#Sid meiers railroads pc how to#

However, it's only when you compete against AI or human players that there's any real action. Yeah, it's possible to spiral into debt and doom yourself, but you'll soon know not to overload trains, and learn to watch out for the more inefficient services before the wallet goes boom. As long as you're not too profligate you can run a profitable little network with no trouble and watching the goods get delivered has its own kind of satisfying mental clunk-click. Of course you could play the single-player on your own to make it all disgustingly easy (yet mildly satisfying) to monopolise to your heart's content.

#Sid meiers railroads pc how to#

Once you've digested the basics of how to connect outlying resources to cities, as well as how to bend your train-tracks across the topography of the cute little maps, you start to reel in cash and begin the long process of buying out your opponents. The friendlier, cuter approach we had been previewed previously makes this an altogether more playful experience than other Tycoon games and those folks who spent hours nuzzling the stats pages of Railroad Tycoon 3 will likely find this more like a rummage around the toy box than a serious outing to the land of computerised Hornby.

As the game unfolds it feels entirely intuitive, with everything in its place (even if the interface is a bit too dinky). We expected it to be enjoyable, if simply because the Railroad games are some of the best-crafted management games in the world, but we could have done with something a little more muscular. Meier's latest platform game is sort of unremarkably entrancing. It's management at its most genial: connect A with B in the most efficient manner possible and personal satisfaction arrives in droves. The huffing steam engines and whirring diesels are almost inconsequential to the overall puzzle-tweak-challenge of connecting supply with demand and making the world go round. Yes, it's that train network management time again, complete with industrious-sounding theme music and lots of options to click as you watch your virtual wallet grow satisfyingly fat, or despairingly thin. Or Railroad Tycoon 4, as it's definitely not going to be called.