Freight Yards

[Orange46]

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.

[Gumboots]

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)?

You could arrange something like this in RT3, but it would be limited in what it could handle, in terms of how it looked in the game and who had access to it. Basically, you can make RT3 do things-that-are-not-trains, but it rapidly gets messy.

[RulerofRails]

Extra layers of immersion should always be good.

No matter how RT3 is "intended", IMO the player still retains a lot of control over the economy. The distribution reach of the railway is often vital for a healthy local economy. Being able to build industries at reasonable prices means that the player has a side-task of controlling map-wide resource-usage efficiency.

I feel that sometimes having things generalized into a single factory for example makes the outcomes clearer for the player. Such choices are probably a core part of current game strategy. In real life a railway has a volume outlook stretching some way into the future. But they are guessing. Personally I'm not sure I would enjoy a game as much if it adds some of the guessing from real life into the strategy. Although I don't check out many games, maybe there are some where strategic guessing works well?

In those games you mentioned, are there many industries/resources on the map that will never be fully profitable, and still more that will only break-even? If I saw anything in the transition from RTII to RT3 I would say that in RT3 seeding and industrial make-up matters a lot more. RT3 maps are a lot harder to balance. In RTII there is an excess of cargoes which are impossible to utilize efficiently, thanks in part to no industry building, which just sit there as eye-candy or get in your way. RT3 will punish you for that. All that cargo will probably wash out prices in a few short years. As I see it, RT3 tried to bring a little risk into the industrial zone to offset in some way the power of industry building.