Summer Overlord: Railroad Tycoon 3 ? Bits 'n' Bytes Gaming ...

Summer Overlord: Railroad Tycoon?3

Posted by Declan Burrowes on July 2, 2011 ? Leave a Comment?

Waiting patiently for his final year at college, Declan is in the midst of a four-month?summer holiday. He is quite bored. Unemployed and at home, to stave off insanity, he is playing through fifteen management/tycoon games from the last decade in a series of articles in which he will attempt to become the ultimate Summer Overlord, master of routine and efficiency and pro hirer of vomit-sweeping janitors. Join him every Saturday on a journey which will take you through some of the best and the worst that the obscure genre has to offer.?

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Breathe in that pollution good, boy!

School of Hard Knocks

I?m not very good at Railroad Tycoon 3. Not very good at all. In fact, I?m so rubbish at it, I reverted to scouring GameFAQs for guides, but even after following the careful advice of more successful players, I still managed to find myself bought out and bankrupt. You see, Railroad Tycoon 3 really is a tycoon game. Where most management games slap you across the wrist for carelessly mishandling finances, RT3 positively beats you across the face with a splintered broom-handle if you so much as think about spending your company?s funds without meticulously considering all possible outcomes.

I suppose therein lies the problem. Mix mathematics and economics into my games and I?m destined to sit in a sort of stasis ? perhaps quietly frothing at the mouth ? as my brain is forced into overdrive to handle cash flow, bonds and shares. I felt like Mason from Black Ops, cluelessly trying to make sense of streams of numbers that I didn?t understand. Of course, this was no fault of Railroad Tycoon?s. It?s not its fault I?m an imbecile. Indeed, I suppose I?m an even bigger imbecile for buying RT3 despite failing to truly grasp its predecessor, RT2, way back when in 1998. Still, I came back like a submissive cur, and that says something about this charming series.

If I continue on my current course of being a bitter, nihilistic human-being, I know for a fact that when I?m in my 50s, RT3 will be my favourite game. Ah, I can picture it now: a multimillionaire, but divorced, ?overweight and with an addiction to menthol cigarettes and whiskey, alone and on the cusp of death, but still laying track across the Eastern Seaboard, ruthlessly buying out my competitors and bulldozing housing for my Boston-New York line. By then, I?ll have mastered its intricate modelling of economics through my decades of accumulated wisdom and be man enough to earn each scenario?s gold medal without so much as frittering a single dollar. For the time being, I?m content to haphazardly fumble around pressing all the buttons like an intern at a junction-control. It?s just fun.

D'awh, so quaint! Wait! Snap out of it! Someone's buying up our shares!

Railroad Tycoon 3: The Real Man?s Game

So, I think I?ve made it quite clear that RT3 is not for the faint-hearted/numerically challenged. In fact, it?s positively niche. Combine trains ? trains that you can?t even drive ? with economics, narrations by a wheezing old Texan and the most sedate bluegrass soundtrack you could possibly imagine, and you?d be forgiven for thinking you?d stepped into some sort of hellish twilight zone. Of course, had RT3 been a game developed for the four people globally whose loins stirred in anticipation at the above description, it would never have reached its third incarnation. Despite me prodding fun at its subject-matter like one might prod a caged, one-armed chimpanzee, there is a solid game to be played, undoubtedly one of the most solid and hard cored of the genre. Don?t let the locomotives fool you: this isn?t a game about trains, so much as cold, cutthroat business. You?re here to deliver ammunition to Berlin and livestock to Paris via the most efficient route possible, not sit around admiring the view.

RT3?achieves what many games do not: the perfect learning-curve. It is easy to learn, but excruciatingly difficult to master. With careful planning, a network of profitable lines is relatively simple to establish, but expand too soon or let your opponents monopolise a certain demanded good and it?s game over. Within minutes, your running costs will grossly outweigh your income, ?and any twitch attempts to recover lost capital (like issuing bonds or declaring bankruptcy) will assure no investor ever so much as tosses you a penny ever again. That?s not to say it?s unfair; the game rewards the patient and industrious player. If you time your expansion correctly, move the right goods in the right quantities and service your trains regularly, you?ll have enough funds to buy and merge with other competing companies.

Unfortunately, thorough, gold-medal winning success in these scenarios requires that you have read the Financial Times since you uttered your first word (preferably ?capitalism!?) and inherited the genetic material of a German-Japanese coal and steel magnate, the sort that had his competitors unscrupulously assassinated and went to bed with a loaded pistol under his pillow.

Who needs a loft-sized train set when you can have a continent-sized one?

?Choo Choo?, Can I Get a ?Woo Woo??

For those more interested in the trains, there is respite from the ugly world of business. The sandbox mode allows the player to peacefully shift cargo from one area of demand to the next without a nagging board of directors or the nightmarish fear of running into the red.

Like a good-humoured father returning home to his kids after a gruelling day working the grindstone, RT3 transforms from ultra-serious to pleasantly playful, and frankly, it is in this sandbox that I had the most fun. From the earliest steam-engines to the maglevs of the near-future, there is a mechanical menagerie bursting at the rivets to be played with. I rather enjoyed sitting back with a cup of tea, locking the camera on my favourite train and following it on its little journey as it weaved across a bustling Canadian landscape, through tunnels beneath mountains and over bridges spanning meandering rivers, captivated. That?s the escapism we gamers love and seek. If I can forget that I?m sitting inside in my underpants with a blocked nose on an uncomfortably hot day, fantastic: my money?s been well-spent and the medium has succeeded.

Alas, the only thing missing from RT3?s sandbox is a wearable steam train-driver?s hat. Oh, they had such fashionable hats?

Bridges - especially ones like these - are awfully expensive. Be careful with your money!

Save or Delete

For the railroad enthusiast, it?s all there: a twenty-eight scenario campaign spanning two hundred years of locomotive history; lovingly recreated engines, from the 1830 2-2-0 Stephenson?s Planet to the first Shinkansen bullet-trains; and intuitive track laying tools. For the hardcore management simmer, it?s there too: a realistic and merciless economic system with a reactive stock market; opponents who would sooner sell their own mothers than let you connect London to Edinburgh before them; and all the consequences of poor business handling, like bankruptcy and a dreadful credit rating.

If you?re like me and are somewhere in between, neither accountant nor train set owner, but enthusiastic nonetheless, for all its strengths, you are unlikely to reap the game?s full rewards. Analytical minds will be at home; creative minds won?t be. Whilst there is a great deal of fun to be had in pottering about the sandbox mode like an excited granddad with pockets full of Werther?s, if the campaign leaves you easily confuddled and bemused, you?re not getting the full meat off the bone.

So, I?m biding my time until my enterprising ability has been buffed considerably, and if that means re-reading The Prince and watching The Apprentice, so be it. Meanwhile, I?m happy to revere Railroad Tycoon 3 and its masterful players as a pantheon of gods to be feared and worshipped. Amongst management games, it is the alpha and omega, and I look forward to the day when I may become its most loyal servant.

Source: http://bnbgaming.com/2011/07/02/summer-overlord-railroad-tycoon-3/

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