly, the transition to 3D allows players to get up close to the locomotives and enjoy some fantastic scenery.
The new economic model is a stroke of genius. Its flexibility is mind-boggling, allowing players to simply connect cities to each other, with one train running between any two connections, or creating specific routes for maximum profit. Of course, none of this is new. What is new are alternate modes of transport.
Coal and iron mines tend to be in mountainous areas, far from civilization. Long before trains, these goods had to make their way across the land to the cities. The most expedient route available was water, be it rivers or oceans. However, given enough demand, goods will make their way by land to a city, over short distances. Thus, the need to connect directly to resource production areas is alleviated. Free market economics will decide what gets shipped where on your trains. If a lumber mill really wants its wood but iron and coal are taking up your cars because a steel mill pays more, then the lumber mill is out of luck.
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Of course, you’re also presented with the opportunity to own industries. Why not buy the lumber mill for a dirt cheap price, and force your trains to carry logs to the city, in order to make a profit off the mill. Then you can buy a furniture factory and use the supply of lumber to make a further profit. That, however, is not even a beginning to the deviousness you’ll see in multiplayer, especially on the stock market.
SIDEBAR: The system requirements are laughably low on RRT3, with a P2/400 and 128MB of RAM with a 16MB 3D card.
| Graphics and sound | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
Graphics
The graphics are actually a bit disappointing. There’s nothing wrong with the terrain and day/night cycle, which are beautiful. The water has nice pixel shader effects, but the focus of the game, the trains, are horribly neglected. The basic details that identify every train are readily visible, but the small touches are gone. Wheels are not actual 3D objects, but pairs of flat, animated textures.
The textures are rather low-res and while they have rudimentary details, these aren’t particularly impressive. There’s an undeniable lack of color depth to any given texture, they seem done for a 16-bit color palette. They’re functional and it’s easy enough to identify trains, but we’d be overgenerous if we suggested that the textures accomplish anything beyond that.
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The terrain engine is really rather impressive, able to display huge mountains as ably as deserts, forests, plains and oceans, but the most important gameplay change this allows is the way track laying is handled. Being able to control the exact path of the track using minute angles allows one to minimize the severity of the grades faced by his trains, thus improving delivery time, but while the graphics and the game support this, the tool to do so is not conducive to it. The track laying tool is very biased towards long, curving tracks, and absolutely hates allowing track to come off at small angles from a main line. It’s often necessary to create a 90 degree turn and then delete the extra track before proceeding with the new, slight angle. It’s a minor quibble, but it’d save time and money; and those are the two things a railroad company always cares about.
All in all, the graphics engine feels like a jack of all trades aimed at a lower denominator, than an uber-l33t visual machine. RT3’s low system requirements support that hypothesis, and when judged on those merits, Railroad Tycoon 3 has a rather splendid engine.
Sound
The sound effects are much better than the graphics, relatively speaking. PopTop provided a multitude of sound effects for the various trains of course, but also present are background sounds for rivers, coasts, the wilds of nature and the hum of civilization. Of course the trains coming into stations still make those pleasant video lottery terminal-like dings and beeps.
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Music has been very important in PopTop’s version of Railroad Tycoon and that certainly carries over to RT3. Unfortunately it seems most of the tracks are repeats from the previous games. Maybe the tunes are all genuine, and it’s a little tough to go back in history and make some more railroad songs, but it’s not as if anyone would be put off in original scores being created.
SIDEBAR: Locomotives inter-city passenger transportation for a couple of decades after the invention of the car, as cars were unreliable and servicing the early, rare models, was difficult. The Ford Model T changed all that.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
The good
Railroad Tycoon 3 is fantastically good. The curious economic system works really well, and unlike previous games it’s no longer a chore to transport goods to cities that specifically request them. Indeed, with the default settings, trains will simply carry the cargo that pays the most.
However, the option of micromanagement is still there, and that’s what allows RT3 to succeed where so many economic sims fail. The tedious details of running the company can be left alone, or you can run them to ever-greater benefit. Have your eyes on a particularly profitable brewery? Set your trains to transport anything but the grain that a brewery needs, and that brewery will start losing money (and its purchase price will drop) faster than you can say “This is the kind of abuse that led to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”
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The campaign confronts the player with about twenty scenarios with specific victory conditions for bronze, silver and gold medals. These are complemented by general scenarios on the same maps, with different conditions. Conditions generally aren’t too difficult, however we caution anyone from allowing the USRA to run their railroad during WWI… it’s not a pretty sight. A typical requirement is to connect cities A, B and C by such-and-such date for Bronze, have a company value of X also by that date for silver, and haul 20 cars of product Y by an earlier date. In general they’re smart and challenging, adding a sense of purpose to a map, but they don’t mask RT3’s two greatest flaws.
But before we get to that, a few words on multiplayer: if you manage to find a game, it’ll be vicious and cut-throat. While the stock market and tycoonery in general take a back seat in the singleplayer campaign, in multiplayer it’s a completely different story. Everyone runs the ragged edge of safety on margin buying and (occasionally) short selling, because to do without means financial ruin, but going too far into debt exposes one to the risk of margin calls and short squeezes.
AI? What’s that?
Railroad Tycoon 3’s AI is just plain terrible. One of the warning signs we should have caught onto is in the difficulty levels, which merely seem to affect the economics of the game. On Easy, the player gets a bonus; on Normal, things are even, and difficulty levels after that simply penalize the player and/or give benefits to his competition.
Competitor behavior seems completely unaffected by the difficulty levels. There are two things necessary to success in RT3: expansion and proper management. The only facet of the AI that is worse than its expansion policy, is its management. The AI will run multiple trains on the same one-rail track, it will ignore connections between some cities, and be satisfied with five or six cities, tops. Occasionally it’ll go wacko and expand like crazy, but its management never seems to improve as the debt load generally grows and grows.
Which brings us to the other flaw in RT3. Scenario challenges aside, all one needs to do to succeed is expand. Small, big, medium – the city size doesn’t matter. All that matters is increasing the number of potential destinations for goods and passengers. The modern era is a touch more difficult since passengers shun rail transit, meaning that more trains will have to be designed that deliver cargo straight to the destination and skip cities in between, but this is a minor adjustment and not really worthy of complaint. We speculate that the “critical mass” syndrome is what led to the AI being toned down, since once a company achieves a certain size, it becomes nigh-on unassailable.
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Other minor problems affect RT3; there’s a rare crash to desktop error that comes on without warning, for example. There are gameplay issues like having to put both maintenance stations and water/sand towers along all routes, even though one would think that a facility equipped with the gear to repair a train would be able to spare a little water and some sand. We’d like to be able to play more expansive scenarios, such as the entire map of the US or Europe, rather than dealing with small, no-name towns in Texas or Germany.
SIDEBAR: The Baltimore and Ohio railroad was the first in the US.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Gameplay
The aforementioned flaws just can’t draw away from the amazing addiction factor. Prepare for detox.
Graphics
Although a touch too weak on the key point of the game – trains – they bring the world much closer to the player.
Intro movie
Best ever? Perhaps. Definitely the most charming.
Challenges
The challenge system is generally well thought-out, but clearly has a problem with the war scenarios. The option to hand over your railroad to the USRA should be accompanied by the gift of a gun with a single bullet, and the weird final scenario of the American campaign is just… weird.
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Cons
AI
Even Webster runs out of enough synonyms of “terrible” to accurately describe the AI.
Critical Mass Syndrome
Connect enough cities and you’re unstoppable. Unstoppable I say!
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SIDEBAR: The fastest train in RRT3 is capable of 300mph.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |