szy@Apple.COM (Steven J. Szymanski) (05/08/91)
The following is a review of "Sid Meier's Rail Road Tycoon" published by MicroProse for the Mac. REVIEWER CALIBRATION I like strategy games where one wins by planning and thought rather than by quick reaction or eye/hand coordination. I like games where I have a lot of control over what is going on. I like games where I receive a clear sense of accomplishment if I do well. My three favorite games on the Mac are Sim City, Playmaker Football, and (reluctantly) Harpoon. QUICK REVIEW I can finally get Harpoon off of my "Three Favorite Games" list. Railroad Tycoon is a GREAT!!!! game. It has everything I like in Sim City and more! The quality of the User Interface is excellent (it's a port of a DOS game, but a VERY good one). The game play is interesting and varied. It is just plain a good Mac game. On the down side, it is somewhat buggy. I have had several random crashes, although fewer once I have removed various INITs (I have not yet figured out which ones cause problems, sorry). My advice is: save after every financial report. By the way, I have yet to have a problem running it under System 7.0. All of my crashes were when running it on a machine with System 6.04. The other down side is display speed, which is moderate to poor. In particular, there is information which the programmers chose to display in a collection of floating windoids; very "Mac-like", but in the long run it slows down the redisplay process, particularly when scrolling the window underneath. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS I suppose the third down side is that the program is FAT. It takes up 3.2 Meg on disk; and 2.5 Meg in RAM for color (750K in RAM for B&W). It also depends on a high bandwidth to the user through the screen, so I would hate to try and play it on a 9" monitor (all of the windows can be resized, so you can take advantage of larger monitors. Take that Harpoon!). Likewise, there is so much information which is conveyed to the user through color, when available, that I suspect it is a much more difficult game to play in Black&White. Performance (other than the scrolling/redisplay problem mentioned above) is fine on a MacIIx, I have not had a chance to test it on any slower machines. GAME DESCRIPTION The World: When you start a new game, you get to choose from four venues: Eastern USA starting in 1830, Western USA starting in 1866, England starting in 1828, and Europe starting in 1900. The game then takes the basic geography/economy of the venue and generates a randomized map of the region. Each space in the map has an elevation (the grade of piece of track is dependent on the difference in elevations between the spaces it connects); and a type of terrain. There are natural types of terrain: Mountains, Hills, Foothills, Forrest, Clear, Farmland, Swamps, Oceans, Lakes, and Rivers; and developed types of terrain: Brewery, City, Cattle Ranch, Chemical Plant, Coal Mine, Factory, Food Processing Plant, Fort, Glass Works, Grain Elevator, Harbor, Landing, Lumber Mill, Oil Well, Paper Mill, Power Plant, Refinery, Salt Mine, Sheep Farm, Steel Mill, Stockyard, Textile Mill, Village, Vineyard, Winery. There is also competition in the world. The computer will generate up to three competing companies at a time. One will always start right away, and the others will be generated at random times. If a company goes out of business, it may eventually be replaced by a new company. Each of these competing companies will be played by the computer with one of several randomly chosen strategies (which is represented by the computer naming one of several historical railroad tycoons as "President" of the company). The strategies used ARE really different, and definitely effect play. Economics: There are various commodities which you can transport by rail: Mail, Passengers, Food, Livestock, Goods, Grain, Paper, Steel, Petroleum, Wood, Coal, Beer, Hops, Textiles, Chemicals, Cotton, Wine, Grapes, Armaments, Fertilizer, Nitrates, Wool. Each of the types of developed terrain has a (perhaps empty) set of commodities it will produce, a set of commodities it will pay to receive, and a set of commodities it will transform into other commodities. For instance: Coal Mines produce Coal, Steel Mills pay for Coal and transform it into Steel, Factories pay for Steel and transform it into Goods, Cities pay for Goods. Cities both produce Passengers and pay to receive them. Laying Tracks: So, you start by laying tracks between places which can exchange commodities. You survey the land (to get the elevations), and then taking into account the grades and the cost to purchase right-of-ways (which varies with terrain), you use the mouse to build the track one segment at a time. You can build bridges to cross rivers (with a choice of building materials). You can build tunnels through mountains where the grade would have been too steep. You can set up ferries to cross large bodies of water. You can double track segments of track to increase their throughput. Stations: At places where you want to pick up or deliver commodities you build stations. There are 3 different sizes of station, which have different areas of coverage. A station will accept deliveries for and deliver commodities to any developed terrain feature within its area of coverage. Thus a "Terminal" will accept deliveries for any Factory/City/etc. within 3 spaces, while a "Depot" will only do it for ones within 1 space. In addition to the basic station types, there are various improvements you can make. Some, like switching yards and maintenance shops, help you run the railroad. Some, like Hotels and Restaurants, help you earn a little extra money. Some just let you store commodities for future delivery. Trains: Once you have track and stations, its time to get some trains running. For each train, you first need to choose which type of locomotive engine you want to pull it. Each type of engine has different characteristics, some are very fast with a small number of cars, but quickly die as you add more weight to pull. Others are slow but have the horsepower to pull long trains. Some are good on steep grades, others are only useful in the flatlands. Some engines have higher maintenance costs than others, and some wear out faster than others. As the game progresses, new engine types come to market and you may want to switch some existing trains over to use them. Given an engine, you next define where you want the train to stop, and what cars you want it to carry between each set of stops. For each train, you specify at most 4 stops, but you can also indicate how many of the other station in between those stops it should stop at as well. Thus, the real limit is that you can change the set of cars carried (the "consists" of the train) at most 4 times in its route. At each of these stops you also indicate if it should wait until all of its cars are full before moving on to the next station. Operations: Once you have the trains rolling, the computer tasks care of most of the detailed dispatch work. In general, to insure that there will be no collisions, the computer will allow only one train on the stretch of track between stations at a time (two if it is double tracked). To expedite progress, you can add signal stations on the track to dive the track into multiple blocks. The computer dispatcher will then allow only one (two) trains to enter a block at a time. Even this is often too conservative, and so the game allows the user to override the switches at their own risk. Randomness: While randomness is not a major factor, not everything is completely predictable in the game. Bridges, particularly old wooden ones, will wash out in floods. Industries change. This can be good in the case where a new industry you need suddenly appears, but can really hurt when a Steel Mill you have been making deliveries to suddenly folds. In addition, there is an overall economic level which effects the price of track and the interest rate on bonds. Business: You can get money in several ways: You start out by selling 100,000 shares in your company; and through the game you may be given an opportunity to issue more stock. You can speculate in the stock of your own and competing companies. You hopefully will make money from the operation of the railroad. You can get extra money by selling Bonds (for which you need to pay interest each year until you buy them back). You can also make money on certain improvements to you stations. Through it all, you need to keep you stock holders happy. That mean you need to maintain a profit, and to keep you net worth growing. Investors get particularly nervous if you get too highly leveraged (your debt in Bonds get to high relative to your Net Worth). Competition: There are three realms of direct competition between companies: First there is the basic build-a-better-railraid aspect. At the end of each period, the computer reports on the relative value/profit/statistics of the existing companies, and you can see who is doing better. Second, two companies can build tracks into a single station and start a price war for ownership of the station. Whoever can meet the needs represented by the station better is rewarded with control of the station. During this period, all income from deliveries made to that station is halved; but once/if you have won, income is doubled for some period of time thereafter. Third, companies can try to take control over other companies by purchasing over 50% of their stock. The kind of control you get is limited but significant (after all, you only a majority stockholder not the president). And More: While this has taken a lot of text, I still have not covered all of the features of the program, much less some of the interesting interactions. What I do want to point out is that while there is a lot to the game, it does not FEEL complex. Most of the actions and interactions are "common sense" sorts of things, and I have yet to see anything happen which I though was not reasonable to expect. Thee are 4 basic levels of play and 3 other choices which control the difficulty of a game. It is very easy to get started at the lowest levels and work your way up. If you can play Sim City, you can play Tycoon. PROTECTION The game disks are not copy protected, but it does use a manual based anti-piracy scheme where you are asked to identify a model of locomotive based on a picture displayed on the screen. The number of different engines are small, and people who have played the game on IBM machines claim you do eventually learn to identify them without the book. USER INTERFACE Like I said at the top, they did a very good job of providing a real Mac- like interface for the program. With one exception, it abides by the Mac User Interface Guidelines better than most of the productivity tools I use. The one exception is that there is no "New Game", "Open Game", or "Close Game" menu commands. Instead, there is a opening screen which allows you to choose between open and new by clicking on "buttons" in a splash screen. All of the information for the start-up sequence is actually contained in a separate file, and it really looks like the engineer responsible for that file had never seen a Mac. Sigh. The real problem with this is not the esthetics; but is the fact that once you are running the only way to start a new game or reopen a saved one is to quit and relaunch the application; forcing you to go though the piracy check again. FINAL REVIEW Like I said earlier, I really like this game. The closest thing I can compare it to is SimCity, but I think it is better than Sim City on almost all counts. The game is more varied than Sim City. The only REAL difference between two games of Sim City is the placement of water and trees. (I know there are micro-differences in the behavior of the Sims, but my experience is that those tend to average out). In Tycoon, the are MANY more variables in the map itself, plus there are many different strategies for the competition. I have a real confidence that no two games will be alike. The game play is more intricate than Sim City. You have many more variables to control, some of which don't cost money to change. Thus while you are waiting to accumulate enough money to build that new spur out to a rich oil field, you can still be productive refining your existing train routes. You don't end up waiting around for money with nothing to do. The game has a better feeling of reward and completion than Sim City (and certainly more than Sim Earth). At various points in the game you are offered other jobs which you can retire into. The quality of the jobs is a rough measure of how you are doing; ranging from Hobo to President of the USA. After 100 years of play you will finally be forced to retire, and a score is developed based on the net worth of the company, the level you are playing at, and how well you did. All in all, Tycoon is an excellent game, and is on my recomended must-buy list. .szy -- AppleLink: szy "Apple has no idea what I am Internet: szy@apple.COM saying here and should not be UUCP: {sun,voder,amdahl,decwrl}!apple!szy held responsible for my raving"
pb1p+@andrew.cmu.edu (Peter Glen Berger) (05/09/91)
Hey, thanks for that review ... now I sort of want the game! I went out and bought Pirates! after playing a pirated version, because when I couldn't enter the right "codes" it let me play a sort of "demo mode" that 1) Wouldn't let me do well at all, but 2) Let me see the complexity and coolness of the game. Does RT have a similar mode? If it does, is there any way to get the "demo" version? Thanks in advance, ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pete Berger || ARPA: peterb@cs.cmu.edu Professional Student || Pete.Berger@andrew.cmu.edu Univ. Pittsburgh School of Law || BITNET: R746PB1P@CMCCVB Attend this school, not CMU || UUCP: ...!harvard!andrew.cmu.edu!pb1p ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Goldilocks is about property rights. Little Red Riding Hood is a tale of seduction, rape, murder, and cannibalism." -Bernard J. Hibbits ------------------------------------------------------------------------