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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------