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Review: Railroad Tycoon II Gold for Linux
Rating 10/10
Buy from Lokisoft.
When I survey my life and contemplate which computer games have sucked my time away from being an otherwise productive citizen, Railroad Tycoon stands out high on the list. I spent many a summer afternoon with my friend Nate and his 286 building railroad empires while our peers were out living healthy and energetic lives. Now, Loki has released a new version of Railroad Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon Gold Edition 2, for Linux. RT2 is very similar to its predecessor, but has improved graphics, more scenarios, campaigns, multi-player support, a terrain editor and an improved and more complex financial model.
At the game's core, as the name implies, you build railroads. You ship passengers, mail, and a wide variety of other raw materials, goods and products from one location to another. If you send raw materials to a city with the appropriate industry, it will create a finished product for you to ship to another city. You have the option to select how difficult of an industrial model you wish to use. If you chose the basic, option, you can ship anything to any city and they will buy it. This obviously makes it much easier to find a buyer for your goods. Think it will be fun to ship every carload of coal in the United States to Alpena, MI? That's fine, because they'll happily pay for it. For those looking for a little more challenge or a more realistic game, you can choose an advanced model which only pays a fraction of the price for goods not demanded, or the expert level where you basically get nothing for undemanded goods.
But if you are only playing to build a railroad, you are missing the real fun of the game. If you play your cards right, it will be no time before you are making money faster than you can spend it. It is time to become a true robber baron and create monopolies that would make Microsoft drool. If you have a couple hundred thousand spare dollars, you can begin to buy up all of the industries around your railroad-though you have to be playing the most difficult industrial model to do this. While you do need to be careful to buy and hold only profitable industries, this is an easy way to earn a little money.
The real monopoly building fun, and frankly the most fun part of the game, is playing a ruthless corporate raider. RT2 has added features such as buying or selling on the margin give you that extra edge when playing the market. Thanks to the designer's decision to separate corporate funds from company funds, you can now first personally buy up a bunch of a competitors stock and thereby guarantee some votes when your company attempts to merge (or more accurately, take over) the company.
While the game concept and design are excellent, there are a couple of minor issues with the game. First, the scrolling is very slow which makes is a little bit difficult to get around the map. Second, if you choose to start a new game on a large map, it can take a little while for the computer to create the game. Both of these items, while they can be corrected with a getting a faster machine, the performance was somewhat slow for a fairly well loaded Pentium II.
Overall, this is wonderfully addictive game. There are a wide variety of difficulty levels, depending on how complex of an economy you want to play. If you are they type who would rather control the world's economy than run around through caverns shooting thiings, this game is a must buy.
Note: Railroad Tycoon II Gold, which this game is, is different from Railroad Tycoon II. As Gold implies, it comes equipped with more scenarios, and more playability.
http://www.linuxcentral.com
Lower shipping rates than Loki too...
What I wanted was some kind of simple scripting language where I could write a few simple rules for my vehicles and stations, rather than having to point and click for absolutely everything. Are there any games like this? (And don't say Core Wars :)
While it's still deep in development, WorldForge has exactly this plan in mind.
In parallel with our C++ server development effort, we are also developing a powerful scripted AI tool called Cyphesis which allows players to create customized scripts in Python. Cyphesis is a complete server in and of itself - you can run a game completely independent of any other server or client, although since it's in Python you're limited to a rather small number of entities.
Cyphesis bases its scripting on 'goals'. Rather than specify, "Move north, south, south, east, up", you will specify, "go to smithy and buy an axe" and the character uses internal AI logic to determine its path and what to do when it gets there. Cyphesis' author, Aloril, has plans for building in a wide wealth of artificial intelligence building blocks. If you're interested in helping develop AI stuff, drop him a line.
We intend to make very good use of Cyphesis in the WorldForge game system. In addition to being useful to players in running their own scripts, it can run goal-based monster AI's, ALife sims, and so forth.
While Cyphesis is still in alpha testing, you're encouraged to download it and check it out. And if you'd like to help developing it, or any other part of the WorldForge gaming system, hop on by our joining page for a todo list to get involved. It's a big system, as you can imagine, and we'd love to have more programmer and scripting help! :-)
How about an open source game that doesn't just emulate windoze games, but does something new and better.
Check out WorldForge then. We're building a game system for building massively multiplayer online roleplaying and strategy games (as opposed to the traditional twitch games). We're designing it to allow others to be able to reuse the bulk of it but change the game rules logic to be able to mold it into new and interesting forms.
You'll probably want to check out our FAQ first.
If you'd like to join the team and help build this game system, we'd love to have you. Hop on over to the WorldForge join page. Then come on by our irc server: irc.worldforge.org / #forge.
On the other hand, Transport Tycoon was written by someone else (albeit for the same vendor). I can't remember the name (Chris Carter springs to mind), but the same author recently released Rollercoaster Tycoon.
All these mentioned are great games! Many don't come for Linux, which is why I still boot to MS....
... and today's pet project has
The thing I always found with the original RailRoad Tycoon was that the game always panned out the same; instead of making big strategic decisions, I was faffing about with the minutiae (sp?) of bus loading/unloading decisions at individual stations.
:)
What I wanted was some kind of simple scripting language where I could write a few simple rules for my vehicles and stations, rather than having to point and click for absolutely everything.
Are there any games like this? (And don't say Core Wars
OT: The X10 adverts are downright offensive, Rob. Bin 'em.
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Peter
Hmm. I've been checking the local EB and Babbage's for any linux games but they always look at me with a blank stare.
:/
I ordered CivCTP from loki directly, but I really wanted to buy MythII from a normal store.
I can't wait until q3 comes out, tho. It is going to rock being able to stroll up to the guy at Babbage's and say, "I want a copy of quake 3 for linux" and not have him say "is that like macintosh?"
This sig is false.
It builds, slowly, especially in markets like Linux games, where there is a high perceived risk. When the truth comes out about Linux games - whether good or ill - competition will decide whether to appear. Competition is only immediate when people assume that entering the market is a sure thing. Until then, well, there's always reluctance to be an early adapter.
I've seen enough enthusiasm about Linux games around here that I think people would buy them. More intriguingly, I think most gamers consider open source a less important issue than for tools such as operating systems and web servers.
I see people cheerfully talking playing closed-source games who would never even dream of using a closed-source OS.
D
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All I can say is I bought Civ:CTP and I love it. I'm having a blast playing it, and I got a free FreeBSD CD from (I can't remember if it was LinuxMall or LinuxCentral... sorry...).
I'm having as much fun with FreeBSD as I am with Civ:CTP. Still run Linux on all but one of my boxes, though...
This game has been out for a while now. Not the gold version but still. It has been reviewed by every game site and I have never seen a low rating or even an average rationg. I think it got strategy game of the year for strategy games+ magazine (something like that). Anyway, if you are even remotly interested in railroads and strategy games it will not dissapoint you. Up close it looks like a model trainset, the graphics are just incredible. I heard they used model rr buildings to model the buildings in the game after. It was done to make things cheaper but things turned out even better. Anyway, just a very good progression on the original and if any game is a representation of a "good" game, this is it.
That's funny, I can think of why sales are low for the exact same reasons...
1) Community -- The Free Software / Open Source crowd don't like software that doesn't generally like or support closed source software such as the type Loki releases.
2) Competition -- There would certainly be more compeittion of there was a lot of demand. Economics teaches us that people don't leave $20 bills lying on the sidewalk.
3) The desktop argument -- Linux runs lots of servers... those don't need games. Why would the average Linux user buy more games the average other OS user?
4) Pend up demand -- see #2.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
do i have to point out the irony in that this was posted by an Anonymous Coward...??
;)
Games are somewhat different from other software becasuse we don't need them. If my O/S isn't Free Software, then the company that I bought it from can revoke my licence at any time and prevent me from obtaining a new one - so If I were going an all-commercial-software solution one company (The O/S developer) could legally prevent me from using *any* software that I had. I don't like that plan.
With games, although the standard commercial licence still is obnoxious and lame, if my licnece is revoked for a game... I've lost a single game - Not a $500 Office Suite, Not $10,000 'worth' of software, just one game.
The issue with the "Open Source" development model is similar. Bugs in your O/S or an important program like a Web Server screw everything up, cost a lot of money to fix, and otherwise basically suck.
With a game, yea - bugs suck, but they aren't fatal and can't cost millions of dollars.
There's also the fact that there just aren't that many good games that are Free Software. XArchon, FreeCiv, and XShipWars just arn't as good as StarCraft, Quake II, and MechWarrior III.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
ftp://ftp.lokigames.com/pub/demos/rt2/
I don't know if we ever announced this... but the tarball should work.
m. vance
programmer, loki
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
Has anyone heard how many copies of Civ-CTP Loki has actually sold (vs. "shipped") ?
I've heard that they aren't telling. Someone on Linux Today speculated that it's because they don't want the other game vendors to realize what a lucrative market Linux games is.
At any rate, a figure for the number of copies sold, crossed with a survey of what fraction of Linuxers actually bought a copy, should give us a ballpark figure for that elusive "number of Linux users".
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It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade