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Sid Meier's Railroads! Impressions

We make tracks to see Sid Meier's Railroads! at the Leipzig Games Convention, and find ourselves in the company of the nearly complete game.

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LEIPZIG, Germany--Sid Meier's Railroads! is an update of the classic Railroad Tycoon template that's being developed by Firaxis and published by 2K Games. Thankfully, it has been updated to take advantage of all the technology sitting inside a modern PC, and as a result, it looks superb. The game that we saw at Leipzig was pre-beta, and it had a few graphical glitches here and there, but in general it exuded a polished presentation and an alluring golden-era style. The game is on target for a Q3 release, which doesn't leave long for the team to add the final touches to the build we saw.

Sid Meier's Railroads! is a highly attractive game to just see being played. The decision was made to design each individual city as a small collection of buildings on the map, which lets you survey the landscape quickly and easily. The general design is meant to hearken back to a time when the linking of cities by train brought prosperity, and the clean aesthetic responds to that need. As a result, each individual element of the gameworld looks like its part of a toy train set. Even the oil refinery plants have an alluring purity.

Once you're done cooing over the gorgeous aesthetics, you have to move on to the basic demands of supplying the cities on your map. The ideal situation is to have a constant supply of goods coming in and out of each town, with raw materials such as corn and oil being used by the city and then exported in a different form. Once raw materials have been made into commercial products, they'll need to be taken out of the city, which is where your railroads come into play once again. There's a simple satisfaction to be had from serving these little towns with materials and then seeing the product shipped out to another city on the same line.

Building tracks in Railroads! is an automated process that's easy to get the hang of. You drag the mouse wherever you want the tracks to go, and the computer will choose the right pieces and then do the actual building and plotting. It's impressive to see the computer build bridges over water automatically, and it's even better when you can drill a hole right through a volcano and make your passengers just a little bit warmer along the way. Every preexisting object in the game is responsive to your track, so if you want to go right through a city, it will split automatically to make way for the track.

You can't make money from empty tracks though, so you have to decide on the best places to drop your stations so that you'll get passengers using the service. You also need to decide on the length of trains that serve each of your destinations. Increasing the number of carriages might serve demand, but it will also decrease the speed of your train and cause passengers to seek alternative transport. The key is to maximise the load while making the overall train as efficient as possible.

Being a successful railroad tycoon is all about maximising your potential earnings. When you start the game, the basic economy is fueled by the transportation of people and mail. This is how you can start to make some money, but like all entrepreneurs, you'll want to move onto shifting more-profitable items before long. On the demo we saw, Washington, DC had a high demand for grain. With a train track set up to join the supplier to the city, the corn-processing factory was bought out and the railroad became even more profitable.

Once you've put lines in place and have started serving towns with various materials in different directions, you need to split the tracks in order to manage traffic. This is where the management of supply routes starts to make things more complicated, as you need to optimise the amount of trains coming in and out of each station, while making sure that nothing is delayed because of waiting around for other trains to pass.

Before long, financial competition comes into play, and you'll find yourself competing with other railroad builders. Keeping trains and tracks is a financial burden, as they often require maintenance and upgrades. Therefore, you need to balance your finances to maintain your stock price, otherwise your competitors may start buying you out if you become cheap enough. By the same token, your aim is to obliterate the competition by meeting supply and demand at as many locations as possible, by which point you should have enough money to buy rival companies out. Once you buy someone out, you inherit all their railroads and equipment, so it's in your interest to expand your enterprise as soon as possible.

And as you make plans to expand your empire by buying things such as oil refineries, you'll often find the competition attempting to outbid you. If you manage to be successful as a railroad tycoon and retire rich, the game might tell you that you've made it all the way to become the president of the United States.

The game offers 10 maps in total, with Germany, France, England, and four US maps for you to choose from. There will also be a couple of multiplayer maps that have no real-life counterparts. Each country offers relevant architectural styles and supply demands, with the developers cheekily including beer factories for Germany and cheese manufacturing for France. There will also be more practical demands, such as the building of a track from Manchester to Liverpool in England, as well as setting the world speed record with the Mallard train.

By taking an interesting art direction, Sid Meier's Railroads! looks to invigorate what is traditionally a niche genre. The game certainly looks like a lot of fun, and if you have a basic interest in trains or even just the management genre, it already seems like it will offer a novel and polished experience. We'll find out shortly, as the game is due to be released in Q3 2006.

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