Item — HN Reader

I loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with small improvements.

I would love to play a modern version of this. Probably true for other strategy classics like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, Colonization.

Edit: ha, I remember that I used a really good tactic of playing with competitors' stocks, gaining majority, siphoning tons of money from them, and then selling the stocks. More profitable than running actual railroads.

5 comments

> I would love to play a modern version of this.

Steam and GoG have a version of Railroad Tycoon 2 which works well on modern machines:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...

https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2

Not quite as old-school as the first version, but IMHO gameplay-wise "just right".

Civilization 4 (currently on sale for $6 at gog) includes a colonization mode. I don't like it as much as the original but that's probably my nostalgia bias

Well there goes my weekend. Thanks!

https://www.openttd.org/ ?

I've been playing for the last year or two. Great game.

https://openloco.io/ too!

Chris Sawyer made a lot of games that have since been reverse engineered lmao.

I have been hooked on Transport Fever for a while now. My only gripe with it is that civilian vehicles will take roads intended for cargo/public transport traffic only. So the most profitable way is to disconnect entire cities by road and then use rail or road with disjunct depots to connect cargo to cities. This way you can force civilians to use public transport.

Using "civilian" to mean "a civilian who's not a cop" was already bad enough, but using it to differentiate private cars from trucks and buses? Public transport is practically the quintessential example of civilian infrastructure, you're really going too far now.

“Your transfer has expired, civilian, you’ll have to pay another fare!”

Said the bus driver in the mirrored shades.

My apologies, you are right. I maybe should have used the term NPC? Or non-controllable vehicles.

I think Transport Fever is of a slightly but significantly different genre.

Railroad Tycoon is a strategy game with competition whereas Transport Fever is pretty much a building and optimization sandbox. Even Transport Tycoon falls more in the latter category, IMO, despite superficially having competition even in single player. (I haven't played OpenTTD in a long time so I don't know if the AIs are nowadays competent enough to make the competition interesting.)

In RRT, with cut-throat competition enabled your company can even be opportunistically bought by the competition if you aren't careful. You can also be driven out of cities by rate wars. Some of the other strategy aspects feel perhaps a bit artificial -- you can't cross the other companies' track, for example, so you can effectively cordon off areas from competition. Nevertheless, those competitive strategy aspects add a significant edge to the game.

I've also played a lot of Transport Fever. The competitive aspect, even if against the old and cheating AI, is probably one of the reasons I still end up returning to the old Railroad Tycoon now and then, though.

Some of the technical limitations of the original are somewhat frustrating, though, so I find the reverse engineering effort really interesting.

There is also a great re-make of Star Control 2 https://sc2.sourceforge.net/