If you're looking to learn the basics of the stock market, play Railroad Tycoon 2 -- I can't speak for the original (didn't play it), but the sequel at least can teach you quite a bit.
Good game :) I played this about a year ago. Brought back good memories. I remember thinking sod it and laid a track straight across the map. The huge risk paid off. I love these types of games.
Capitalism II is also an interesting one with a stock market component.
The stock market aspects of the Railroad Tycoon franchise were what set it apart from all the other "Tycoon" games to follow. It allowed you to play the game on a variety of different levels. You could just focus on building a railroad network. You could focus on building a successful business. Or my person favorite, you could focus on building a personal fortune without any regard for the other two objectives. I spent many an hour as a kid trying to build a fortune be strategically destroying my virtual businesses.
It's a great illustration of why insider trading can be so damaging. There were so many ways to be extremely destructive overall, but which you could turn into huge amounts of money for yourself by trading your own stock appropriately.
Exactly like that. And you could usually arrange it so the tanking was temporary, so you could then cover your short, buy a bunch of extra stock, and then bring the business back to life. For example, you could stop all your trains for a while, let the lack of revenue cause massive losses, then once your stock price was sufficiently low, restart the trains and resume business.
Oh, absolutely! In some scenarios you could enrich yourself by driving the business into the ground and manipulating the stock, and then let one of your hapless competitors merge with the failing railroad while you founded a new one.
Railroad Tycoon 2 had an interesting story by itself: It was originally not named Railroad Tycoon at all, as it was built by a very different company, PopTop Software, based in a St Louis suburb. Close to release they managed to get the license, and IMO the name recognition really helped a very good game.
The same team moved on to make Tropico and Railroad Tycoon 3, both of which made plenty of money. They didn't do quite so well after that, and what was left of the studio was relocated and eaten by Firaxis.
Railroad Tycoon was amazing because as a kid I had access to higher quality, more timely metrics of my simulated company than many real life companies do.
That's only true if user [meta] data is a key asset or if one had one too many SAP-koolaids. In reality, most real life companies can be wholly contained in any $20 printer's memory.
Real life companies deal with ambiguous contracts, negotiations, networking, quality control, delayed payments, brand perception, employee satisfaction, trust, law and many other facets which are not easily simulated.
If you're a fan of Chris Sawyer's games, Roller Coaster Tycoon is also getting a remake via OpenRCT2: https://openrct2.org/
And "Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic" was just released by Atari to iOS and Android, which is a port of the original games modified for touch. (It's a fantastic port, btw, I highly recommend it.)
The original RCT becomes even more impressive when you find out Sawyer coded the vast majority of it in assembly language:http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
> The game was written and compiled using MS Macro Assembler V6.11c, MS Visual C V5, MS DirectX 5 SDK, plus assorted custom-written tools... It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.
Omg, I will. I was thinking when posting the above "they should remake RCT for mobile". Perhaps a perfect moment for nostalgia as my daughter turns 3 tomorrow and we can build a theme park together :) thank you!
One thing I worry about wrt OpenRCT2 is that after a quick browse through the history it looks heavily based on a disassembly of the original exe, which was then manually deobfuscated to standard C. I'm worried if Sawyer et al. would send it a ceasw and desist.
Having played both Railroad Tycoon II and OpenTTD, I must say that I prefer RT2 immensely more. (I've not played the original, so I can't comment on its quality).
Some of the advantages of RT2:
- Less tedious micromanagement without need for signals (although it does mean there's no way to build a 4-track mainline in RT2 that works like you can in OpenTTD).
- The stock market and competitive play is more fun. I never found the AI of OpenTTD fun, except when I was bored and wanted to watch their cars get plowed by my trains.
- The economic aspects of RT2 were more enjoyable. You can buy industries, for example. It's also laid out more clearly how the economy works (you can turn off these features to make the game easier, but it's much less fun). There's also lots more type of cargo (ship iron and coal to a steel mill to make steel, rubber to a tire factory for tires, the steel and the tires to an auto plant to make cars which go to the cities).
- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.
- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.
^ You can install GRF sets for OpenTTD that have even more locomotives than railroad tycoon. NARS or UKRS2 have extremely expansive sets of trains compared to the small selections of bland name trains the base game comes with. Also NUTS has a set optimised for gameplay over realism, if you want to go the other direction.
It's a different game than RT, but if you play OpenTTD there's a community on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/ with a couple of dedicated servers.
Server 1 is a vanilla multiplayer, games last ~2 real days.
Server 2 is a custom client with a lot of community patches, games last ~5 real days (IIRC):
It has transport load overlays, a city building challenge mode, way more types of transport and types of trains, much lower margins on routes meaning compound routes are more necessary, easier UI tools for laying and routing track, heaps more trains and buildings.
And the in-game chat from both servers merges with their IRC channel.
Amusingly, I was going to comment that RT2 worked as my personal introduction to the blues – I remember my dad walking by and commenting on just how good the soundtrack was.
My favourite Sid's game of all time is still the original Colonization. So much depth, replayability, and overall fun. To me it's always been superior to Civ because it's a clear road to independence.
Credit where it's due: while the original Colonization (which I agree was brilliant) was sold under the "Sid Meier's" label, its lead designer was actually a colleague of Meier who would go on to become a celebrated designer in his own right, Brian Reynolds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_(game_designe...).
Brian Reynolds doesn't seem to quite get the credit for the impact he had on the PC gaming scene. He was the lead designer of Civ 2 (in my opinion, the best one), created Alpha Centauri, and later made Rise of Nations. I wish he stuck to deep, strategic computer games instead of working for Zynga after he left Big Huge Games (Mark Pincus was such a big fan of Rise of Nations he hired Reynolds as Chief Game Designer).
Really love the guy's work, he has a lot of credits. What really saddens me is that Rise of Nations had such a bad follow-up that they never continued the series. RTS games always seem to have a tough time it seems, but I'm really loving that turn-based strategy games have made a huge comeback in recent years.
Somewhat of a competitor, but any Sim Tower fans here? I was obsessed with everything Sim* but especially loved Sim Tower. Maxis was an amazing gaming company and actually my first entry into Macs. My friends dad had a Macintosh II, then classic, then LC, and I would spend hours playing games on them.
/me raises hand :) Maxis games were classic. And quite complementary to Meier's work - the former being very open simulation sandboxes, and the latter more strategic and goal-oriented but with a lot of flex and slack in the rules for the player to experiment with.
But they definitely shared a similar spirit: giving the player a box full of building blocks and see what they do with it! :)
It was surprisingly fun! One of the best games where you try to build stuff for little virtual people, figure out how to make them happy, how to push their buttons, etc. (Also: the Sims, Theme Park / Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, etc :) )
Interestingly, SimTower was published by Maxis but developed by OpenBook (later Vivarium), the Japanese developer that would later make Seaman for the Dreamcast.
Unfortunately I wasn't there to see it, but I saw him talk earlier about Seaman at GDC 2000, and it was fascinating to learn how he was able to pull off such an unprecedented original design, even supporting speech recognition on the Dreamcast!
Announcement: Yoot Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to present a Classic Game Postmortem of Seaman! [2]
"Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, the talented game designer known for his idiosyncratic approach to game development, will be delivering a Classic Game Postmortem on his remarkable Dreamcast game 'Seaman' at GDC 2017! Saito's game development career took off in the early '90s when he created the game that was published by Maxis as 'SimTower', but it was after he founded his own studio Vivarium that he really came into his own. Under the Vivarium banner, Saito developed the groundbreaking virtual pet game 'Seaman' (lending his own face to the titular Seaman), its striking sequel 'Seaman 2', the pinball strategy game 'Odama', and the airport baggage management puzzle game 'Aero Porter'. Now, Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to speak at length about his work creating 'Seaman', a game that left an indelible mark on the fabric of both the game industry and pop culture at large. Don't miss it!"
I just found the video of his GDC 2017 talk: Classic Game Postmortem: 'Seaman'! [3]
I was even briefly involved with one of the efforts to make a modern clone of it (in particular, I've partially reversed some of the file format in a text document... somewhere).
The game had a very sharp difficulty curve, but in kind of a bad way. It was very tough to get started and to get a decent colony going, but once you did you could snowball through the rest of the yard. I could take on giant spiders and harvest food from them, and of course any other colony.
I shudder at imagining a lot of the earlier Sim* games without a manual and largely pre-web. Without the space or time to create digital help content, there was so much that was only mentioned in the manuals!
I remember the SimEarth one being a pretty hefty tome.
Check out Software, Inc. [0] for a actively-developed interpretation of a similar sim. It includes building and infrastructure elements in addition to markets and resources.
I liked SimTower, but it was very hard to lose. You could have unhappy people, but there was little impact to it. I recall it being described once as the most computationally-intensive screen saver available at the time.
If you find this interesting, the interview with him at idlethumbs is really good: https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-... (looks like its one of the sources for this post). I think the portion related to railroad tycoon is in the second part but its worth listening to all of it.
Interesting story - love reading more of the stories behind some of the games I loved growing up, especially the people behind them.
Railroad Tycoon II is still one of my favorite games - the economic simulation side of it was a lot of fun, and you could sort of decide how much of it you wanted to bite off. I haven't really found anything quite like it since.
In some ways, it is kind of a shame - tablets/phones would make great platforms for economic sim games, but every single one I've tried has been disappointing for the same reason - the mechanism they use to funnel you into buying things makes the game really un-fun and repetitive very quickly. I wouldn't mind paying $10-$20 for a good economic sim that didn't act like this, but I guess not enough other people would.
Transport Tycoon (that this was based on) was also published by MicroPose. I don't know if Meier had any influence on the game though. Pretty interesting how much graphics improved in 3 years.
IIRC - Chris had been promoting the project that became TT for a while. He main work at the time was as a truly awesome 68k to PC porter. I remember a colleague telling me something along the lines of 'Chris should stick to doing ports, that is what he is good at. If he shows you some wierd thing with numbers and simulation, just ignore it'
By the way, filfre is probably the highest quality VG and possibly computer history writer I've read. His archives are gold. He mostly focuses on interactive storytelling, but that was most of gaming in the early days of computing, so his histories amount to histories of computing.
RT2 is one of the coolest "business simulations" of all time - the goal was to make profits. The simplification was the "business" was achieved by setting the game near the dawn of the industrial age - when there was more of a relation between work vs output. The goal was to connect cities/companies so economic activity could take place. The big obstacles were set at random (i.e. train breakdowns) that added the element of fun. The game took the player through "macro" settings like recession and booms.
My deep appreciation of the game also comes from the fact that the settings were largely historically accurate. The big industrial centers (Albany, Denver (for lumber)) were accurately depicted. An extremely engaging way to learn a lot of early U.S. history, regarding how cities came into existence (answer: based on commodities trade). Also fascinating to learn about tech evolution (engines!)
Customary hyperbole: One of the best "business simulations" ever made! :)
I played RT2 as a teenager and spent hours playing every scenario. They had a few futuristic ones like colonizing Antarctica. US historical were the best.
Same here, RT2 was one of my favorite games as a kid. I would love to see a modern remaster or, better yet, a new Railroad Tycoon game that preserves the simulation aspects of its predecessor.
RT3 did the series one better IMHO, since its economic model was more comprehensive and calculated the costs of everything based on alternative transport methods - building a line through the mountains could reap big rewards, and buying up the businesses you were going to expand towards even more so.
I've never played RT2, but my understanding was that RT3 was rather difficult because they added the ability for goods to move independent of the railroad. So a lot of goods that you would have been able to make money on in the past moved down rivers, and away from rail lines, rather than sitting around waiting to be collected.
I liked both of them. The 3D modelling was so much better in RT3 and alot of the economics was more "real-world". I do feel like RT2 had more of the history and charm however than RT3. Also a bit less pressure compared to some of the later maps in RT3 which were more scenario based and less open ended.
Oh, Railroad Tycoon! The first game that really hooked me. I still remember the feeling of utter betrayal when I first tried cutthroat competition and lost a station in a rate war. Then the absolute glee of stealing a valuable station from another line on my next play through. I could go on for hours, but instead I'm going to fire up DosBox now.
We build planning and scheduling software for railroads and I continually think back to playing this game as a kid. The concerns are unsurprisingly similar but the level of detail you go to in managing a real railroad is obviously far greater.
For example we delivered a piece of software to manage where to park trains during storms so they don't blow over.
We recently release SimAirport via Steam's Early Access program. The game was initially riddled with bugs, probably released about 2+ weeks or so too early, but after >= daily patching over the last 2 weeks it's finally yielding pretty solid gameplay.
If you enjoyed the old Bullfrog games, the Roller Coaster Tycoon series, or Prison Architect in modern times (huge inspiration), then you'd probably SimAirport too.
We're in Early Access, so go easy on us! You'll still hit bugs for sure, but we [hopefully] don't have any major game stoppers at this point. There's no tutorial, some so experience with similar games is helpful, but we've got a lot of players with 20, 30, and way upwards of 40 hours in just the short <2 weeks since we initially released.
Just curious, but did you run the name past a lawyer before using it? Sim<Noun> strikes me as perhaps a little too close to the Maxis series.
Looks neat either way though. I've put it on my list of games to [p]review once I get back to writing stuff up (been on an extended break due to illness).
To be honest, we haven't considered it yet. We probably will eventually, but for right now -- releasing patches almost daily, and planning to release content/feature continuously for the next year or two -- staying on one ecosystem is just a lot easier.
It may change in the future (probably not) but we don't have any/special DRM right now -- we just deploy our vanilla EXE/.App game executable.
We've been advising those who have expressed a similar sentiment that, if you're unsure, then just wait a bit.
If you think you'll be unhappy with it in it's current state, then you probably will be; unless you're really into tycoon games or aviation. If you're hesitant then yes, we'd suggest it best to wait a few weeks or months. Even if it means paying a slightly higher price later, you'll probably be happier with a more complete & bug free game for the slightly higher price at that point in time.
Agreed, I have bought probably a dozen games in beta, but usually in the £5-15 range and more than likely, further in the release cycle. Usually the more raw the game, the cheaper the price - I would have expected a game like this that has been subject to recent, major bugs to be closer to the £5-10 level.
Soren Johnson's Designer Notes podcast[1] mentioned in the article is excellent and I've learned quite a lot from the long interviews, especially Bruce Shelley's, Louis Castle's and Amy Hennig's. Currently he's releasing his interview with Sid Meier, which looks like it'll end up being 5-6 hours in length and is great so far. I really enjoy when in-depth discussions of niche topics give me ideas about other things and that's happened many times while listening to this show.
Those interested in the market/economic simulations in Railroad Tycoon might enjoy playing Soren's game, Offworld Trading Company[2]. I'll just mention that entire games rarely take more than 30 minutes, they are almost always interesting ones, and it is fun without triggering compulsive play (for me.)
Additionally to RT2, I have found memories of Industry Giant 2. Does anyone remember this 2002 game?
What are Bruce Shelley (RT, Age of Empire), Rick Goodman (Age of Empire, Empire Earth), Chris Sawyer (Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc) and Geoff Crammond (Sentinel, Grand Prix 1-4) doing lately?
Bruce Shelley was working for BonusXP on The Incorruptibles until it released in December 2015 [1]
Rick Goodman's last game was in 2006 (though apparently he was prototyping one in 2012 [5]), and the only thing I can obviously find is that he was on the board of (and co-founded?) 8D World, a virtual world for Chinese children to learn English, but their site doesn't load. [2][4]
Chris Sawyer appears to have been working to port RCT to mobile (came out December 2016) [3]
Geoff Crammond hasn't apparently been associated with a game since 2010. [6]
If there was ever a game that encouraged me to become a developer during my youth it was definitely Railroad Tycoon. I remember being so curious how everything might have worked within the game with out knowing a thing about programming and it was definitely an inspiration to me in so many aspects. Games were my avenue for learning DOS and later my learning to write Software. I can't imagine what my life would have been like with out so many great early game developers.
Railroad Tycoon and SimCity had a huge influence on Factorio, the vast scope of which I can't begin to describe, but its trailer does it justice. [1]
About the game:
Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.
You will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.
It was crazy to see a Factorio tournament at PAX. I never would have expected that that game would lend itself to a tournament setting, but they did it!
From what I understood, everyone was loaded into identically seeded areas. No combat, basic research already completed, first to a certain late game tech (rocket?) won.
I kept getting a "410 Gone" nginx error when trying to download the latest build's Linux demo. Had to keep refreshing to get the download to initialize - got it now but FYI, maybe it's something you need to check out.
A great board game with a train theme is Steam, it's available for iOS and Android and next week for OSX, Windows and Linux as well. The good thing is that you can play it as a boardgame as we, competing with others face to face as to who can lay the tracks and transport goods most efficiently.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/595930/
Shorter, as it doesn't include a stock market, but 1830 (msdos) is a good one as well (you probably know the java 18xx). For other train board games with a pc adaptation, see Eurorails (crayon type) and Wabash Canonball (aka Chicago Express). There's also American Rails (which imo is better) which I'd wish there was an AI implementation for.
http://www.railgamefans.com/ebp/https://www.engadget.com/2010/10/07/app-review-wabash-cannon...
Someone please please please make a modern refresh of transport tycoon. I still love that game but would love to see it brought up to date in the style of cities in motion and with more depth added.
150 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadCapitalism II is also an interesting one with a stock market component.
The same team moved on to make Tropico and Railroad Tycoon 3, both of which made plenty of money. They didn't do quite so well after that, and what was left of the studio was relocated and eaten by Firaxis.
And "Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic" was just released by Atari to iOS and Android, which is a port of the original games modified for touch. (It's a fantastic port, btw, I highly recommend it.)
> The game was written and compiled using MS Macro Assembler V6.11c, MS Visual C V5, MS DirectX 5 SDK, plus assorted custom-written tools... It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.
Omg, I will. I was thinking when posting the above "they should remake RCT for mobile". Perhaps a perfect moment for nostalgia as my daughter turns 3 tomorrow and we can build a theme park together :) thank you!
Some of the advantages of RT2:
- Less tedious micromanagement without need for signals (although it does mean there's no way to build a 4-track mainline in RT2 that works like you can in OpenTTD).
- The stock market and competitive play is more fun. I never found the AI of OpenTTD fun, except when I was bored and wanted to watch their cars get plowed by my trains.
- The economic aspects of RT2 were more enjoyable. You can buy industries, for example. It's also laid out more clearly how the economy works (you can turn off these features to make the game easier, but it's much less fun). There's also lots more type of cargo (ship iron and coal to a steel mill to make steel, rubber to a tire factory for tires, the steel and the tires to an auto plant to make cars which go to the cities).
- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.
^ You can install GRF sets for OpenTTD that have even more locomotives than railroad tycoon. NARS or UKRS2 have extremely expansive sets of trains compared to the small selections of bland name trains the base game comes with. Also NUTS has a set optimised for gameplay over realism, if you want to go the other direction.
There are a lot of custom patches adding more types of cargo, more vehicles, and more intricate economic routes.
But I haven't played RT2, so that might not be enough to make any difference to you.
Server 1 is a vanilla multiplayer, games last ~2 real days.
Server 2 is a custom client with a lot of community patches, games last ~5 real days (IIRC):
- https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/wiki/server2#wiki_joining_i...
It has transport load overlays, a city building challenge mode, way more types of transport and types of trains, much lower margins on routes meaning compound routes are more necessary, easier UI tools for laying and routing track, heaps more trains and buildings.
And the in-game chat from both servers merges with their IRC channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW5MP4DFcYg
http://www.freecol.org/screenshots.html
Although it's a 300MB download, so I haven't tried. Not all of their emulations work perfectly.
But they definitely shared a similar spirit: giving the player a box full of building blocks and see what they do with it! :)
I can't help but wonder if that was a hint at their larger philosophy of game development too...
[1] http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/classic-game-postmortem-s...
Unfortunately I wasn't there to see it, but I saw him talk earlier about Seaman at GDC 2000, and it was fascinating to learn how he was able to pull off such an unprecedented original design, even supporting speech recognition on the Dreamcast!
Announcement: Yoot Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to present a Classic Game Postmortem of Seaman! [2]
[2] http://www.gdconf.com/news/yoot-saito-coming-gdc-2017-presen...
"Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, the talented game designer known for his idiosyncratic approach to game development, will be delivering a Classic Game Postmortem on his remarkable Dreamcast game 'Seaman' at GDC 2017! Saito's game development career took off in the early '90s when he created the game that was published by Maxis as 'SimTower', but it was after he founded his own studio Vivarium that he really came into his own. Under the Vivarium banner, Saito developed the groundbreaking virtual pet game 'Seaman' (lending his own face to the titular Seaman), its striking sequel 'Seaman 2', the pinball strategy game 'Odama', and the airport baggage management puzzle game 'Aero Porter'. Now, Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to speak at length about his work creating 'Seaman', a game that left an indelible mark on the fabric of both the game industry and pop culture at large. Don't miss it!"
I just found the video of his GDC 2017 talk: Classic Game Postmortem: 'Seaman'! [3]
[3] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024327/Classic-Game-Postmortem...
And here's a review and summary of his talk. [4]
[4] http://www.seganerds.com/2017/03/02/yoot-saito-gives-gdc-pre...
I was even briefly involved with one of the efforts to make a modern clone of it (in particular, I've partially reversed some of the file format in a text document... somewhere).
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/269610/
Molyneux's new game Godus and Godus Wars wasn't as fun.
I remember the SimEarth one being a pretty hefty tome.
You should also give Project Highrise a shot, very similar to Sim Tower and I have found it to be enjoyable.
(Also, tip for those starting a new game: 2x3 grid of fast food in the basement at the start of the game. You're welcome.)
Yikes, here comes the VIP!
[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/362620/
http://i.imgur.com/fUYLPFB.png http://i.imgur.com/WwUXZMd.png
I loved the first industry giant as well, best logistic and production game ever made.
Simairport is quite nice as well but beware, bugs.
Now might be a good time to pick up a few on the cheap for preservation proposes.
Railroad Tycoon II is still one of my favorite games - the economic simulation side of it was a lot of fun, and you could sort of decide how much of it you wanted to bite off. I haven't really found anything quite like it since.
In some ways, it is kind of a shame - tablets/phones would make great platforms for economic sim games, but every single one I've tried has been disappointing for the same reason - the mechanism they use to funnel you into buying things makes the game really un-fun and repetitive very quickly. I wouldn't mind paying $10-$20 for a good economic sim that didn't act like this, but I guess not enough other people would.
https://www.openttd.org/
Thanks for telling me about it.
The OpenTTD Coop Wiki[1] is also very very good when it comes to advanced designs, signalling etc.
[1]: https://wiki.openttdcoop.org/Main_Page
Um.
Though it's not his domain and is a one-off like Railroad Tycoon, I love the article on Sim City: http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will-wrights-ci...
The history of the TRS-80, whose place in PC history I did not appreciate before reading: http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/
There are many more interesting articles he lists on his own best-of list: http://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/
His writing his amazing and I'm always interested in how pieces of gaming history fit together.
Another way to read it, is as I have come across a theme I'm interested in I just follow that tag for a while e.g. http://www.filfre.net/tag/sierra
All in all, this blog is amazing and well worth supporting IMHO.
My deep appreciation of the game also comes from the fact that the settings were largely historically accurate. The big industrial centers (Albany, Denver (for lumber)) were accurately depicted. An extremely engaging way to learn a lot of early U.S. history, regarding how cities came into existence (answer: based on commodities trade). Also fascinating to learn about tech evolution (engines!)
Customary hyperbole: One of the best "business simulations" ever made! :)
That being said, I had a lot of fun playing RT3.
For example we delivered a piece of software to manage where to park trains during storms so they don't blow over.
http://biarrirail.com/ btw.
We recently release SimAirport via Steam's Early Access program. The game was initially riddled with bugs, probably released about 2+ weeks or so too early, but after >= daily patching over the last 2 weeks it's finally yielding pretty solid gameplay.
If you enjoyed the old Bullfrog games, the Roller Coaster Tycoon series, or Prison Architect in modern times (huge inspiration), then you'd probably SimAirport too.
We're in Early Access, so go easy on us! You'll still hit bugs for sure, but we [hopefully] don't have any major game stoppers at this point. There's no tutorial, some so experience with similar games is helpful, but we've got a lot of players with 20, 30, and way upwards of 40 hours in just the short <2 weeks since we initially released.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/598330
Looks neat either way though. I've put it on my list of games to [p]review once I get back to writing stuff up (been on an extended break due to illness).
It may change in the future (probably not) but we don't have any/special DRM right now -- we just deploy our vanilla EXE/.App game executable.
If you think you'll be unhappy with it in it's current state, then you probably will be; unless you're really into tycoon games or aviation. If you're hesitant then yes, we'd suggest it best to wait a few weeks or months. Even if it means paying a slightly higher price later, you'll probably be happier with a more complete & bug free game for the slightly higher price at that point in time.
I will be keeping an eye on this one in any case.
The goal is to transport as many passengers as possible, so it has a little competitiveness in it.
Those interested in the market/economic simulations in Railroad Tycoon might enjoy playing Soren's game, Offworld Trading Company[2]. I'll just mention that entire games rarely take more than 30 minutes, they are almost always interesting ones, and it is fun without triggering compulsive play (for me.)
[1] https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes
[2] http://www.offworldgame.com
What are Bruce Shelley (RT, Age of Empire), Rick Goodman (Age of Empire, Empire Earth), Chris Sawyer (Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc) and Geoff Crammond (Sentinel, Grand Prix 1-4) doing lately?
Rick Goodman's last game was in 2006 (though apparently he was prototyping one in 2012 [5]), and the only thing I can obviously find is that he was on the board of (and co-founded?) 8D World, a virtual world for Chinese children to learn English, but their site doesn't load. [2][4]
Chris Sawyer appears to have been working to port RCT to mobile (came out December 2016) [3]
Geoff Crammond hasn't apparently been associated with a game since 2010. [6]
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w9vkr/i_am_bruce_she...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Goodman
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Sawyer
[4] - http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?...
[5] - http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/what-is-ric...
[6] - http://www.virtualr.net/catching-geoff-crammond-interview
Apparently someone did - it was ported to PS4 and Xbox One last year.
About the game: Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.
You will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.
[1] https://www.factorio.com/
"This game is like crack for programmers." -kentonv [2]
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471
From what I understood, everyone was loaded into identically seeded areas. No combat, basic research already completed, first to a certain late game tech (rocket?) won.
Is there a good* technological civilization bootstrapping handbook? (For a real person stranded on some random Earth-like planet.)
*intentionally ambiguous
The Railway orientated programming comes to mind http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/
Not quite a modern refresh, but theres enough new stuff to keep you going if you haven't played it yet.