Learning something from older videogames

The older I become the more interesting older video games become to me, the newer ones have something enticing too but as I have come to focus on a specific type of games or maybe I am just part of a demographic who want something either more detailed that has way too many ramifications to be humanly possible to follow through with any of them.

A recent example of something that got my attention again was Railroad Tycoon and this by mere chance when going back through some games I’m selling on eBay, Railroad Tycoon was one of those games that I bought somewhere in the mid to late 90’s back when I was in elementary, I bought that purple players choice box from Microprose at KB Toy Liquidators (rest in peace, such a great place and so many fond memories and games!) that I would have not obtained through any other means and going to the store was also another mere chance, finding the game on a discount bin for about a dollar together with Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom of the Opera, X-COM: Terror from the Deep and some other Microprose good games from back in the day.

I tried the game and found it to be a little too complicated because English is not my first language and back then I was still learning, I did get to enjoy it quite a bit but never got through with the game as I have in recent times.

My latest playthrough with this game taught me that mechanics found in Railroad Tycoon 3 and Sid Meier’s Railroads! were already present in the original Railroad Tycoon and RRT 3 polished to what could have possibly been the best it could get too (or maybe I’m wrong here, I think Railway Empire could be a true successor to the Railroad games).

From replaying RRT I noticed that not only my grasp of English is better (after some 20 years it should be as I have been working mostly for American companies) but my understanding of the mechanics was derived purely from experience from figuring out other games that followed other mechanics so it was easier to go from more complex games to simpler ones (not that this is always the case but this is how I see it from this point in time).

Reading the manual obviously gave me much more insight that experience alone could have thought me and in a much shorter time span, playing the game in investor mode, dispatcher mode and complex economy surely made for a more interesting game, but I have yet to play with cutthroat AI but so far, I have learned the following things from my experience playing the game:

1. Micro management can be a total pain in the ass when you start expanding too much way early in the game, while I had more than 2.5 million in the bank by 1866 in the East Coast (where is the Civil War, eh?) I did not have an effortless way to handle the 20+ locomotives that I had at the time and station wise I had around 15 or 16 at the time with more on their way but the madness that was becoming of this was not making for an easy game.

2. My administration of the lines (express and local) was not working as I had intended, passenger/mail trains were getting stuck waiting for freight trains to move through the signals and I was losing valuable money (not that I really needed it, but if you are selling such a service you should deliver, maybe I’m just roleplaying here).

3. I had to build a sort of logistical map to figure out what was going out anymore, the complexity of said map (in paper, because I could for the life of me not figure how to put this in a computer at the time because I wanted something simple) was such that I truly understand why such precision was needed in real life when moving trains around, one bad move and a collision could happen or trains could get out of their time tables and money is lost, you get the gist out of it.

4. My logistical nightmare eventually taught me that dropping certain materials at certain stations (just like in later versions of RRT) that were being used as a central to haul resources to other stations was the best way to go, mixed trains could potentially solve the issue at the time and later with faster trains I could continue to push for better centralization.

5. I had always improved stations to get more profit, but I had never truly understood the purpose of the other buildings such as the switchyard, the pen, goods storage, etc. Now with that in mind I could push to centralize even more things and then move them elsewhere and keep the system rolling, shorter hauls were better in my mind at this point and in a way, it worked better as it would clog the system less than with the 20+ trains running around although this would be done at a slower pace.

6. I had invested way too much brain power into the whole thing and I was freaking out for not being able to have a better logistical system and then I figured out that I’m just a guy in his 30s who’s investing too much time in a videogame that is meant for people to relax while playing with trains.