Sid Meier's Railroads! Demo

[RainOfTerror]

Sid Meier's Railroads! marks the return of the watershed title in simulation/strategy gaming that launched the popular “tycoon” genre, and inspired a new generation of games.

2K Games have released a 270mb playable demo allowing you to check out a tutorial and one small 2-player map.

Mirrors :
Boomtown (http://download.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php?id=12700)
WorthPlaying (http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=38200)

[Ventura_DK]

And the Boomtown mirror (http://download.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php?id=12700) :)

[Tricky Thumb]

The game is addictive, so watch out.

Very happy to say that it's a good kind of "simple yet deep" design.

[JazGalaxy]

Whoever thinks a tutorial... generally the worst and most mind numbing part of a game... is a good thing to have as a demo is an idiot.

[Thenetcase]

The game is addictive, so watch out.

Very happy to say that it's a good kind of "simple yet deep" design.


Very addtictive.
I wasted many hours last night playing this game... only got like 2 hours of sleep last night. Work sucks today thanks to this game.

damn it.

-TNC-

[morose]

Whoever thinks a tutorial... generally the worst and most mind numbing part of a game... is a good thing to have as a demo is an idiot.
Uh, I'd rather have a tutorial and a 2 player map than two 2 player maps and have to just learn things by guessing or wading through help boxes or some crappy PDF manual. Including a tutorial with a demo is a good idea, especially when you have a sim game. People get right into it, it removes one of the barriers of entry.

[walkstheplanes]

This game is a lot of fun... just doing one's best to be as efficient as possible.

If this is anything like SC4, after I hit a certain level of mastery, I'll begin having fun playing with railroad aesthetics.

[Fragland]

Fragland mirror: http://www.fragland.net/downloads.php?id=15500

[Buddha Lotus]

its MUCH too fast for me.. there is no grand strategic overlook..

Maps too small

[mikeohara]

Gamershell has posted their mirror: http://gamershell.com/download_16158.shtml

[Dorfl]

its MUCH too fast for me.. there is no grand strategic overlook..

Maps too small

You can still do everything when the game's paused, so speed is never an issue. (although I do feel a bit like I'm cheating when I do that - it was obviously intended to be possible, but where's the challenge when I play like that?)

[Reznoriam]

The routing engine for this game is dumb as a post. I got all excited when I saw this thinking "Sid Meier's pretty good" and "I loved Rail Tycon" and I got a big dissapointment. I'm hoping for a patch at a later date that will help out. Don't want to rant too much in here but if you do a bit of searching I'm sure you can find quite a bit of detail on how it's broken, and how severely it's broken.

[zyzyx]

Bought the game the other day but I've found that it's so hideously buggy as to be unplayable. I'm a bit obsessed with transport tycoon alikes but I've not lasted more than 10 minutes without a CTD yet.

[Verocity]

I am loving this game as well only I having a tough time finding a challenge. I played the hell outta RRT3 and loved that one. This one is definitely a simpler version of the tycoon series but I kinda miss all the extra stuff too. Ah well, it's still fun as heck. I've already beaten a few games with 3 AI opponents on Mogul setting. Time to go Tycoon!

[alldat360]

here is a link to a washington post article
6million 360's sold (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601123.html)

[Thenetcase]

The routing engine for this game is dumb as a post. I got all excited when I saw this thinking "Sid Meier's pretty good" and "I loved Rail Tycon" and I got a big dissapointment. I'm hoping for a patch at a later date that will help out. Don't want to rant too much in here but if you do a bit of searching I'm sure you can find quite a bit of detail on how it's broken, and how severely it's broken.

How is the routing engine dumb as a post or broken?
It works extremely well. You set up your stops, you add cars. You can set up cars differently for each stop, or go with with the auto selection (which is not usually a good idea, but it CAN save you time if you need the train to keep additional cars AND the ones from the previous stop-- which it automatically adds).

No, it's not broken and it's not dumb. It works well.
Maybe your comprehension is broken and you're just dumb.

Who knows?
-TNC-

[Citizen Philip]

I had lots of fun with the demo yesterday, I played it 4 times! I'm thinking about picking it up.

[Reznoriam]

You misunderstand what I mean by routing TNC. I was referring to the background AI that determines what track a train will take when moving from one point to another. I have found that it will route multiple trains to one track, take shunts when it's not necessary to take them, and refuse to use a shunt when it's necessary to move the trains forward. As near as I can tell the reason it performs in this manner is that the AI only looks in the next block when it advances a train. It was probably designed this way so that it wouldn't be as resource intensive on your computer. With some fairly exotic tracking you can get it to where you can run a large number of trains through a certain area but it takes patience and well thought out planning. I just put it on east routing difficulty so that there is automatic sidelining when two trains encounter each other.

PS: Thanks for attacking my character out of hand by the way I appreciate it.