There's something magical about trains. Kids enjoy train sets, even though they limit where the carriages can go across the living room carpet. Lots of folks admire the craft of model railways, from the simple setup to the elaborate museum piece, even though they're just going around in circles.
As a board game player, I can tell you for a fact that the hobby is full of train games. Games where you lay track, games where you buy stocks, games that newcomers can jump into, and games for the devoted enthusiast.
Video games too are no stranger to train games, and Railroad Tycoon 3 may just be the most prominent stop on the line. From laying track to buying trains and keeping your stocks in check, it offers a wealth of steam-powered, land-based, transportation management gameplay.
But is the service any good?
Fun Times
While the intro video is full of country music about a kid growing up fascinated by trains and doesn't quite do it for me, Railroad Tycoon 3 is packed with maps and scenarios from across the world, set in the golden age of steam locomotion.
The message is simple: if you have a passion for something, by the time you're old and grey you could be a wealthy railroad tycoon, sitting alone in a private carriage on your own train. What a goal.
After a brief tutorial, I headed into the single-player campaign, where the disembodied voice of an engineer/museum worker prompts us to start off on the more accessible end of the map packs. I wanted to start in Europe, but nope, that's madness for a newcomer like me. Off to the Wild West we go instead.
More CGI introduces us to the state of play, and we're given the goal of linking up the east with the west, from Boston to Buffalo, with rewards based on how soon we manage to get there.
I recognise those two names, but couldn't place them on a map. Let's zoom out and see what we're dealing with.
That's quite a distance, that. Uhm. Right, well... I hope I've remembered what the tutorial told me.
First up, it's probably wise to set up a company. You can pick the name and logo, and the more money you cough up yourself, the more cash your investors will contribute to your efforts. You can't do all of this railroad stuff on your own, so you'll need to please your investors by making them lots of money year after year.
You're going to achieve that by transporting people and cargo from town to town, taking goods that aren't worth much in one part of the country to somewhere more profitable, making everyone happy along the way.
Various overlays tell you where specific goods are worth more or less relative to the rest of the map, to give you an idea of where to start and what to focus on. Because I have no goddamn idea what's what, however, I decide to just lay track in a line from east to west, first stop Worcester.
Tracks are plonked down by dragging and dropping, and options for how they span rivers or cut through mountains are adjustable so that you can save cash or build with the potential to easily upgrade in the future.
Because I have no goddamn idea what that's all about either, even when the tutorial took me through it, I left it all as is and plonked a straight line track from point A to point B.
A track on its own is worthless, so stations need to be built to connect the towns and cities. They come in three sizes, and no, I don't know what the difference between the sizes are, other than size. Given the rest of this game, I'm going to guess it'll be essential to have big stations in big cities, and small stations in smaller towns.
Also important are service towers and maintenance facilities, which can be placed on your tracks and will refill trains water, sand and oil reserves if they need a top-up. I don't even know why they need sand, but there it is. Dot them around your route to keep your trains in working order.
So the next step is probably to buy a train and give it some instructions. Several trains are available, with more coming into play as the years go by, and train technology steadily improves. Information panels tell you how fast they'll be able to travel on different degrees of a sloping track, how much they can pull, and if you want more control, exactly which and how much cargo they should load from the station.
Frustrations
I understand the concept of transporting, say, steel from a manufacturer of it to a customer for it. That's obvious. What I haven't got the gist of is just where the hell these various cargo types can be found.
I can find overlays and info windows, but I can't make sense of them. What do Worcester and Boston want? What will make me money between the two stations?
There's a board game we quite like that goes by a few names, Railways of the World or Age of Steam, notably. In those games, a city has coloured cubes, and they need to be delivered to towns of a matching colour. It's visual, it's easy to understand, and you can immediately see which routes are going to be good before you lay down a single piece of track.
Railroad Tycoon 3 is very similar to that, apart from the obviousness of it. There aren't five colours, but twenty, and there aren't coloured cities, but everyone wants some things more than others, but could probably make use of everything.
It is a game that offers more options, perhaps, but at the cost of following along, and I'm struggling to follow along.
It doesn't help that my train wasn't moving for a good three minutes before I saw the game speed gems at the bottom of my display...
Off my little train finally went, chugging through the countryside on its way to Worcester. You can lock the camera to a train and just watch the world go by if you'd like. It's certainly easier to follow than the spreadsheets this game runs on.
My short first journey netted me $34k, which will be immediately reinvested in expanding the network.
Someone clearly likes me coming to Hartford. My network isn't pretty, but it's getting the job done. But because I have absolutely no idea how to actually profit from it, I don't know what that job even is.
At the end of the year - it absolutely zipped by, it felt like - I was bemoaned by my investors who docked my salary.
Where was I going wrong? Is that not a profit? Did you want more return on your $2000k investment? Do you want more bucks per mile coming in? Do you maybe want to suggest a route for me to follow this year?
After seeing updates from AI players investing in stocks and shares, I clicked around the menus to find out what my options were. It's a big part of Railroad Tycoon 3, and knowing how it works is vital for keeping the money flowing.
Because of my complete inability to comprehend numbers, this was all meaningless to me. Utterly meaningless. Do you want to guess how meaningless it was to me? The only thing I remember from the tutorial about this part is that if the 'Buy' option is surrounded by brackets, you can still buy shares, but...
... and I can't remember what the hell that but was.
At a complete loss as to what was going on, I headed to New York on the assumption that anything going to or coming from the city would make me money. Someone was already in here, though, so I obviously had to have as big a station as them but was out of money to build it.
No problem, the game has you covered. Just issue a Bond!
Excellent. See, progress. We're in the city now. It took a lot to get here, sure, but now that we're here, we look forward to a brighter future.
Further Frustrations
Oh, come on now. What do you want from me? I've got one train, it made a delivery or two. What else do you demand from me? Proof that I understand what all these numbers mean?
How else can I influence my railway? Well, you can build a bunch of other buildings that live off the railway and therefore alter its use. If there is a Tavern to go to before a journey, passengers are more likely to make a journey, because they've gone to the bar and gotten themselves hydrated, or something. The Tavern makes money, the railway makes money.
Similarly, hotels along the route give passengers a reason to go somewhere in the first place and make multiple journeys back and forth. The hotels make money, the railway makes money.
This all makes sense, so I stick some post offices along my network. Everyone uses the post office.
Obviously, I then see my train transporting meat across the country. I really wish I knew where and why it picked it up, and who wants it. Is it profitable for me? Should I focus on the meat industry, now that I know some point of my network has or wants meat?
Before I could even answer my own thoughts, this window popped up to tell me... something... something terrible, I assume. I ought to understand that, too, so that I can make it out of this game alive and swimming in money.
The meat gets to New York, the end of year report comes in, nobody is happy, all these numbers are too much for me to keep track of, I really do hope Age of Steam arrives in the post soon, because that's a Railroad Tycoon game I can follow along with, money problems and all.
Final Word
Railroad Tycoon 3 is deep. It's not a fun little railway game, it's a full-on business management simulator. There is a market for those kinds of games, most definitely, but like the in-game investors who put their resources into your efforts, you need to put effort and investment into the game.
The idea of building something and watching it grow is an intense desire for many. Worldbuilding, city building, vehicle modifying, character creating and levelling up... we love it in so many different ways and are catered for across all genres.
If you way you love to build something is with financial reports and stock market manipulation, and you like trains, then Railroad Tycoon 3 is probably pretty damn good. It certainly packs a lot of content to keep you busy.
But if you only like trains, you might run out of steam with this one. I like trains. I'm even saddened that a bad experience on a train is currently making me worried about travelling on the damn things, but that's not the train's fault. That's my brain worrying over something or other. It's weird and inexplicable, and I hope I can get over it soon.
Similarly, I hope I can get the hang of the stock market, and investments, and profits soon, because that lack of awareness of the entire point of the game is stopping me from having a good time with it.
It is overwhelming, even after a tutorial, even on a comfortable map, on the easy difficulty. This isn't a sandbox game where the money is never a problem. This is a game that demands your attention to do well from the start; otherwise, you'll be out of luck and money in no time.
If it is abstracted and obvious, like in a board game, I'll get it. If it's complicated and hidden, like in Railroad Tycoon 3, then I'll have to leave it to those who can find a way to enjoy it. I'm sure it feels great when you're on top of the world, a transport empire in your portfolio, but I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get there.
Fun Facts
The entire 3D map can be seen from street level to space, and buildings and the like switch from detailed models to vague 'near-enough's to reduce things popping in out of nowhere.
Railroad Tycoon 3, developed by PopTop Software, first released in 2003.
Version played: PC, 2003.