MAIN
NEWS

Resources
CHEATS
GALLERY
RELEASE DATES
BETA CENTER
LINKS
FORUM
GAMERS DATABASE

Downloads
DEMOS
PATCHES
GAME TOOLS
MAPS/SCENARIOS

SGO
ABOUT US
FAQ
FEEDBACK
HOSTING

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

REVIEWS

I can remember it was a couple of years ago that I was wasting time on the net (as usual) and I stumbled across a USENET posting about some guy named Phil Steinmeyer and his dream of producing a sequel to Railroad Tycoon. This was in the heady days of the "who owns the Civ franchise?" battles, and since Sid Meier had left Microprose to do his own thing (later called Firaxis) it was likely that any concept of a sequel to RRT was going to fall through the cracks entirely.

Not that I thought this a bad thing exactly. Don’t get me wrong. RRT(1) had kindled an enjoyment of the train industry that I had never really had – basically, RRT was one of the first games that infected me with the dreaded JOMT bug - but I was still pretty pissed off about my shelling out $40 for a piece of crap Railroad Tycoon "Deluxe" that ended up being RRT with more bugs and (apparently) a damn *.wav file for every stinking tile. You couldn’t click ANYWHERE in that game without getting some chicken clucking in your ear, or cow mooing, or some such. Ack. I gave it about a week’s effort and then the stinking software store started enforcing their "opened software for exchange only" policy. I went back to playing RRT too much and gave up on the "new" version as lost money.

But reading through the plans and projections from Phil, as well as some preliminary graphics that were up, my interest was piqued. I honestly thought it was kind of a pipe dream – no way MP was going to let go of the RRT label, right? They couldn’t be that stupid, could they? Gladly, I was wrong.

Phil nabbed the rights to a RRT sequel and plunged into the project with a fervor usually observed only in single women obsessing over beanie babies. He wasn’t going to simply write a sequel – no, that wouldn’t be enough. He was going to revamp the entire presentation of the game, add more terrain, more trains, a more realistic economic and business model, more and better AI opponents, and simply make the most kickass railroad game/simulation ever produced. And he did it. He managed to capture the "play" of the original and build and entirely new experience thereon. (Hey, CGW used the phrase "nonpareil" in their review, so I’m going to throw around the wheretofores and thereons with impunity...). You can read our review of RRT2 elsewhere, but suffice to say RRT2 was a far better simulation of the "rail business" as well as being far harder at the top difficulty levels.

future scenario, these things produce HUGE amounts of waste.

 
the elements of war: an armament/troop train passes - you guessed it - a liquor train!

For those youngsters who never played the original, the essence of RRT2 is the same as RRT: you are playing the role of one of the great rail magnates – the guiding spirit of a booming (hopefully) rail company that succeeds through canny management, cunning competition, and aggressive expansion. Those of you who are experienced RRT’ers (no doubt reading this review to see if it was only you that thought this was such an awesome game) can skip a bit – I’m going to explain some of the basic premises of the game.

When you start the game, you have a physical map of the playing area (which can be as small as a single city in the SC expansion) or an entire continent. Scattered about this continent are a number of industries. These industries can be grouped generally into 3 categories: producers, converters, or consumers. Producers create the raw materials from which everything later in the game is later made (example: a bauxite mine produces two carloads of bauxite per year). Converters take a raw material and convert it to another product (using the previous example, an aluminum mill converts bauxite to aluminum). Consumers are the final destination, and produce no products of their own (for example towns consume food). Each step where the product on a train arrives at a place where it’s demanded nets the Railroad manager some money (that’s you). There are of course many variations on this: combination producers such as Grain Mills that produce 2 units of grain per year, but whose production increases 50% if they are ALSO supplied with Fertilizer. People are combinations as well – population centers both produce and demand passengers and mail. There are additive producers, that require two products to make a further one, such as canneries that require food PLUS aluminum (or steel after 1930). The goal of a careful manager is to try to arrange his loads to that there is a multi-link chain of raw materials stopping at each stage in the production, netting the railroad a profit for each step in the process. Probably the longest example of this I can think of is to have a line start at a chemical plant, taking a full load to a fertilizer plant. The product therefrom goes to a rubber plantation, shipping its product to the tire factory, tires to the auto plant, and autos to the city. In this case, the rail that controls this whole chain would net 5 profits from a single train and trackline. At the higher difficulty levels players can also buy into the industries themselves netting a handsome dividend AGAIN off the transactions at that location!

As you can see, this isn’t simply a matter of laying some track and watching the trains puff merrily down the line – there are some serious business principles at work beneath the surface. One reason I refer to this as a game/simulation is that Poptop made a significant effort to offer the player the ability to customize the game to allow them the experience that they are individually after. If you wan to simply watch trains run, play in "sandbox mode" which dispenses with the economics entirely and you can build stations all over, track anything, and build bridges with impunity. But at the highest financial difficulties, you will have to always keep a weather eye on the marketplace, as some of the AI players are ruthless in taking control of your precious railroad.

seattle transit authority - one of the coolest new scenarios that pushes the game to its limits

3 beautiful new steam engines

But enough about RRT2 – that’s not even the focus of this review.

Second Century is a worthy add-on to the RRT pantheon. Typically (as was the case with the blecchy RRTD) follow-on packs are usually little more than the original rehashed with some additional chrome as well as a few more scenarios that didn’t fit on the original distribution. That is distinctly NOT the case with SC.

Poptop has gone to great lengths to offer players distinctly new experiences with a change of focus (the Second Century, get it?), a couple new features, as well as some tantalizingly difficult new situations.

First off, they’ve added the ability to drop-ship; that is, to ship a product to one destination and unload it there for ANOTHER train to pick up later for delivery to a final destination. I’ve seen this characterized in USENET as a rather minor change but for those of us pulling our hair out in the original version, this is like a gift from above. Well, ok it IS a gift from above but you get my point. Previously, if you had an origin high up in mountainous terrain you HAD to choose an engine capable of the steep grades you inevitably encountered. The problem is that the big money was in hauling most of these to points OUTSIDE the mountain region; the train that worked at the origin was woefully inadequate for the latter legs. Don’t underestimate the import of this: it’s a subtle enhancement to the entire game. Finally, the builder’s choice of engines is geographically significant – I was always hobbled by buying the compromise engines in the original and RRT2. If I went for specialized engines, inevitably I’d find myself rushing some flatland high speed engine up into the alps because it was the only one available, and then weep as the poor little engine that couldn’t practically gave up the ghost at the first serious grade. Alternately, I’d examine my consists and find that muscle powerhouse was pulling damn mail cars around Belgium! I can’t overstate how much this has improved the game for me (and honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that this was a problem until I saw they were adding the feature! Now, I can’t even play RRT2 without gritting my teeth about it.)

Additionally, I very much liked the opening of the game (even with the historical scenarios) in more of what I’d call the "meat" of the age of rail. Perhaps some players really enjoy the early stages of the game where you have Stephenson Rockets chugging around at a blazing 16 mph. I never did – these were always the stages that I had to "get through" until I could have a ‘real’ railroad. The SC expansion addresses this – certainly there are historical scenarios one can play in SC, but I like the fact that the situations included with SC are basically from post WWI to the future. I like it when I start with the Pacific 4-6-2’s whipping around, and I can focus more on the building of my business and the specific economics of the various engines, rather than being concerned if my poor express can make it up the hill.

Further, this pushes to the fore a major tactical decision that – due to the fact that I was already fighting my neighbors and had not a spare penny to my name – rarely was available to me by the midgame in RRT2: electricity. With the tighter feel to the economics of the Second Century, it’s a real headbanger. Do you pay the huge up-front outlay required for electrification of a rail net, and suffer with crappy weak electrics for a few years? Or do you wait and pay a similar amount in fuel, maintenance and new engines for the aging steam fleet? But the decision is available, and for this I truly thank Poptop (I think).

One of the things that caused a lot of clamor in USENET on the release of RRT2 was "NO TUNNELS?!". I found this to be a little disingenuous. Frankly, in RRT I tried to AVOID using tunnels as much as possible – they couldn’t be double tracked and this invariably made them a chokepoint for your railroad at later stages. I personally think it was a worthwhile decision in terms of the burden of programming the AI for this – better those resources were used elsewhere. But it did stink when you were trying to expand your empire and a beautiful nest of raw materials was "just across the water" but more than the distance spannable by a bridge. So the bridges are pretty useful in a narrow range of situations, as well as being good looking.

The scenarios included in SC are uniformly hard. I’m not a J.J.Hill, though I did pretty well at moderately high difficulty levels in RRT2. But Poptop (wisely) realized that "Hey, if they want to carry milk to the local city, they can play RRT2!" The problems facing the rail baron are no longer a matter of "how can I make the most possible cash from this situation?" – that’s entirely too pedestrian for the Second Century. More frequently the question is "How can I survive THIS disaster?" Certainly the wartime scenarios such as Battle of Britain and Mother Russia fall into this category – the business aspect vanished to insignificance (and in fact is frequently disabled) in the face of managing the flow of goods in the face of bombings and enemy action. Certainly the measure of success is often money (and in the war scenarios, even this is not necessarily the case!), but for me the satisfaction was in simple survival. Of course, I have to confess that I haven’t been able to get better than a bronze in either one of these two scenarios despite repeated attempts. I have to take satisfaction from SOMETHING or I’d be tempted to admit my inadequacies and reduce the difficulty levels…

The future scenarios present the players with interesting landscapes and novel situations (a drained Mediterranean or a flooded USA) but IMO felt the most like classic RRT scenarios. Certainly there are some additional commodities and goals that are set, but to me the interest of these scenarios lay almost completely in the technology: you get the sweet-ass trains – the TGV and the ICE are awesome trains. Coupled with the always-impressive graphics of RRT these are really great. Of course, a lot of it could be due to train envy, which sets in for any long-term RRT player, of course. I admit that after a couple of hours beating my head against the wall of the Swiss Rail system (or more accurately, beating my head against the mountains of the Swiss cantons), I fired up the sandbox mode. I just sat and enjoyed watching these babies swish around Europe. Hey, you can’t be a cutthroat tycoon ALL the time…

One point that keeps getting to me, and I can’t resist raising it here (since I didn’t write the original RRT2 review) is the issue of unitized freight. In the historical scenarios it’s realistic that it didn’t exist, and in the modern scenarios it’s not too unbelievable, but the future scenarios for me really required more of a suspension of disbelief than I could sustain. Part of it is the fault of Poptop, of course. If their other scenarios didn’t feel so damn realistic, I wouldn’t have such high expectations! (How’s that for a backhanded compliment?) But I spend 4 years in the intermodal transportation business, and nearly another 10 years in the international freight world, and for a transportation "simulation" to ignore unitized (container) freight is, well, fantasy. Sure, it makes a more interesting game but one of the things that I really LIKED about RRT2 especially was its realism. And one of the answers modern transport companies have had to the narrower margins of postmodern logistics has been the idea of unitized cargo. This makes the management of specialized stock a much smaller issue AND the delivery of time sensitive cargo once again a possibility (for an industry considered almost moribund in the face of long-distance trucking, this was a HUGE factor). Of course, bulk commodities are still hauled in bulk cars. But last year intermodal rail services moved more than 8 million containers of goods. I’d like to see this addressed on a serious basis – I know the RRT2 scenario-building community is a great one. Anyone care to pick up this gauntlet?

New Madrid - yes, that's the Mediterranean that's missing!

It was the present scenarios that really drew my interest and have consumed much of my playing time. The Metra scenario – where the player is tasked with building and maintaining (and, if they want to succeed, expanding) a metropolitan light rail system. The scenario is really tough. You have a limited amount of "freedom" at the outset to clear your basic paths. After your grace period is over, the demands on your service (in terms of goods and people) and the costs of operation (especially in the clearing of space for new lines) increase dramatically. This makes this scenario one that you will think about a lot while you are away from the computer.

Finally, Multiplayer in the SC is still a pretty slow game. I think that’s inevitable that any cerebrally focussed game will be a little pokey in multiplayer. But Poptop has done what they could by tightening the maps and forcing MP players to compete more for scarce resources and consumers. Previous RRT2 games could go on for ages with the players basically playing parallel solo games, and having little incentive/need to interact or compete. The SC maps on the other hand first give the players each a little more challenge, with (seemingly) scarcer resources and more impetus for conflict.

And that’s really the sign of a great game, isn’t it? Strategic gamers want a game that grabs you by the frontal lobes and challenges you every minute. RRT2 did it without question, but without a lot of variety beyond the formula that had made the original so successful. But Second Century highlights the creative genius of the folks at Poptop: rather than rest on their laurels (impressive laurels in point of fact) they have created a number of major modifications to the great game core. They have given us a whole set of new challenges and we couldn’t hope for more than that.

If you like to comment on this review, please post a message at the forum.
Reviewed by Steve Lieb

Copyright © 1998 Strategy Gaming Online. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express permission of Strategy Gaming Online is prohibited.