Sid Meiers Railroad

[Repairman_Jack]

It's kind of hard to picture in my head, so I'll do my best.

To start, it's a known bug in the game that AI pathfinding at rails with cross sections can be... wonky. Sometimes trains just don't seem to want to take that open path into the station. But, let's assume for the moment that isn't it.

Make sure that each train has an alternate route. Give it plenty of opportunity to switch tracks, then switch back again on the other side (if it's going through). Also, assuming you're playing on hard routing, rather than easy (which has ghosting), give trains ample opportunity to get out of the way. Places to move out of the way of upcoming traffic.

There's been a lot of complaints about how trains don't do their best to avoid jams, so it's possible that that's your problem. But I will say that I've spent a lot of time with the hard routing, and I have yet to really deal with traffic building up. It could be that I have a tendency to run dedicated lines, or that I keep traffic to a minimum, but I don't know. I think a lot of the problem probably stem from user errors.

[FrostyBoy]

I'd so love to hear a word from Firaxis explaining how they missed this.

I sometimes wonder if they themselves play their own game? or maybe the process of making a game makes you blind to the simple things and they end up overlooking them?

[FrostyBoy]

Oh, its why we have beta testers right? Think we need beta testers to test the beta testers.

[Repairman_Jack]

Also just wanted to add that you'll save yourself a whole world of headaches if you make sure that you connect to other rails when your indicator (the circle under the cursor when over a track) is green. This usually occurs right underneath a switch, and will keep the game from making additional switches that will just serve to gum up your rail system.

The best thing you can do when double tracking is to make the second track (or third) shorter than the one previous, that way your track connection has room to connect directly to the main lines switch without being too sharp of a turn.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Adagio
Whenever I tried to make a double tracked bridge it crashed (but only in that exact position... I've created double-tracked bridges before without any problems)

I've had a similar situation trying to double track within a city. Normally I have no problem, but sometimes the game crashes when trying to double track a particular location. Other locations within the same game I won't have any issue with. The error will still persist at the same spot even after a reboot.

[:) Smiley]

sounds like the gameplay is painful.

the graphics look kind of disconcerting also... when stuff is in 3D, I get this expectation that it is realistic, and am confused when I see a locomotive the size of a highrise.

the screens of the trains in the countryside are much better, and have that basement model railroad atmosphere to them.

[Repairman_Jack]

Originally posted by Willem


I've had a similar situation trying to double track within a city. Normally I have no problem, but sometimes the game crashes when trying to double track a particular location. Other locations within the same game I won't have any issue with. The error will still persist at the same spot even after a reboot.

There's a couple of track problems reportedly being fixed for the next patch (due to go to QA around the end of the week, reportedly). I know one of the problems is extending a track in the center of two other tracks, though it doesn't sound like your problem. Actually, that's the first time I've heard of a problem like that.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Repairman_Jack
It's hard to tell from the map, but it looks to me like you don't have a curve off the track the meets with the track to the north, and therefore it's going all the way around (since that's the only way it can get there).

Oh, I know that the direct route works, as the train could easily get from station 1 to station 2 before I made that mentioned route from New York down to the cities east of the river, making my tracks go around in circles. After this track was made a lot of my trains started acting stupid

Originally posted by snoopy369
Adagio, I can't actually see a better way of it getting there - it's never supposed to choose to take 'backwards' routes, ie overshooting then backing into a station. Unless there's more going on there than I can see from that small of a picture, but it's really a bit crowded there.

Are you talking to the first or second problem? If its the first, then (as mentioned above) the route works just fine. The train never has to "turn around" as Ive made the tracks to go directly to that city

[Adagio]

And on the screenshot you can see the train-route animation (just after making the last turn, near the large orange city), which shows up using the correct route

[Repairman_Jack]

Originally posted by Smiley
sounds like the gameplay is painful.

the graphics look kind of disconcerting also... when stuff is in 3D, I get this expectation that it is realistic, and am confused when I see a locomotive the size of a highrise.

the screens of the trains in the countryside are much better, and have that basement model railroad atmosphere to them.

It's not. It's actually really good once you get over the track designer's learning curve. There's a few bugs that need worked out, but it's been playing like a dream for most of us. I have yet to have a crash save a tutorial bug.

As for the graphics, they lean toward the whimsical without a doubt. There's no tenders (a big complaint with the train-loving grognards), the engines are larger than the cars (there's already a mod in the works to fix that), the sense of scale is pretty small with smaller maps (part of the idea of a model train table rather than a true strat/sim like RRT), and the cities have buildings in them that aren't available during the time period (though I don't really know why that's a problem for some)... But all in all, it's a gorgeous game that's a lot of fun to watch. It just depends on how much a stickler of realism you are.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Smiley
when stuff is in 3D, I get this expectation that it is realistic, and am confused when I see a locomotive the size of a highrise.

As I mentioned, that's easily adjusted. Changing two numbers in two files will scale down every train and car in the game. Now if only it were possible to do that with some of the other graphics. I don't like having my farm windmills the size of highrises. And it would be nice to be able to scale down the track to match the smaller trains. It doesn't look too bad as it is, but it could be better.

[FrostyBoy]

Firaxis; scale matters, Ensemble Studio's knows this; it is time for you to get to know this too.

[Repairman_Jack]

Only to grognards, though. For the casual gamer, the artistic style is very distinct, and a nice change of pace. I think that, apart from hardcore fans of RRT and other random sticklers, the graphics will get mostly positive feedback.

[Dale]

Originally posted by Repairman_Jack
Only to grognards, though. For the casual gamer, the artistic style is very distinct, and a nice change of pace. I think that, apart from hardcore fans of RRT and other random sticklers, the graphics will get mostly positive feedback.

I'm a hardcore RR fan. Thus Railroads does nothing for me with the wierd scale (which really doesn't bother me too much actually), the way the buildings jump around, and the fact advanced train networks are almost impossible to run correctly.

That last point is a game-breaker to me. I want to build a steel mill in one city and ship ALL ore to it from across the map (to maximise my profits) and then ship that steel out. With the current simplified networks possible, and the retarded train AI this is impossible to do.

Dale

[Repairman_Jack]

I haven't really run into any problems with routing in the game, but I know a lot of people who have. Firaxis said they were already addressing some of the complaints (mostly CTD problems, I believe) in a forthcoming patch. The crippling problem I've found is that industries don't give money to the owner, but rather to everyone who delivers to it BUT the owner. THAT is a nasty little bug.