SM's Railroads!

[Shayne]

Anyone given this a go yet?  I spent a few hours on it the last couple days and I really enjoy it, makes the last few Railroad Tycoons look rather amateurish, and the hidden bonus is that its got support and a couple plugins for my G15 keyboard built into the game

Very fun game, and Gamespot seems to think so as well.  Average on Gamerankings is a little low, but i will admit the game is a bit shallow, but a great way to burn through 20 hours in the next few weeks.

[TheDruid]

Downloading it right now... i'll see if your "claims" are true, muahahahahaha-a-cough-cough-haaaaaack-splat... still trying to get over my cold 

[TheDruid]

Played and liked

I spent some time with this game and found it to be quite fun, however its appealing lack of any serious dept will also contribute to the short lived attention i will give it.

I played through about 4 games now, two solo and two with computer AI. First off its a resource hog so it don’t take long to slow down to a slide show on my machine. The first time i played it, graphics were great. Second time i played it, i upgraded my video drivers, now i get graphic errors all over the place, pink pixilated water ect.

Game play is fun, but simplistic once you figure out "the build strategy".

I found the best way to play, is to build disconnected tracks from out lying resources to cities, where there is only ever 1 maybe 2 trains dedicated per track.

My earlier attempts had multiple interconnected tracks running in parallel to everything. Bad idea, the path finding gets confused, and trains get stuck right away where they start eating into your bottom line, since your paying maintenance and no making any cash off of them.

I found that a city terminal can accept up to 3 tracks (although you can build more parallel, only three are recognized as a "stop" at that city) Keep it simple, have maybe two tracks dedicated to dropping off resources, and one picking up resources to bring to other cities. Keep your city connections simple, where one track will connect 2, maybe three cities at most. What ever you do, don’t join these tracks, and especially don’t join incoming tracks with out going tracks, it all adds to the pathing confusion. Also keep tracks dedicated to one maybe two trains at most. If your using a track for dual purpose, have trains leave in opposite directions so that they avoid meeting up somewhere on the beaten track (for example, maybe you have a track coming in from the east dropping off trees, you can extend that track west and dedicate another train to pickup grain)

I found that following these simple strategies netted me a 100,000k net worth well before the time limit was up.