I’m a BIG BIG fan of Railroad Tycoon III and have played the game for literally hundreds of hours.
I was happy to see your game on sale at Steam and I’ve now logged over 40 hours playing it.
In my opinion. you HAVE made some improvements over the other game in some areas but there are many ways that it feels “less.”
With that in mind, and after having read the first few posts in this thread, here are MY suggestions, for what they’re worth:
I love that switching and sidings play a role in the game. The RRT3 conceit that trains could just pass through each other was a programming shortcut that I’m glad to see you’ve gotten rid of.
I love that replacement strategies play more of a role in this game than they did in the RRT3 scenarios.
I do wish that track laying wasn’t instantaneous (or maybe only certain amounts each year with the rest building over time)
Horse and Wagon and Stagecoach models SHOULD have drivers. Not sure WHY their wheels go backwards (like in westerns when the camera shutter speed causes that illusion)
The UI should make reviewing one train after another easier.
The pop-up about vehicles reaching the end of their life ought to optionally be a game pausing pop-up.
Or it ought to be controllable at the vehicle level rather than the route level ahead of time.
Locating instances of a particular type of industry/resource should be easier. We need an economic overlay map.
RT3 had a clunky rail laying UI. This one is worse! At least RRT3 had a primitive undo. Couldn’t the game when paused allow for a “planning mode?” allow the user to lay tracks/ roads, etc but to be able to undo those things at no cost if their first attempts aren’t right. When the layout IS the way the user wants it then they’d exit the planning mode and their changes would be made.
The game has no regular feedback like annual stockholder feedback. I miss it. Also the ledger in RRT3 made reviewing all your company’s vitals easy. It’s MUCH tougher in Train Fever and it really shouldn’t be.
Implement a mini-map. Almost every game of this sort has one. Yours is unnecessarily clunky without one.
I’ve tried playing the game to get the penny pincher achievement and that makes the game much more interesting. The basic game in Easy mode starts with WAY too much money. RRT3 had a “governor” of sorts in that as you went deeper in debt the interest rate increased. Here it’s just locked at 10% and your credit limit is the same no matter how well your company is doing.
All maps are kinda the same. RRT3 used different historically real maps. I miss the history that was present in the earlier game. Historically accurate maps would improve this game immensely.
I love that train cars of various types don’t just appear where they’re needed as in RRT3 but when you nerf’d the horse and wagons I think you went too far. There doesn’t seem to be any reason that wood and goods couldn’t be carried by the same wagons. Really the same for ALL the commodities. A better solution would have been to allow multi-use vehicles (they CAN carry barrels of oil, and barrels of Coal, or lumber, or goods, but to ADD specialized vehicles with higher capacities for the various cargoes as well.
Why no cabooses? Freight trains should have them, and did until the 1980’s
I do wish that different climates and season were possible.
Maps should contain coasts with ports sometimes.
I do miss the AI competitors and the stock market aspects of RRT3
I do wish that there was more variety in the commodities and that some production chains were longer.
