Tycoon War : Transport vs Railroad

I've been playing Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon II recently, so here's a post on the differences between them.

Obvious Stuff

Transport Tycoon covers all sorts of transport -- trains, planes, buses, trucks, ships, helicopters. Railroad Tycoon has only trains, but adds in economic 'tycoon' gameplay elements -- your "avatar" has a personal net worth, he can buy stocks and receive dividends. Some of the RRT2 missions focus on that aspect.

And that again is another major difference: TT is a toy, but RRT2 is a game. The first hour of TT gameplay is challenging, especially if you start with buses. Making money with buses and trucks is very difficult. They can pay for themselves, but expanding your empire with just road vehicles is definitely a challenge. But if you start building trains and hauling goods, it's very easy to make cash. Once you get a few coal trains running, money is no longer and object and it turns into a toy.

I like the toy aspect of TT. Once I have all the cash I care to spend, I start building giant, all-encompasing rail networks and elaborate switching and signaling systems. Elegant train networks are Art. But, since it's a toy, and because one needs to switch from diesel and steam trains to electric (rebuilding your entire network), and then later upgrade to maglev, you can't just continue making a more awesomest network. So I build up the network to a certain point then start over. Typically my 'games' last for one session, or a day. The next day I play, I start a new game.

Whereas with RRT2, after a few hours, you finish the mission and move on. You don't have to, but with the enticement of future missions and gold medals to be won, why stay with a finished mission?

Building Routes

First, to be clear, both games work with underlying square-tile engines. Track is built from tile to tile, and can go in eight directions (ie the four cardinal directions plus the 45-degree angles).

To build a route in TT, you have to lay track in straight stretches. Vertical climbs are very obvious; a given tile-to-tile segment will either be level, up one level, or down one level. The entire map might have eight or so distinct levels. Elevation changes are an important aspect of gameplay and I'll cover it in more detail later.

In RRT2, you can lay track tile by tile if you want, but the game provides an automatic track-stretching algorithm: select a start, drag to the end, and the game will figure out how to curve the track between the two points. Nearly every pair of adjacent tiles has an elevation change; elevation changes comes in .1 value increments, with slopes of up to 12.0 (or more).

A side-effect of these decisions is that track-laying is a critical gameplay element in TT, and not a concern in RRT2. You can be picky about how you lay tracks in RRT2, but why? The game generally discourages the player from being critical about the path that his trains take.

In TT, when two trains occupy the same track tile at the same time, they crash and burn. In RRT2, one train stops and the other passes. You can build two-way rails in RRT2, but that just means trains can go in both directions -- one can't overcome another. If you have a steep mountain grade or just a long stretch of track, and trains with varying engines and loads, in TT you can build extra rails. That, again, is part of the play to TT -- build efficient routes. In RRT2, since trains won't crash and building (and controlling) additional lines is difficult to do, you basically ignore the problem.

Efficiency is a big part of TT, and difficult to pay attention to in RRT2. Yet it has a very similar effect in both games, and is a critical component to successful route-building.

Elevation

One of the basic mechanics of both games is the option to choose which engine pulls a given train. Different engines have different speed characteristics -- fuel costs, maintenance costs, acceleration, reliability, and how well they deal with climbing. Even with the best, strongest engines, climbing up a steep slope (in TT, several levels; in RRT2, a slope over 2.0 or 4.0) causes a significant slowdown.

The smart track-builder avoids elevations as much as possible. When the money starts rolling in in TT, I start terraforming like crazy -- digging holes through hills, leveling mountains, in-filling valleys -- just to avoid level-changes. Fast trains means more profit. Both games reward quick delivery, and a train that's not climbing a hill can be delivering more goods, too. When you avoid hills, you win twice -- more profit from what carloads you do deliver, and the opportunity to deliver more carloads.

With TT's focus on track-building and the obvious level changes, it's easy to make efficient routes. It's a big part of the game.

RRT2, though.... It basically hides elevations from the user. Because of the fractional level changes and the isometric display, it's often hard to figure out whether a given stretch of land is level or slightly sloped. When you lay track, the UI will show you the level change from tile to tile, but it's not always obvious whether it's a climb or a descent. The game makes it hard to make efficient routes.

Implicitly, then, you're not supposed to be efficient when playing RRT2. Just build your stations and your trains and move on! This is one of the things that defines getting gold medals from missions vs silver or bronze -- if you pay extra attention to what's going on, turn on the grid, carefully lay your tracks, and even do some landscaping, you can dramatically increase the speed your trains take through some routes.

Stations

Station-placement is a minipuzzle in both games. It's surprisingly similar, because of the shared mechanic -- catchment area. TT stations are relatively cheap (tho maybe that's because I'm used to having more money than I need), and their catchment area is always four tiles from the edges of the station (you can create stations that are longer or have more tracks). RRT2 has three different station sizes, with each bigger and more expensive station having a larger catchment area.

RRT2 has missions and it's difficult to establish a cash cow, so you're always concerned about optimizing station placement. Stations are expensive. You're only going to build one in a town, and there's no options to build longer stations or multiple platforms, so you have to choose a good location. Elevation is a consideration, too, for the tracks coming in to a town's station.

Economy

Ok, so you bought your stations, laid the track, and now you need to figure out where to send trains. Both games have Industries that produce goods; some are strict producers (grain farms, cattle ranches, coal and iron mines), others are intermediates (especially steel), and others produce final goods (such as "food" and "goods"). Plus cities generate mail and passengers.

Trains make money by delivering goods that are in demand. TT cares less about 'demand' -- either a station accepts a type of good (and pays a rate depending on how far the good has travelled) or it doesn't. In RRT2, a station will have a demand rate for goods. In both games, stations pay more for goods that are delivered quickly -- especially passengers and perishable foods. Other goods, such as coal, don't "expire" and therefore the pay rate doesn't depend on how long a train takes to get to its destination. TT has a weird model, where it's very lucrative to haul coal across the entire map, which isn't realistic. It's a game, there's tons of unrealistic things going on, but this aspect of the economy model seems out of place.

Trains & Consists

Consists switch things around: in TT, a given train has the same consist throughout its entire life. You buy the engine, attack coal cars and passenger cars and mail cars, send it off, and (usually) never change what's attached. In RRT2, you can change consist at every station. It's easy to set up a route, with one train, that brings grain from station A to station B, and then carries baked bread (ie, "food" manufactured at a bakery from the grain you delivered) back. Unlike the other mechanics I've mentioned above, it's easier to tweak consists in RRT2.

Yet this fits many of the other gameplay elements in RRT2: you can be picky, but who's picky? Specifically, you can change the consist of a train right before it gets to a station (or even when it's unloading), so that it loads exactly what that station has available at the moment. If you spend a lot of extra time micro-managing the game, exploiting the finer points of the UI, you can dramatically improve your return.

I generally stop doing that micromanagement after a while, because it's a repetetive, mechanical task. It's not even a puzzle. It's almost the sort of thing I'd like to assign an algorithm to. More on that later!

Speed

TT's trains move much faster. Both games have map sizes that are roughly equivalent, and both have game-speed controls (letting game-time move faster or slower), so you'd think it wouldn't matter. But one of the side effects of this is that inefficient routes matter much more in RRT2. Since the missions are time-based ("achieve goal X by 1896"), you can't afford to waste time, and one inefficient route can kill you. It takes as much as six game years to cross a map in RRT2, whereas my slowest routes in TT take about four months, and that's for slow trains going up and down hills from corner to corner. Most of my "long-distance" trains take about three months to get to their destination; the vast majority hit a new station once a month. Since journeys take so freaking long in RRT2, several of the missions are to just make one trip -- say, send two trains from one side of the map to the other.

This effectively adds randomness to RRT2. Did this train make money this year? Did your company stock go up or down? Was the route so long the train ran out of sand and water right before it got to the destination? Did you not build the expensive sand, water, and maintenance sheds at the last station it was at? Doing well means either getting lucky, or building your lines to minimize dependence on all this randomness. You're not managing trains and delivering goods; you're figuring out how to build lines that are short, and get a bunch of trains to hit the stations where you built roundhouses.

The slowness of RRT2 also means that it takes years to see if a given plan works out. Was trying to branch out to enough remote locations to get that steel plant running a good move? Years later, you find out: no. Too late, the deadline for the mission is too close, start over. Or, just skip the mission. Play around a little bit, wait til it tells you you failed, and move on to the next mission. If you do that, RRT2 becomes a toy, too -- if you don't care about the goal, then the goal might as well not exist.

I want to succeed, though. I want to figure out how to build profitable train runs, to turn a small bit of starting capital into a big empire. Which means failing missions, and then playing them over and over until I get the gold medal. Bleh.

The Designer Told Me Not to Worry

I'm moving into meta-issues here; consideration of gameplay elements from a game-design standpoint.

It's easy to focus on the factors that a game makes obvious. When games make stuff obvious, the designer is saying "pay attention to this factor." When factors aren't obvious, when they're hidden, it's difficult to assume that you are supposed to pay attention to it. It's like the game designer is telling you not to worry about it.

TT makes elevation obvious. You see specific elevation changes, and work around them. You deal with whole units. RRT2 works with fractional units, and hides them, too, and on top of that gives you a tool for building rail lines that effectively avoids tweaking elevation changes. You can't see what the elevations are, so how are you supposed to take it into consideration? It tells you how steep the route will be, but so what? Can you really work around that? It's the sort of thing that I wind up just ignoring -- until I realized that I needed to pay attention to it, turned on the grid, and started getting obsessive.

Train Management

I'm just going to consider these two models as train-building games. They both provide more, but I want to look at them as lessons for building a similar train-buliding game. What lessons do they teach?

In both games, you spend money buying stations, laying track, and acquiring engines. Then you
make revenue by sending the trains around. Your score depends on how well you manage your engines, and how efficiently you played the station-placement and track-laying minipuzzles.

So, really, let's start there: your SCORE depends on how well you play those minipuzzles, and then how well you manage the resources you have available -- goods waiting at stations, and the trains you have to transport the goods around. Theoretically, the games should make that easy to do. Yet neither really does.

In TT, it's possible to open up a miniwindow for each train; a small version of the game window proper, showing where the train is in the world. If you open a bunch of these, you can see how your trains are doing. This is really only effective for seeing if the train is lost, or stuck in traffic. Checking out what it is carrying -- a full load or not -- requires opening up a sub-window. There is an All Trains window, and you can even put trains into groups to limit what you're looking at. The window shows profit and loss, and (for some car types) whether the car is full. But so what? This only tells you that a route is unprofitable. To change consist, you need to send the train into a depot -- which means taking the train out of service for a while. And also distracting yourself from doing anything else until the train gets to a station. You could leave the window open, and go build more tracks or something, but when I do that usually the train gets to the depot and I don't notice for a while -- and then I have to remember what I was going to do anyway. RRT2 lets you change consist immediately, tho it will only take effect the next time the train arrives at the station -- ie, cars won't magically appear or disappear while the train is en route.

(Speaking of which, RRT2 does let you replace an engine at any time, magically, wherever and whenever, while TT again requires that you send that train into a station. OpenTTD does have an option to auto-replace engines and road vehicles, though, which is nice. It's annoying to require sending the train to a depot, especially if the depot isn't on the line, so this is a bandaid over a bad feature. A better solution would be allowing the player to replace engines anywhere, anytime.)

In TT, you can also pop up miniwindows for each station, which lists the goods waiting for pickup. But since you can't actively manage consists, your primary option for changing what gets carried is to add more trains. Lots of passengers waiting at that inner-city station? Buy more trains!

RRT2 likewise has a trains-list view, which takes the entire screen and shows six whole trains! Omg! Six! The normal UI (ie not this trains-list window) has a listbox down at the bottom that shows all your trains, and it's a great tool. It shows the consist, whether each one of those cars is full (recall, in RRT2 a car is either empty or fully loaded; no in-between), how far it is to its next stop, the name of that next stop, current speed, status (needs water/sand/repairs), and the value of the cargo that it's carrying. This is great stuff -- this is everything you need to assess whether you've got a good route or not.

Except that it only shows four trains. When you've got a dozen trains running and a bunch of stations to manage, seeing only four trains is a kick in the teeth. And you can only look at trains OR stations, not both. The station info panel is also nice; it shows what goods a given station is supplying (and it what quantity), tho not what the demand level is. Again, the view is limited -- only two stations at a time.

Conclusions

Let's go back to my summary of what these games are about:

Your SCORE depends on how well you play those minipuzzles, and then how well you manage the resources you have available -- goods waiting at stations, and the trains you have to transport the goods around.

There are three minipuzzles in both games: station placement, track layout, and engine/consist choice. For the most part, in both games, once you've done any of these (say, placed one station), you don't go back and change the choice. You might tweak a train route, or change a consist, but you can't spend the entire game doing that. Maybe that's how you consistently win the gold medals, but it seems awfully obsessive to me. Tweaking consists at every train arrival is just dull. Plus, I don't want to drag each mission out into a 12-hour marathon session, because (like I said above) if something doesn't work out, you have to replay the whole mission all over again. Bleh bleh bleh.

The strategic element to both games is similar -- what industries to you chase down? Do you branch out to Northern cities, or stay focussed on reaching the west coast? This is great; it's a big part of transportation-empire building. Good stuff.

I just want better tools.

I want TT to tell me, on, say, hover-over, what's waiting at a station. Missions would be fun, too. Some players put out quiz-like puzzles, saying stuff like: "fix this juncture" or "extend this network to include Town X without interrupting the existing traffic." More of that, plzkthx. Get rid of depots. Make train building easier. Since, for the most part, you build a train once, set its route, then leave it alone forever -- flexible tools for managing that route make no sense. The tools should be optimized for the tasks that you perform often. Don't give me the chance of sending a train into the middle of the lake -- if you want me to choose a station, give me a list of the fucking stations. Srsly. Fix the long-distance gravy train and it could be a fun challenge to build a network encompassing the entire map.

RRT2 should start by getting rid of the tycoon aspect. Other than the missions where it's the specific goal, it's completely ignorable. In fact, you should ignore it, because milking money from the company via dividends makes it much harder to grow the company. I haven't even gotten into how labyrinthine the stock-market aspect is. There's a lot of statistics there, but wtf? Who cares? And graphs beat pages of text any day -- TT and other Chris Sawyer games have all had great charts. Give me those. Give me good train and station overview tools. Give me explicit terraforming tools. Let me see more than four trains or two stations at a time, without hiding everything else.

Sometimes when I'm playing TT I think, "I wish there was more variety in the buildings." That's a great thing for a designer to have players complain about, because it means they're not bitching about everything else. And I have been bitching this whole post, but I still do enjoy the game.