Subject: REVIEW: RailRoad Tycoon
From: "SYSTEM MANAGER" <[email-masked]>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

Rail Road Tycoon by MicroProse is yet another in a series of "half-baked"
ports to the Amiga.  The base game, however, is excellent and if you can
stand bad ports you may want to pick this beast up.  It is manual 
copy protected and only runs under 1.3  -- $49.95

MicroProse, who has given the Amiga community such greats as GunShip,
F-15 Strike Eagle and M1 Tank Platoon has once again hired MPS Labs
in the UK to do their porting.  MPS certainly lived up to their 
previous efforts with this software.   

Rail Road Tycoon gives you the opportunity to manage a RailRoad
company in either the old West, Europe or North Eastern United
States.  The game play is similar to that of Sim City.  You, as
the manager of your business must lay track, purchase and schedule
trains and, if you wish, handle individual train movement.  You also
have other railroads attempting to put you out of business by nasty
stock dealings as well as by Rate Wars between railroads.

When the game starts you select whether you are a investor, financier,
mogul or tycoon.  You then decide how you want train dispatching handled,
whether you have a simple or complex economy and how friendly your 
competition is.  Your selections determine the overall difficulty
of the game.  

You are given one million dollars to start your railroad with.  You
can get more cash by selling 500,000 dollar bonds at various interest
rates (depending on the current economic condition).  It is best to
survey the areas in the region of the world you have chosen to play in.
You want to locate an area that is dense with cities as well as natural
resources.  

After you pick a good starting area you begin to lay track.  It is
important to lay your track carefully.  The early trains of the late
1860s were not very powerful so any grade over 1.75% will have 
significant impact on the overall speed of your trains.   Once you
have connected one city to another, you need to build a station.

There are five different types of stations:  Switching Tower, Depot,
Station and a Terminal.   Each of these stations service the surrounding
area, with the switching tower serving its own square and with the 
terminal handling up to 5 squares away from the station.  

When you build your first station you will also build a engine shop.
This engine shop will be the manufacturing area for your different
trains.  You can upgrade depots, stations and terminals that you
might build elsewhere along your track to have engine shops.  Later
in the game you will find this very valuable.

Once you build a station you build your first train.  You are 
presented with a little animation of a engine exiting the engine
shop.  You then can add cars to the train and send it on its way.
You can at each station change the 'consist' which is the list of
cars your train is to pick up at the various stations along the way.

You continue to build tracks and linking city to city until either you
run out of funds or the fiscal year ends.  You might also consider
buying treasury stock so that your investors can't fire you, or you
might purchase stock from one of your competitors.

In one game I had a blast forcing a company out of business by 
taking control of the E&C railroad.  I kept taking money from them
until they could not pay their bills.  Finally in a nice gesture I
sold all of my stock and they went into debt trying to save E&C.
Needless to say I lost my shirt on the stock, but it was great to
see this railroad go under!

When the fiscal year ends you get your annual report.  This report 
contains your income statement for the year, your balance sheet and 
the stock information.  Study the stock information as it will tell
you a lot.   IF you see a stock suddenly rise you might want to 
invest in that railroad, or if you see stock prices fall you might
want to sell your stock.  Your stock holders are conscious of your
stock decisions!

You play the game for one hundred years, at that time you are 
forced into retirement.   If you have done well enough you will
be given a job ranging from hobo (takes no skill to get that job!) to
the President of the United States.  In my gaming I have only 
been given a job as a Mayor.  

The good points:
  - The game is not disk copy protected
  - The game does install on a hard disk
  - Game has decent amount of depth, though some of the newspaper
    news items get a bit repetitious after a time

The bad points:
  - The game advertises that it runs on _all_ Amigas.  What it
    doesn't say is that A3000 users must use 1.3!   I contacted
    MicroProse on this problem and they simply said "they have
    no plans to correct this" and that they felt that 2.0 was
    not significant because only A3000s currently have it.

    On the surface this seems quite reasonable.  However, don't
    let MicroProse fool you.  RR Tycoon seems to be breaking
    several of the rules published in the RKM.  The keyboard
    interface is broken (real slow text entry on a A3000!).
    There is _no_ reason for this program to be written just
    to run under 1.3.  

  - Graphics are 'ok', not real exciting
  - There seems to be a bug in reloading games, track areas seem
    to disappear though the trains do not de-rail
  - Game will crash in low-memory conditions

All in all a great game that suffers from the work of MPS labs.
If RR Tycoon got a slight face lift I would recommend it to 
everyone.  As it is now, you should return it to the store telling
the store manager that if it doesn't run under 2.0, you don't 
want it.

In my opinion it is important for the game manufactures to understand
that half-hearted ports that do not run under 1.3 and 2.0 will not
be accepted by the Amiga community.  The only way to get their
attention is to boycott products that do not perform.   RR Tycoon
is a product that is a perfect example.  This is a game with great
game play and yet it suffers from a crummy programming job.  There
is simply no excuse.

2.0 is the future of _all_ Amigas--make the software companies 
understand!

+------------------------------------------------------+              /////
| Mark D. Manes                                        |            /////
| email:  [email-masked]                           |          /////
| phone:  (804) 683-2532                               |   \\\\\/////
+------------------------------------------------------+     \\\\//  Amiga!
"Ohh say can you C!"