Railroad Tycoon 3

[Joseph]

The current issue of Computer Games No. 150, May 2003 has an 8 page story about Railroad Tycoon 3.
The new game will be 3 D. In this version there will be 3D building that can be built by the player. The player will also be allowed to buy and place some industries.
The game will be out sometime next year, 2004.

[vovan]

Yep, there has been some discussion of that already.

http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=75996

More info from the articles maybe?

[Urban Ranger]

I hope this is better than the last one, that's all I can say.

[Joseph]

Pop top has been working on the core game for a year and a half. A programmer working on the new game engine a year and a half before that. That is 3 years now and another year to go, not bad. There will be a camera view in the game. There will be clouding in the sky and rain with some lightning and day and night cycles. There will be tunnels. Quote "A flock of geese flies by overhead." In Railroad tycoon II we had the station screen, which had all the different support buildings on that screen," says Steinmeyer. "But they weren't visible in the game world, so you saw your station building in the world, but nothing else." For RR 3 has whittled the number of station enhancements down significantly you will be able to build service towers
and maintenance facilities, and four or five other minor buildings such as hotels. All of these will be in the game world.
Players will be allowed to purchase and place industry buildings. Natural resources will still occur naturally. You will not be able to buy an oil well and put it in Illinois.
There will be around 40 trains to pick from. They show pictures of a Stirling 8, Three Truck Shay, Mallard 4-6-2, Challenger 4-6-6-4, and ICE.
You can now upgrade any of your building and neutral buildings will upgrade on their own if their region is prosperous.
Separate interface screens for buying and routing trains, building stations, and managing your company are gone.
The game will be multiplayer, big news for some, but not me.
In RR2 you had to pick the contents for each of your trains, now you'll build the rail line and tell it to haul the best available cargo. You can still micromanage specific cargo whenever you want.
You can lock the camera to specific trains, or set camera waypoints and revisit them later by pressing a hotkey. The game is full of Easter eggs such as flocks of geese and era-specific airplanes flying overhead. You can fly the airplanes.
Now passengers do not just want to go somewhere, they want to go somewhere specific. If passengers consistently find that every time they leave New York, they can catch a train to Buffalo at a reasonable price, the level of passenger traffic will pick up.
The story goes on to explain that you may not want to haul cargo (Iron, Ore, etc.) a long distance if you own a saw mill and the forest is just a few miles away. The story said keep your own business well supply.
That is about it. I like this game already and it is a year away.

[Grumbold]

Sounds a bit light and fluffy to me. I don't mind if the underlying sim is solid and enjoyable, but all to often you find these sorts of games don't provide any challenge and want you to admire the clouds or the 3d station views instead of notice how bad the gameplay is.

[VetLegion]

Who cares about cosmetics? Rain and wind and animals I can live without.

Gameplay improvements are needed. Tunnels sound good, we will se how they make them. One of the most important things I would like to see is indepentant terrain tool. You could do really many things with building tracks at proper angles in RRTII, but it was no fun at all

I just hope PopTop will build on traditions of previous games like RRTII and Transport Tycoon Deluxe. "Rethinking the genre" is not something I look forward to, and even less, cosmetics.

[vovan]

Well, i don't know about everybody else, but I quite enjoyed improving the stations and seeing how the income differed from those improvements, and choosing the more appropriate ones in different situations. Thus, the claim that "RR 3 has whittled the number of station enhancements down significantly" is rather a downside. Indeed, I would rather see only the station building on the map, and "imagine" the infrastructure around it, than have the number of improvements cut down, because somebody couldn't think of how to dynamically allocate a large number of them on the map.

The statement "now you'll build the rail line and tell it to haul the best available cargo" also scares me quite a bit. It seems that the micromanagement aspect is being taken out of the game in order to have the players enjoy the scenery or what not. We have already seen this approach fail rather miserably with MoO3, where the dynamics of the game are hidden from the player and the AI takes care of stuff for you. I really hope RR3 doesn't go the same way...

[Alex]

Originally posted by Joseph
The game is full of Easter eggs such as flocks of geese and era-specific airplanes flying overhead. You can fly the airplanes.

Why would I want to fly airplanes in a railroad simulation?

[Urban Ranger]

Damn, this sounds bad. Who cares about camera angles and similar worthless "enchancements?" I like the part that now players can buy their own industries, but the part about "choosing the best available cargo" is terrible. In the very least, a player should be able to turn it off, because that won't work half the time.

[vovan]

Well, my main objection to it is not that it might not work right - which it may or may not - but that it takes one of the biggest potential challenges out of the game. I mean, if you get down to it, that's what the game is about - moving the right cargo at the right time between right places. Transportation. And makling the AI make that decision is basically killing the main premise of the game. Sure, they can say that you can choose not to employ that feature. But as long as there is no way to turn it off, it will be annoying - just look at the automatic roads in SimCity4. They were supposed to be a convenience, and instead they are a nuisance, because you have to build your blocks in tiny pieces in order to avoide the automatic roading...

Then again, we don't know anything about the game yet, really, and maybe the automatic cargo thing is still not very final, and may be cut altogether, or turned off through options, or higher difficulty level. We'll see.

[Urban Ranger]

I am not sure, I hardly fine tuned my consists of trains when I played RRT and RRT 2. I did that occasionally, or when there's a priority cargo load (RRT only). My main concern is the AI screws around my setup, trying to be smarter than me.

[moomin]

I kinda think that could be useful. Have a couple ordinary trains running aound your system, picking up whatever is available for transport - and AI handling that. Of course, there should be trains the AI can't touch, for those occasions you want to set up that special concet-five-industires type of roundtrip.

A bit more permanent than the RRT specials, but rather like them, in fact. That the AI could dump a passenger wagon for a mail one when there a bounty of mail to be delivered doesn't really bother me, though.

[Joseph]

[SIZE=1]
Then again, we don't know anything about the game yet, really, and maybe the automatic cargo thing is still not very final, and may be cut altogether, or turned off through options, or higher difficulty level. We'll see.

Now passengers do not just want to go somewhere, they want to go somewhere specific. If passengers consistently find that every time they leave New York, they can catch a train to Buffalo at a reasonable price, the level of passenger traffic will pick up.
The story goes on to explain that you may not want to haul cargo (Iron, Ore, etc.) a long distance if you own a saw mill and the forest is just a few miles away. The story said keep your own business well supply.

In RR2 you had to pick the contents for each of your trains, now you'll build the rail line and tell it to haul the best available cargo.

You can still micromanage specific cargo whenever you want.

The top quote said it all. I'm sure we will hear more at the game gets closure to release. And please some of you give the game a chance OK.
Oh please read the last quote you can still micromanage specific cargo whenever you want.