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Choo-chooing time: Let's Play Railroad Tycoon II: Platinum!

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  #1  
Old 01-03-2015, 01:02 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Default Choo-chooing time: Let's Play Railroad Tycoon II: Platinum!

First map is completed. Next up: Morocco!



Some of you may have heard that I was going to do an LP after the conclusion of the fantastic Sims 3 LP by R^2. Well, I am. But it's not the game I originally mentioned.



Railroad Tycoon II was released in late 1998 to critical and financial success, so I'm pretty sure that makes it a classic now. I'll be playing the Platinum edition, which combines the Gold edition (the base game bundled with the main expansion pack) with around 50 new scenarios, most of them downloaded from the internet. Fear not, veteran DOOM players who might read this, for most of the ones selected were pretty good. The Platinum edition is pretty cheap on Steam too.

The first game in the series was developed by Sid Meier in 1990 - you need DOSBox to play it on a modern system now - as was the simpler spin-off game Railroads!, released in 2006. Railroad Tycoon 3 came out in 2003, and while it's very good it doesn't have quite the vintage quality of 2.

You can probably guess what the player does in a game called Railroad Tycoon, but just in case you didn't know: you build and manage a railroad and (usually) try to get rich off its stocks on the side, like the great robber barons of the Gilded Age. Sometimes you'll be facing other tycoons heading their own railroads. Your options for competing with them are only limited by the difficulty level and your own sense of fair play. There are also a couple of metropolitan transit and tactical military train routing scenarios for variety.

What's going to make this LP special - aside from me testing my skills with my first screenshot LP - is that you people, the Talking Timers in the audience, will (mostly) be in control of the railroad's business strategy. What to build, where to build it, what kind of locomotives to choose, etc. I'll try to explain enough of the game that you can decide what to do. If we pick a scenario that includes stock market profit goals, advice on that will be taken but not given as high a priority, because one guy playing the market isn't as entertaining as a bunch of people on a forum mismanaging a railroad.

On that note, I will be taking suggestions for what kind of scenario you want me to play and the name of the railroad. There's a lot of scenarios to choose from - some more fantastic than others - so I'll pick one to start based on whatever you feel like telling me you want. This is because I don't feel like tackling either of the campaigns - and because every other LP I've seen of this game covers one of them anyway.

As for the name? I can't LP this game without letting you name the railroad. It just wouldn't be right. Once some posts come in, I'll start on the LP proper.

Feel free to ask questions and discuss this game, other train games and trains in general if you don't feel like being a part-time tycoon. But who wouldn't want to be a Talking Train Tycoon? I can't think of anyone who wouldn't.


Table of Contents:

Scenario 1: From Sails to Rails

Part 1: Not A Bad Start
Part 2: You Fool (Not You, The Other Guy)
Interlude 1: Boxcar Percy
Part 3: We're in the Money (ft. Tha Tycoonzzz)
Part 4: Wooster Booster - Act 2
Part 5: Syrup Tycoon
Interlude 2: A Most Delicious Development (now with a logo)
Part 6: Increased Monetary Funds, Increased Difficulties
Part 7: Deep in the Heart of Connecticut - Act 2
Interlude 3: The Case of the Curious Expenditure
Part 8: I'm Serious, We Do Have More Problems
Part 9: A Train About Nothing
Interlude 4: The American 4-4-0 Locomotive
Part 10: Of Persimmons and Premonitions - Act 2 - Act 3
Part 11: Peace on Earth - Act 2
Part 12: Back into the Trenches - Act 2
Interlude 5: Excerpt from the Diary of Sgt. Daniel T. Seward
Part 13: We're Close to The End for Real This Time
Part 14: A League of Our Own - Act 2 - 'Act 3'/Voting
* Completed save file


Scenario 2: Morocco - Rails over the Atlas

Part 1: Welcome to Morocco
Interlude 1: Back to the Promise
Part 2: Here's Choo-Chooin' at You
Part 3: Left Turn at Dire Dawa
Part 4: Expansion. Yep.
Part 5: The Most Powerful Force in the Universe


Bonus resources:

Link to the soundtracks from Railroad Tycoon II and 3 - I uploaded them because the games' bluegrass/blues is just too good, and in II's day they were head and shoulders above then-contemporary MIDIs. It doesn't exactly fit as well when you're routing electric locomotives around your Japanese rail network, but it's still good music. 216 MB .ZIP file.

Improved default2.lng file - this is basically an unofficially patched version of the file that contains the vast majority of the text in the game. Pretty much fixes typos. Some work by me, some work by this guy who I originally downloaded it from. Just drop this in the game's directory and replace the original file. Incidentally, that site is both a great resource for the game and a preserved example of Web 1.0 design.

The missing Alaska map - during the development of the Platinum edition there was a custom map that was accidentally overwritten by another custom map. Fortunately, you can download the missing map linked from here.

Inside the Sausage Factory - a dev journal Phil Steinmeyer wrote for Computer Games Magazine when he was leading development for this game, its sequel, and the first Tropico game, which itself was funded by the sales of (and took a few layout cues from) RT2. The last I heard, he was making casual games, but this was around 2008 and I really don't know what he's up to now.

My Steam recommendation - I wrote a review of this game a while back. Warning: may contain Opinions.

Last edited by Trar; 01-05-2017 at 05:24 PM.
  #2  
Old 01-03-2015, 01:16 AM
Loki Loki is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Trar View Post
As for the name? I can't LP this game without letting you name the railroad. It just wouldn't be right. Once some posts come in, I'll start on the LP proper.
Talking Tracks
  #3  
Old 01-03-2015, 03:29 AM
Bunk Moreland Bunk Moreland is offline
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Boxcar Percy should either be the railroad name, or if applicable, the name of any specific person within our railroad.
  #4  
Old 01-03-2015, 04:06 AM
Zaidyer Zaidyer is offline
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This being the year 2015, I want to see you push a steam locomotive to 88 miles per hour before it launches into a ravine causing a spectacular wreck.

And if this can't happen, find a way to make it happen.
  #5  
Old 01-03-2015, 05:08 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dart Zaidyer View Post
This being the year 2015, I want to see you push a steam locomotive to 88 miles per hour before it launches into a ravine causing a spectacular wreck.

And if this can't happen, find a way to make it happen.

I...I didn't think of that...

Guys, this might be harder than I thought.
  #6  
Old 01-03-2015, 07:09 AM
Torzelbaum Torzelbaum is offline
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Originally Posted by Bunk Moreland View Post
Boxcar Percy should either be the railroad name, or if applicable, the name of any specific person within our railroad.
Percy the Porter. "Sorry boss, I dropped your luggage off the back of the train!"
  #7  
Old 01-03-2015, 08:13 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Added some more goodies to the OP. Also, you people are brilliant.
  #8  
Old 01-04-2015, 12:10 AM
Kalir Kalir is offline
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Can you hire bandits into robbing rival train companies in order to ensure people rely on your trains and yours alone?
  #9  
Old 01-04-2015, 12:25 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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There is at least one campaign mission where that is definitely an option, so maybe I might play it if we do a 'second episode'. It's a scripted event, though, not a gameplay feature that you can do at any time.
  #10  
Old 01-07-2015, 03:31 PM
Trar Trar is offline
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Default Part 1: Not A Bad Start

The intro is strangely minimalistic and dramatic for a tycoon game, and I sure wish the only copy I could find on YouTube allowed embedding. The train coming at you in the beginning from the darkness still sends chills down my spine, at least. This technically isn't the intro for the Platinum version, but everything except the title screen is the same anyway.



Pretty fly for a main menu.



This is the menu for selecting a new scenario; the branching menus here are really neat.



None of you told me what kind of scenario you wanted me to play, but I got a friend of mine to give me the word "SMOKE". Which is...awfully vague. I decided to go with a scenario that lets us introduce smoke to the skies - by building a railroad in the 1850s to replace sailboats with steam locomotives. I haven't played it before, so this is now kind of a blind LP.



I usually play with the expert financial and industrial models. As I said before, they give you the most options to run your railroad and enrich yourself. Of course, they also give your rivals these options. And since the AI in this game is a cheating bastard, I also usually give myself about 10 percent more revenue than they get. More on this later.

This scenario requires me to play alongside a minimum of two rival AIs, and I can add one more if I want. I don't particularly feel like doing so. I can also change the start date by adding or subtracting up to 15 years, but I'll leave that alone too.



And here we are. A scenario briefing can contain multiple dialog boxes, but this one doesn't. This looks like a relatively simple one: connect two major cities and get richer than the competition. Note that the game is technically set to run at a slow speed while the briefing is open, but the game doesn't continue to run when it's open by default. It can still trip you up if you close the briefing and take a while to think about what to do without first pausing the game.

But we can't do anything without starting a company, so let's do that!



The more money you accept from outside investors, the less stock you initially control, but I usually take everything I can get. More seed money means more money to make money to claw back our money (stock) with. Money.

Speaking of money, let's take a quick detour to the stock market to see how much I own.



Any day traders or stockbrokers in the audience probably have a good idea of what's going on here, but I'll give a quick overview for those who aren't. Suffice to say as long as our railroad is decently profitable, the stock price will go up in the short term and I will make cash through dividend payouts - the more stock I own, the more money goes back into my pocket. If the stock goes down while I owe money, that's bad news, and if my purchasing power (the total of my cash added - or my lack of it subtracted from - half my stock value) hits the negative, that's even worse news.

We can also change the name and portrait of the tycoon we are, unless you feel like having a former president of the Baltimore and Ohio run our company.



Back to the map. Here's the best overhead view of the map I can get. We basically have the middle of New England to play in, which should be sufficient for Optimal Railroad.

So, the HUD. Over to the left of the screen are the Buttons. The first two at the top are for building tracks and stations respectively, and the third is for bulldozing things. The fourth is an information overlay wizard, the fifth lets you purchase actual locomotives, the sixth is the stock market screen. The penultimate button is the options menu, which is only accessible from within a game for some reason. The final button is the file options menu, where you can save and quit and such and such.

The lower left should be obvious, but the lower right displays little stock footage videos that play when you do certain things such as lay track or purchase a diesel locomotive. They're neat, but they're easy not to pay attention to. It also lets you know when rivals purchase or sell your company's stock.

The tabs at the bottom display information on your stations, your trains, your competitors and the companies in the game, respectively. The info is displayed in the center list box. The list button between the movie box and the tabs takes you to a more detailed listing that we can look at later.



To get the ball rolling, I'll place my first station in Boston. It has 8 houses, which makes it a city and thus Boston demands more goods than a town of four to seven houses would. There is a meat packing plant and a textile mill included in the station's radius as well, which means we can haul cattle here to make food, & cotton and/or wool to make goods. Both of these things sell for a tidy profit elsewhere. There's a produce orchard that produces produce, and we can haul that to other towns as well.

The sheep farm produces wool that we can haul to the mill, but having it in the Boston terminal's radius wouldn't automatically produce goods. We can set up a small branch for that later.

But wait. There's something else we can and probably should do first.



This is the company overview in our ledger. Most of this stuff isn't important right now, but our choice of manager can have a great impact on the railroad from the get-go. Since this is 1850, we don't need Mr. Siemens and his shady deals on fancy fictional e-leck-tricitee. Let's see who else we can hire right now.



These are better choices. The only thing stopping us from firing and hiring whatever managers we want are their signing bonuses, paid immediately when we hire them. I'm going to hire Oakes to lay down our stations, then replace him with Garbe to purchase our first locomotive. The discounts should cover the signing bonuses.



There. Ames saved us 21 thousand dollars building this. The discount also applies to station amenities we can buy, and for either your first or second station you need to also purchase a roundhouse, sanding tower and water tower. Roundhouses perform maintenance and refill oil to keep things running smoothly, sand helps engines scale grades, and steam engines obviously need water. That's another 150k or so, but we can cover that.

I can also rename stations and construct them in one of five architectural styles if you so desire. The styles are Tudor, Victorian, Colonial, Mission Revival and a Japanese style that the game calls Kyoto Revival for some reason. This scenario defaults to Victorian, and it's what I'm using for the first two stations.



Our second station will be a ways south, serving all three of these municipalities. We're technically not connected to any of them - stations need to be closer to a municipality for that - but we're serving them nonetheless. The combined number of houses is about the same as Boston, so this should be a good starting position. There's also two paper mills, which will come in handy if we run across any logging camps and haul their pulpwood, and a mill that we probably could supply with wool from Boston, but it's more profitable to do that as well as ship goods from Boston's mill to the Providence area.

I'll name it Providence Junction, seeing as it's servicing three places at once.



Laying the connecting track cost around 170k.



And finally we get to choose our choo-choo. Well, I do. The 4-4-0 American is our best bet right now, since it has the best reliability and speed of our choices, and is not much more expensive to buy, maintain and fuel. You can tell me to buy crappy locos if you really want to, and I'll probably do that! Because we're a team.

It's fitting that I choose the 4-4-0 because during much of the 1800s it really was the wheel arrangement of choice, being easy to maintain, rugged and stable on often hastily-constructed American track. Like ours!

This is also when I turned on the color cursors because I realized the non-color ones weren't showing up in the screenshots.



And here is the routing screen! It's pretty nifty: you have gauges to see how much oil, sand and water a loco has, and there's a throttle you can manually adjust to increase or decrease maximum speed. For each station you select you can adjust how much cargo to wait for before departing (using the stoplights) and whether to store, keep or sell the cargo based on the station's demand (using the flags). We can also set waypoints along the route, but we don't really need to here.



For our first train, we'll set it to deliver a reasonable amount of passengers and mail between the two stations. This allows the locomotive to reach its destination faster, resulting in more profit and less danger of exhausting the destination's demand for that particular cargo since we're not hauling so much at once.





That is not bad. That is not bad at all.

I think I'll wrap it up for this first update. Our overall goal is to expand towards NYC and outperform our competitors; feel free to suggest courses of action or just ask questions or really post anything tangentially related. Potential options include: buying a second express train, buying a freight train, expanding south or east, and watching me bash my head into my desk because I forgot to hire the other manager which meant I paid 27 percent more for that locomotive than I needed to. If we get enough money rolling in, I see no reason not to do more than one of these.

Last edited by Trar; 01-15-2015 at 11:37 AM.
  #11  
Old 01-07-2015, 06:06 PM
Mogri Mogri is online now
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Wow, this is bringing back memories. I only ever played the original Railroad Tycoon. This one's a lot prettier, but there's a lot that's familiar.
  #12  
Old 01-08-2015, 01:31 PM
Trar Trar is offline
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I have an abandonware copy of the first game, but I never really got into it. I suppose I should sooner or later, but I'm not going to rush it. Glad I could take you for a train ride down memory line, at least.
  #13  
Old 01-08-2015, 03:58 PM
Taeryn Taeryn is offline
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When it comes to digital trains, I've played Transport Tycoon more than the RR series, though I do have a copy of the original and Railroads! and I've played pretty much all of them.

I'll say the first one, much like original Civ, I understood and could read the glyphs back in the day, but today I can hardly understand how to play or control the original.

Being a fan of production chains, I'd like to see some kind of freight service added to our TTRR
  #14  
Old 01-08-2015, 04:24 PM
Trar Trar is offline
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I've played a bit of OpenTTD, and I'd play it with anyone else here who also has it.

The original RRT seems like one of those games that have a larger learning curve than others in the genre because it's a classic, but enthusiasts will find it rewarding for the same reason. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

RRT2 honestly seems like that sort of game as well, except less so because it was released later on. I certainly enjoy it as a classic. I've heard people say the interface is archaic, and I remember it did take me a while to get used to it, but I did get used to it.

Anyway. Freight is a good plan; it's good to diversify when you can. In my experience, passengers and mail can bring the highest revenue, but need fast transport. Not to mention that passenger numbers drop as the automobile and the airplane make their debut. Freight gets more important the later in the game you get, especially when locomotives start to get more expensive.

Freight requires more of an investment to really capitalize on, but delivers more reliable profits over time, and I'll go into this when I start assigning freight trains. Plus, you don't need the fast express locos to haul lumber and such, not unless you really want them to.

Last edited by Trar; 01-08-2015 at 04:37 PM.
  #15  
Old 01-09-2015, 07:37 AM
Bunk Moreland Bunk Moreland is offline
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I'd like for one train to be a hobo's paradise. Ship lots of food and clothes or something like that.
  #16  
Old 01-14-2015, 08:58 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Default Part 2: You Fool (Not You, The Other Guy)



Alright, before we set up a freight train or two, let me explain a little about the Percy Express. Passenger trains that set record speeds earn 15% additional revenue from passenger fares. I'm going to replace the mail car on the Express with another passenger car and add a dining car - which increases revenue by an additional 20%. That's quite a bit more money, and we're going to need it.



You people said you wanted Talking Tracks to diversify into freight, and since this is an excellent idea I'll do so. This sheep farm north of Boston is a good start: in addition to the milk from the nearby dairy farm, it will allow me to ultimately ship goods to both Boston and the Providence area, because both stations have textile mills that can process wool to make what are presumably clothes. We don't know that they're clothes, though...



This is the map overview I mentioned last time, which I'm using to look for grain. If there were any grain silos on the map, we could haul grain to the farm to increase production, because nothing supports the institution of factory farming quite like the railroad does. Unfortunately, there are no grain silos anywhere - all those GRNs are just other industries that can process it. If we did have grain, we could also deliver it to those dairy farms to increase milk production, or ship it to bakeries to make food. If this were a scenario from the expansion, we could even possibly ship it to a distillery to make alcohol. As it is, we'll have to live without.

You may have noticed the disappearance of the FRAPS counter by now. Turns out the Print Screen button and an open Irfanview to paste pictures in as I play the game works just fine for me.





I'm putting the depot on a siding because there's a possibilty we might lay a bridge over the river and connect to Lawrence later on, and we don't want to clog our main lines. I mean, it's not a big possibility, given it's a two-house village with a lumber mill that isn't as close to any logging camps as other places with lumber mills, but it's good to keep our options open.

Fun fact - you can actually bulldoze any industries or houses on the map. The former you can do in cities your competitors might connect to (you can't bulldoze if they're already connected). The latter makes people mad and reduces public opinion of your railroad. This is very expensive and only really worth it if you absolutely need right-of-way.



すべての乗って! I also built a warehouse (ホーボーの家に乗り込む) so the wool (ホーボーの布) can be stored longer. Given the trips our freight train (ホーボーの楽園) will take, I think I'll put a water and sanding tower at the Providence station as well.



Now I'm going to take the liberty of finally firing Ames and hiring Garbe now that we've finished station-building (for now, anyway) and will purchase a freight locomotive.



This locomotive is going to haul no less than four different types of freight - milk, wool and goods to both cities, and produce from Boston to Providence. I suppose I could dictate two locomotives to the task, but honestly I think one 4-4-0 American can handle this. As for the mail, it can find its own damn way around for now.

Cabooses, if you're wondering, reduce breakdown rates and deter robberies. The latter likely won't be a problem in this scenario, but I'd rather avoid the former for our only freight locomotive - and if it breaks down on the main line, the Percy Express won't be able to pass it.



Because we don't have any double track, our two trains must pass each other on the same stretch of rail, using what I am assuming are strategically placed sidings that aren't represented on the map itself. The train that enters a tile first gets right-of-way, but if we set the Percy Express as an express train using those priority arrows on the left, it automatically has right-of-way no matter what.

Speed is usually more important for passenger trains given the sensitivity of their cargo, and while faster deliveries for anything mean more money for you, passengers lose their value faster than most other cargos if you can't deliver them in a timely fashion. Humans are tricky like that.

We're almost ready to actually unpause the game now, but there's one more thing we should do.



This is why I said industry requires more capital to fully establish. We can build restaurants and hotels and stuff at our stations to service passengers and boost their revenue, which are a bit more expensive than some of the smaller industries, but we'll put that off for now.

Because we're playing on the Expert industrial difficulty, any railroad company can usually purchase any industry on the map. If you're not servicing the industry, it operates at a loss (at least I haven't seen any that make profit this way), but if you're servicing that industry? Especially if you're servicing an entire production chain?



Anyway. To buy up both of the textile mills and the sheep farm we're going to need somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. We could buy the dairy farm and the produce orchard, but they probably wouldn't provide quite as much profit, and we don't have that much money to spend or time to wait around until we do. Fortunately, there is another way.



This is the Finances page in the company ledger, probably the most important page because of what we can do from here in addition to what is displayed here. You can totally click that whistle and hear it blow, too.

What we're going to do is borrow some money, all in the grand old Talking Time tradition of fucking with eldritch powers we probably shouldn't fuck with but we need the damn money.

That is a TT tradition, right?



This is kind of a shitty interest rate - the best you can get are around 6% to 5% - but we need to take what we can get now and worry about refinancing later. You can only take out bonds for 500k each, and you can borrow up to ten million dollars. Interest rates will hurt you if you're not careful, so bonds are best used to finance expansions you either know will make you money, or that you absolutely need to build but can't with the money you have now. The latter usually happens when you need to connect two places fast or you start in the mid-20th century and beyond, where money is tight.



And since we're still a new, untested company, our credit won't let us take out any additional bonds. Looks like we'll have to buy only one or two industries. #tycoonproblems



And because we're not frittering away enough of our hard-earned cash, let's raise the dividend payout for our company's stocks and make myself richer in the process. I don't have enough purchasing power to borrow enough money to buy any more of said stocks, though, which is a bit of a bummer. #justtycoonthings



I bought the sheep farm and the Boston mill. That leaves us enough money to cover expenses and not go into even more debt - around 200k.



And while I'm at it, I'll hire a manager that will give us a passive benefit as well - station turnaround is the time it takes for trains to get turned around if the next stop on their route is in the opposite direction.



I'll also also plonk down two saloons at both of our major terminals, because I love these sorts of little investments that pay off over time.

Alright, here we go! The trains are off, and wait what's this?




(*not actually Pedro II)

You fool. You have made a terrible mistake.

Well, several really. Where do I even begin?

Basically, all he can do right now is haul passengers to Somerset from New Bedford, since the latter is a village and only demands steel/iron needed by the tool & die to make goods. It's conceivable he might make enough money to expand, but almost all of his options are villages with the only notable industries being dairy farms up north and a port to the east. Ports give and receive different cargos depending on the scenario, but while they're fairly versatile here they're not exactly crucial to victory, especially not against AIs who only haul freight they can get from cities and primarily focus on passengers/mail.

Meanwhile we're stealing passengers from each other, and while I'll be making more money from my route, he'll be servicing them faster. The rate wars from the first game are gone: in RRT2 it's first come first serve unless the scenario is scripted to allow territorial shenanigans/exclusivity, and this one isn't.

You might be wondering why I said he might make enough money to expand even though his start is pitiful. Well, here's how the AI cheats: they always play by the rules of the Basic industrial difficulty, which means they can make more money hauling anything to anywhere - no matter the demand - than we can by doing the same thing on Expert. If we do that, places that aren't looking for a particular cargo will pay us somewhere between 10 cents and several wads of lint.

I was going to say it was a good thing the resources he'd need to supply the paper mill and the tool & die were either far away or simply weren't on the map respectively, but we can almost always make more money by properly supplying industries we own. Which means less options for us.

Really the only way he's going to do decently is if he decides to take out some bonds and build a long stretch of track to some bigger city, but while I've seen this happen I wouldn't count on it.

Anyway.



This happened. These things give you a decent revenue bonus but they cost 80k a pop with our manager's discount. We could probably buy them soon though, and since passenger revenue tends to drop over time as the novelty of the iron horse wears off it's usually a good idea to put them at your major stations.



If you didn't read the developer diary (or at least this part), you might find it interesting to know that pretty much all the models in this game were actual model trains and model buildings, photographed more or less the way you see them in-game. Gives it a nice toy-train look.



Here I've turned on the grid display to show how the express train has right-of-way to enter Boston.

It's now December and the game year is about to end, and since that brings more stuff to cover I'm going to end this update here. Next time: ringing in 1851, taking a look at our profits and whatever else you hedonists want. Stay tuned for the next episode of Shingeki no Kikansha!

Last edited by Trar; 05-13-2015 at 01:48 PM.
  #17  
Old 01-14-2015, 03:28 PM
BEAT BEAT is offline
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Enjoying the LP so far! Keep it up!
  #18  
Old 01-14-2015, 06:25 PM
Trar Trar is offline
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As the skelelord commandeth, so shall I obey.

Anyway, I only just realized it's spelled New Beford in-game. Alternate history is fun!

Last edited by Trar; 01-14-2015 at 08:38 PM.
  #19  
Old 01-15-2015, 07:53 AM
Taeryn Taeryn is offline
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We must crush this other pathetic railroad before it has the chance to cause more trouble.
  #20  
Old 01-15-2015, 10:22 AM
Daikaiju Daikaiju is offline
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I dunno... That is one MIGHTY BEARD. Also, our company is being run by the 1st Doctor. He's not known for his business acumen.
  #21  
Old 01-15-2015, 11:29 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Er, that's not actually my competitor. I just thought it would be funny to do the Pedro II war thing from Civ 5. I can take an actual picture next update.

Actually, let's just assume he does indeed have a mighty beard, whoever he is.
  #22  
Old 01-15-2015, 12:36 PM
Taeryn Taeryn is offline
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he's an aspiring rail baron. Exceptional facial hair is a job requirement.
  #23  
Old 01-15-2015, 04:47 PM
Falselogic Falselogic is offline
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The fact that you didnt use as the title for this thread the quote from the valentine's card that Lisa Simpson gave Ralphie is a crime.

A crime against God and Man.
  #24  
Old 01-15-2015, 09:22 PM
Posaune Posaune is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Trar View Post

My hometown is named after Oakes Ames!

I always get excited to see him in the game and then get kinda annoyed his name is flipped around on accident and nobody corrected it.
  #25  
Old 01-16-2015, 07:14 AM
Taeryn Taeryn is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Falselogic View Post
The fact that you didnt use as the title for this thread the quote from the valentine's card that Lisa Simpson gave Ralphie is a crime.

A crime against God and Man.
He's saving that one for the RRT/Pokémon crossover narrative lets play.

Building a rail monopoly with friendship
*friendship meaning enslaved animal labor
  #26  
Old 01-16-2015, 10:31 AM
Trar Trar is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Taeryn View Post
He's saving that one for the RRT/Pokémon crossover narrative lets play.

Building a rail monopoly with friendship
*friendship meaning enslaved animal labor
Not gonna lie, that's a really good concept.
  #27  
Old 01-18-2015, 08:59 PM
Trar Trar is offline
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Default Interlude 1: Boxcar Percy

Blog post from tedhrailfan.blogspot.com - 07/06/12


1880s photograph of replica locomotive #1 of the Talking Tracks Railroad, formerly named 'Loki'. This was the locomotive that pulled the colloquially-named 'Percy Express'.

The railroad didn't actually call it the Percy Express. Its official name was the Boston Flyer, but most people who bought a ticket eventually met its popular namesake, who worked as a porter on that particular train. He was called Percy.

The initial few who associated with Percy called him 'Boxcar Percy', because of where the company found him: inside one of the newly ordered freight cars delivered by the Tomato & Salad Car Company, itself recently formed. As the story goes, he was already dressed in a porter's uniform and acted the part from the moment he was found.

This passage from an article in the August 17th, 1850 issue of the Boston Post gives us a unique window into the early days of the Talking Tracks Railroad, and a rare glimpse of the figure that seemed to elude the notice of senior railroad officials, but not the public ridership.

Quote:
Originally Posted by An Excursion On The Boston Flyer - H. E. Reginald
As I stood in the center aisle of the passenger carriage, I started to wonder what I might do with the suitcase I was carrying, being relatively unfamiliar with railroad custom. Would I have to carry it in my lap as I sat? Fortunately, I was saved from that ignoble circumstance by the arrival of a short, stout porter who introduced himself as Percy.

He only came up to slightly above my waist, which may very well put him in midget territory. His head and eyes were larger than normal, however, and upon closer inspection I could almost swear that his skin was actually a shade of yellow, while his hair was uncannily similar to the color of grass. Percy insisted on referring to me as his 'boss', despite the fact that I was not actually his superior, and had informed him of that fact. Percy promptly took my case, whereupon he said that he would store it in the designated area for luggage. I trusted him to do so, but followed him anyhow out of a sense of reporterly duty.

I stopped at the door to the third and last passenger carriage, which happened to be empty, observing Percy through the window. He opened the door on the other side, which naturally led to the outside, and to my utter amazement threw my suitcase clear out of the train. I could scarcely believe it when he ambled back, opened the door and told me "Sorry boss, I dropped your luggage off the back of the train!"

I ran towards the end of the carriage, but as the train was easily travelling at a solid twenty to twenty five miles per hour - a respectable speed, all things considered - I could only see my case with its contents as shrinking points in the distance. When I turned around, Percy was nowhere to be seen. He continued to elude me as I walked towards the front of the train to find the conductor, who upon hearing my misfortune told me that he was "just Boxcar Percy."
Despite allegations and anecdotes that Percy was a willfully negligent employee, no company action or government investigation was ever undertaken. Passenger ridership didn't noticeably decline because of Percy. In fact, by the advent of 1851, it was said that a certain kind of passenger had started to appreciate Percy's antics. In the mid-20th century, a group of psychoanalysts concluded that the surviving documentation of the majority reaction to Boxcar Percy constituted one of the first public examples of collective masochism in the United States.

Later this week: an actual gameplay update. I just really wanted to start doing short narrative stuff for my LP.

Last edited by Trar; 05-26-2015 at 11:01 PM.
  #28  
Old 01-19-2015, 05:20 PM
Daikaiju Daikaiju is offline
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There'd be none such shenanigans on the Daikaiju Flyer, I tell you sir!
  #29  
Old 01-20-2015, 10:37 PM
Kalir Kalir is offline
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Unfortunately, the Daikaiju Flyer suffers from the twin problems of being composed of interlocking plastic pieces and being attacked by extremely vain and confused giant beast creatures.
  #30  
Old 01-21-2015, 03:41 PM
Daikaiju Daikaiju is offline
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Poppycock!

I have spoken with the linemen and been assured "Everything is Awesome!"
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