E3 06: Sid Meier's Railroads! Impressions

LOS ANGELES--Considering that it's due out later this year, the speed at which Firaxis is working on Sid Meier's Railroads! is impressive. The game, which was just announced a couple of months ago, is a remake of the famed designer's beloved railroad game from the early 90's. According to Firaxis representatives, Sid visited Hamburg, Germany, not too long ago and saw the world's largest tabletop model railroad. He came back from that trip with a gleam in his eyes to remake his masterpiece.

Railroads! won't just be a model-train game, though it will introduce a train table mode that will let you tinker around without having to worry about money or the artificial intelligence. But if you play the game in regular mode, you'll find yourself in an economic battle to build a railroad empire large enough that you can buy out your rivals before they can buy you out. You do this by building railroad networks linking cities and industries together, and then making sure the trains run on time to deliver people, mail, and goods to where they need to be. You'll see the results as you play. If you're successful, cities will grow and flourish. If you neglect them, they'll wither and shrink. This is a real-time strategy game, so it's all about being able to link the key cities and resources first and establish your foothold. Or you might need to engage in a price war with a rival in a contested city to gain market share.

This new Railroads! looks to be a lot easier than the original. There's a new drag-and-drop method of laying down railroad tracks, so it's no longer a struggle to lay down one piece at a time, make a mistake, and then have to tear down what you did and begin again. Now, just drag a rail out along the path you want, and the computer will show you how it will look, and it will also automatically build tunnels or bridges to deal with terrain features in the way. This is a much prettier game than the original, though that wasn't too hard to do. This new Railroads! is built on the same graphics engine used for last year's Civilization IV, and there are some interesting design decisions at work. Cities on the map are much closer together than they were in the first game. That's because Firaxis wants to fill the screen with action everywhere you look. Like with Civ IV, Railroads! is going for a living, breathing world. You'll see trains running along the tracks, people boarding at depots, lumber mills depositing logs onto your cars, and more.

Railroads! will support single-player and multiplayer on the Internet and a LAN, and the prospect of battling other cutthroat would-be robber barons is exciting. The game is rapidly coming together, and we're told to expect it to ship sometime this fall.