The problem begins when the train arrives at Harrisburg and attempts to complete delivery. Ok no problem, it is usually like a short line on it's own track. I learned something tonight about classes of trains.Īt first give a Grain train from the grain farm to. Somemtimes a train will chose a congeted track, and wait behind another train over a free track, even though it could proceed unblocked and crossover further down- ? Sometimes a 1st class train will yeild to an inferior train- ? Sometimes a train absolutely will not move froma station, even if wait until full is not selected and track is clear- sometimes changing the class of train will fix this. Sometimes a train will "disappear" from play, although it continues to accrue maitenance costs- if you select "view" from the trains screen, it just flys the camera to an uninhabited corner, usually over water- it must be deleted to avoid spiraling losses. This forces juggling of routes- annoying! If you change a train's route, for some reson it goes to the second assigned station first. I've found a couple more glitches that I haven't seen elsewhere. Sometimes the smashboards that come up if a track can't be accessed never go away, even if you complete the connection- usually this doesn't affect trains, but sometimes it does. I've found that you have to be careful how you multitrack- pay attention to where you put crossovers, so trains can get around each other. SMR has the missing componats of RTII and III- signals and real multitrack, but left out the routing and storage!! I also liked the multi componant resourse chains. It was much better to just plan the route and let the computer play. RT III was a bit of a disapointment, great graphics, but horrible play. I was a huge fan of RTII, then the gold edition with 8 car trains and station drop off/storage and routing through waypoints- major improvements, all it needed was signals. It is a game that takes one away from the troubles and trials of real life for a few hours and that is what it's all about. (With pending traffic inbound from PA and Maryland on top of that.) Jersey where my scenario took place I could feed all the local areas out of one place instead of trying to fit 10 trains in both directions past Trenton. Where are those classification YARDS!? If only I had one big yard in. Sometimes I think they design games to push us to the edge of traffic density and management before we reach meltdown. Then the double track jams up and the traffic stacks everywhere. Eventually it wants automobiles which requires steel (And coal for the steel)Įtc etc you get the idea while the operations exponetially multiplied in all basic requirements with each town you connect to. Then established grain to food processor then finally the food to the city. The game can get really "BIG" or "BLOATED" in tabletop mode. Ok now that I got the tech-babble out of the way. I cannot imagine within a few years games will be running on dual core and 64-bit Vista platforms with everything bloated beyond the limitations of my 32 bit platform. I have a custom system which I built for gaming two years ago and it ran "Railroads" adequately but is long in the tooth. ![]() I cannot stress enough that you need to examine the system requirements and try to have the best hardware on hand before attempting the run the game. I think they did a good job with the product but give it 7 anvils out of 10 in my very unscientific assessment. Constant saving to hard disk minimized the loss of progress due to it's occasional crash. I have a 12 pipe 6800 card and it ran ok in medium detail. I must emphasize that this game is designed to run on powerful computers based on the Nvidia GForce 6 and 7 series cards. I think they might release a patch to address some of the little issues. I have played the game for a period of time today. Here is the website dedicated to the game: I will provide more screenshots later on after the round of railroading. I did not have too much of a issue with that but it would have been nice to at least finish the engines and cabooses properly. I immediately noticed they left the tenders out of the engines and failed to add cabooses. The music and presentation of this game clearly showed the Developer's love and previous rememberance of games like "Locomotion" way back when. The routing information included things like uphill or down hill from one town to another which I thought was a nice touch. I found the profits/Costs to be quite active during a trains operation and it was easy to learn if a run is profitable or not. A little bit off budget but I think this game does trains very well in the old "Tycoon" style. I purchased the game today in Walmart for about 36.00. As Demos go this one was a good peek into the retail product. ![]() But it was free and the file size around 256 mb. I downloaded and ran the Demo software provided by "Fileplanet" and found it to be a good quality demo.
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