Freight Yards
Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2021 3:19 pm
Lately, I have been playing Cities Skyline and Surviving Mars. In both of these games, individual buildings demand and produce cargoes. In Cities, trucks come and pick up the cargo and deliver it to a specific location - store, industry or yard. In Mars, bots come and pick up the loads from ships, yards and buildings and deliver them to other yards or buildings. In both games, the AI does it all. The only thing missing in Cities is freight cars - they are generalized, whereas the vehicles are specific and can be individually tracked; in Mars there are no tracks. Mars also has a really neat automated freight yard that could easily be a RR container yard. This tells me that the technology is there for truly working industries based on supply and demand since individual loads go from farms, mines or wells to industries and then on to the ultimate consumer. In each of these games basic resources are produced until their storage space is filled, automatically sent to the next customer until their storage is filled and ultimately to the final consumer until their demand is satiated. What if Railroad Tycoon 3 could have had little trucks moving cargoes to train Yards (with cars loading on specific tracks assigned to their own line), or running to their destinations on the map if there are no nearby train yards (as they kind of did in my imagination in RT3)?
Adding this ability to, say, Railroad Corporation, would be like going from RT2 to RT3. Working industries (that can be bought and sold) without railroads, something that I know at least one of my friends and other RT fans really want and I would love to see. In RR Corp, the yards could be inside of the station (i.e. viewable on another level, as could be the trucks if this overloads the graphics). This would also bring RT3's mixed freights to RRC.
Just dreaming.
Adding this ability to, say, Railroad Corporation, would be like going from RT2 to RT3. Working industries (that can be bought and sold) without railroads, something that I know at least one of my friends and other RT fans really want and I would love to see. In RR Corp, the yards could be inside of the station (i.e. viewable on another level, as could be the trucks if this overloads the graphics). This would also bring RT3's mixed freights to RRC.
Just dreaming.