Rail Network Games (Transport Tycoon, etc)

[The Liturgist]

Greetings, this is my first post here.

 

I particularly enjoy games in which one develops a rail or other transport network.   The pioneering example, and probably the most detailed one, is Bahn (jbss.de) written by a friend of mine who lives in the German state of Saxony, and which, making me especially enjoy it, was originally written to simulate streetcars (as we call tramways in the US and Canada; the original version, written for a Robotron, an East German clone of the Commodore C64, was called Strassenbahn, which is German for “street railway”).

Then there are the wonderful games by Chris Sawyer: Transport Tycoon, and its various enhanced versions, and Locomotion, which uses the same engine as his other famous game series, Roller Coaster Tycoon.  And there is OpenTTDx based on Transport Tycoon, an open source engine for Roller Coaster Tycoon and RCT2, and perhaps, I hope, someone will do an open source engine for Locomotion, as unfortunately it lacks the stability that characterizes the Rollercoaster Tycoon games.   However there is some wonderful expansion content for it.

 

I also once played a game by an Austrian or German developer in which one would build a network of busses and streetcars in either a European or American looking city:; I forget the name of it, but it came out in the summer of 2000 or 2001 and had beautiful isometric graphics, a bit more rich than those of Locomotion, but it was also unfortunately very buggy. Alas I am not a fan of Railroad Tycoon style games.

 

Lastly there was a vintage PC game I downloaded years ago from an Abandonware site that was of Japanese provenance, in which one would run a Japanese rail transport company, and all that entailed, including real estate development and related side businesses that one would associate with many of the privately run commuter rail systems like Kintetsu.

 

Do any of you know of any good games of this type?   Or of good content resources for Locomotion and/or OpenTTD?

 

God bless,

Gene

 

[Wolf]

A-Train, preferably original japanese as the steam version tends to have a lack of trains due to licensing, and I think still is stuck to the v4 Version, whilst the japanese is already at v5.

 

There is a great community that offers translation files for the game, you can easily google it.

 

Its focus is pretty japan oriented, with japanese "logic" behind it, so your "train company" will end up owning tons of subsidary buisnesses in the end XD

[KateM]

RailRoute starts as a simple dispatcher game, but quickly changes into a rail network manager instead.

 

[Skasaha]

It's much more casual than stuff like OpenTTDx, but I often play Transport Fever 2. There's a wide variety of mods available including quite a lot of Japanese vehicles.

 

I apparently didn't take many screenshots so you'll have to settle for this.

[Kamome]

I agree. I had train fever and transport fever. Definitely want to get TF 2 once I upgrade my now slowing PC.

 

Some of the community make some amazing mods. I have a few modern looking stations with trains like E5, N700, 0 all free community downloads as well as some JR East and West commuter trains and even some Kiha for rural lines and DD51 with 50 series coaches. 

 

The buildings won’t look very Japanese other than those created by the community, (this may have been improved in TF2) but the user interface is very simple and building is really fun. You can add signals to your track work and then the AI works itself out.  I had a few issues whereby on occasion a high speed train booming through on a passing track, would have to slow down for a departing shinkansen coming out of a platform track but no biggie!

 

Train fever and Transport fever uses a very familiar building system so if you enjoyed the Chris Sawyer games, as I did, you’ll feel very at home here.

 

A-train 9 by comparison is a lot more anoraky whereby you need significant time to invest in learning the nuances of the game. It follows the Japanese business model of train companies owning other subsidiaries to offset the costs of running a railway network. You will also pay income and property taxes according to Japanese business legislation so you may see your empire going from the black into the red as suddenly you’re paying taxes on all that beautiful infrastructure that is currently making little to no money. 

 

Graphically it’s not as impressive as TF and the Steam version V4 only has a few of the Japanese trains. The bulk of the game is here but the newer version has many more trains and assets.  If you get A9 V5 Final then you get a lot of differing Japanese rolling stock as well as the ability to couple and uncouple consists like shinkansen, double headers or even loco hauled trains. 

 

There are no working signals here and you will need to spend considerable time timetabling your train sets to avoid collisions at junctions and the whole network coming to a complete halt. I do like the fact you can put trains in yards and sheds at night and use the lines for freight traffic but it really requires you sitting down with some graph paper and drawing timetable graphs to avoid collisions. 
 

If things do go wrong, it’s always a bit of a challenge to find which train is the issue and put it right until the next cycle of timetabling comes into effect. The options of timetabling can come down to individual days, weeks or months depending on your preference. Want a steam special that only runs once a day in Golden Week? You can do it. It just takes a lot of thought and planning about the train chess pieces that may or may not pass or connect in the right locations at the right times.  Get it right, and it’s a lot of fun watching your stations bussle with trains. 

 

The other negative thing about A-Train 9 is the lack of people and cars around your cities and stations. TF you can watch individuals using your transport or deciding to drive due to the shortcomings of your network. A-train you can add buses and trucks but there is no other traffic occupying the roads which make it feel a little outdated. 

Edited April 6, 2023 by Kamome

[Yavaris Forge]

On 4/4/2023 at 9:35 PM, The Liturgist said:

I also once played a game by an Austrian or German developer in which one would build a network of busses and streetcars in either a European or American looking city:; I forget the name of it

I think you're talking about Traffic Giant or Der Verkehrs Gigant in german. The demo can be found online for free, but as you said it is very buggy and installing it on newer computers can be difficult. I did play it when I was a kid and remember it as a fun game.

[ATShinkansen]

On 4/4/2023 at 3:33 PM, Wolf said:

A-Train, preferably original japanese as the steam version tends to have a lack of trains due to licensing, and I think still is stuck to the v4 Version, whilst the japanese is already at v5.

 

There is a great community that offers translation files for the game, you can easily google it.

 

Its focus is pretty japan oriented, with japanese "logic" behind it, so your "train company" will end up owning tons of subsidary buisnesses in the end XD

I tried playing one version of A-Train for PC, I think it was called “Train Giant” or something like that.  I don’t remember if I even still own it.  I liked the graphics, in fact it’s the visual style I’m going for on my layout, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to properly play it.

[Zeether]

They sell the Japanese version of A-Train 8 on Steam, which I got recently but I have been wanting to try the final version of 9 since someone did a translation patch for it. Transport Fever 2 is also fantastic for JP trains with the mods, I have a subscription on Steam Workshop to a big pack of all of them and there's even the Hello Kitty shinkansen in there

[Beaver]

I have been spending a lot of free time playing Sweet Transit. Functionally speaking it follows the familiar Transport Tycoon style tile based system but with a lot of user friendly modern features.

 

What really makes it stand out is the city/nation builder aspect; you don't just build the railway but the entire country the railway serves. No preset/generated settlements or industries, at the start the map is all wilderness. On the one hand this gives a great deal of freedom to build all sorts of ideas, on the other it means things can get very complicated as you control the entire economy and population in a delicate balance that can easily go badly wrong. Especially given how new items, vehicles and structures don't get automatically released to you after reaching a given point in time, but have to be unlocked by achieving specific goals, which means you have to be constantly taking risks to expand and diversify the infrastructure to reach the goals; you can't just build a stable, profitable system and then sit back printing money. Especially as the inhabitants expectations and standards of living rise over time, demanding more and more new industries and infrastructure to supply them with leisure and luxuries.

 

There is an evident sense of gentle humour throughout the game; for example the fact that rail is the only transport system you have (that and teams of strong men carrying things by hand over short distances) is explained by the premise that the colonists building this strange new country are all railway enthusiasts who wanted to create a rail paradise where road transport is banned. The player is worshipped as a god by the inhabitants, there is a regular newspaper that chronicles the game world from the comic perspective of the people living in it, and the achievements list is full of wry mock wisdom.

 

Functionally there is a massive amount of depth and many different ways to do things. Just setting up the routes for your trains gives you dozens of options and conditions to make routes fulfil very specific purposes, with a choice or even a mix of following a timetable, fulfilling specific criteria before departing, responding to trigger events in the world, or just going whenever ready. I've never before seen a game that made it practical to operate pick-up goods trains carrying a mix of different loads, specifying which items should be loaded and unloaded where while other items are left untouched, or to operate mixed trains carrying both goods and passengers, or to make stops for fuel without picking up or setting down anything from that station.

 

Probably the biggest problem in the game is that many of the features are not very well explained or at all, even in the ingame wiki.

 

For example, industries are modular multi-tile complexes where you put together several different types of building carrying out different stages of a process to produce a quantity and mix of outputs determined by the types, numbers and relative positions of the buildings. An oil refinery for example can produce diesel or jet fuel (for jet trains a la Black Beetle) or both in scalable quantities. But there is no explanation at all as to how many of which buildings in what patterns are needed and will work, just pictures of what the buildings look like. You have to experiment a lot to figure out how to make an industry that produces the types and quantities of output you need, and it is all too easy to end up placing buildings in a way that makes the game consider not connected to and contributing to the industry without knowing why (sometimes they must touch, sometimes they just need to be in a certain distance, sometimes in a straight line from one another and sometimes not).