Locomotion, Chris Sawyer's

great to be playing this again

I don't think I'll play it but I want to buy it just to say thanks to Chris Sawyer for how much please I've derived from Transport Tycoon (& now OpenTTD!) over the years!

Locomotion is proposed as the sequel to Transport Tycoon. It is a functionally worse Transport Tycoon, executed with worse ideas, worse building, and an unfitting interface. It is essentially built on the bones of the Roller Coaster Tycoon engine, but that doesn't scale properly to a whole transport empire. It shows. I never once used a road vehicle in my many sessions. The capacity is too poor, the speed is pitiful, and dealing with a fleet of road vehicles seems like a good way to lose sanity. I simply replaced road vehicles with trams. Similarly, aircraft were never worth the trouble as their running costs simply spiraled out of control, plus airports have a very large footprint, leaving their locations quite limited. The AI pathfinder in this game is just terrible. You'll often observe ships spinning on coastal corners, and anything resembling an actual muli-lane railway is out of the question. You might think waypoints could solve either of these: This is not a good solution; you will need to carefully guide vehicles for the entire round trip with waypoints. Forget the idea of beautiful path signal networks, it just isn't worth it. A showstopping issue with Locomotion: There is no means to do maintenance on vehicles, nor any way to do a mass replace or retrofit. Reliability rots away too quickly, with the implied suggestion being: every so often, stop everything and replace it on the spot! No vehicle depots! The early game leaves waiting upwards of a decade for a new vehicle, so that starter fleet is going to be running ragged, even with frequent replacements. Even with as few as five trains maintenance becomes a chore, and due to a quirk of the cargo system, any cargo in a train with engine replaced will outright vanish. The basic graphics get the point across. Mostly. The problem is that most of the structures are just quite bugly. With a very limited roster of buildings and trees, the visual variety runs out, leaving a miasma of ugly offices and square block apartments in later years. This limited roster allegedly covers three styles of architecture over generations. Landscape generation is foul. It explains why in the default set of scenarios, only four are randomly generated. No matter how the settings, never will something resembling usable topography generate, nor even a visually pleasing scape. While Transport Tycoon's map generation was far from perfect, it generated something that resembled a map, rather than a series of stacking rectangles. Further to this point, the industry placement in Locomotion is often a challenge to transport for, in all the wrong ways: Logistically implausible, embedded in a landlocked mountain valley, or simply at two such distant points as to make transport infeasible. Often a combination of all three. These industrial issues would be lessened if the cargo flow of the game wasn't completely without reason. In most transport games, service begins when vehicles arrive, and only the cargo relevant to the service is readied. In Locomotion, service is assumed with as little as one station tile, and due to a glitch in the way cargo is handled, may often end up with irrelevant cargo overflowing somehow as if the entire cargo flow of the map was a liquid, passengers and mail appearing at irrelevant routes in odd corners of the world. In the realm of functioning as designed, getting cargo to an endpoint is not an easy task, especially in the early game. Moving products into their respective industries is easy enough, but delivering finished goods (and mail) to early towns is outright impossible due to the structuring of cargo acceptance. Goods are only accepted by certain buildings, and a station's catchment area has to overlap enough of them to produce a "demand unit". For mail, the problem is quite odd, as while many houses produce mail, most won't start accepting mail until a decade from a 1900 start. Combined with the aforementioned service issue, this means players can have cargo that's all piled up with nowhere to go. All the issues mentioned in the previous two points would be far less of an issue if building a network wasn't such a click heavy pain. Locomotion uses the same exact building tools as Roller Coaster Tycoon, which are ill suited to this purpose. Everything has to be built by the individual tile. Certainly, there are shortcuts to allow you to lay down multiple tiles, but this is only useful for very rare straightaways and worthless for anything else. I will say in favor of the interface that the menus pop open when hovered, and that is about all the positive to be said of the interface. Towns are a menace. When provided services, they can have explosive growth (literally off the chart, no less) and this can choke out your infrastructure growth. The town planning system is simplistic, and is a landscaper's nightmare. [During this review, I never once mentioned finances. This is because with the ease of generating money, it becomes quite useless as a marker of progress and due to an exponential inflation system, worthless as to telling players how much buying power they actually have.] Overall, Locomotion makes for a poor showing: failing to hold up at all. There is great potential in the OpenLoco project to fix most of the issues I have mentioned in this review. Had it been released a decade earlier, it may have been an impressive iteration on Transport Tycoon.

I gave this game a three as a "neutral" rating. I went to download Open TTD and found that I had to accept a toolbar I'm still trying to get rid of and a downloader that will track "non-identifying" information a la: 5.5 During the installation process, after user accepts the terms and conditions the installer will send non personal statistics as follows: iLivid installer and applications will track and send statistical information using the internet. The gathered data is for statistical purposes only. No personal user data is tracked. The gathered data includes but not limited to – Tracking computer unique identifier. Tracking the installation progress. Tracking browser toolbar was loaded or toolbar buttons clicked. Tracking application usage such as but not limited to application started, download started, download complete etc. In addition user may approve gather of private statistics. In such case the application and the toolbar will gather information of the video links used by the toolbar and the application. the information gathered in order to enhance support of non functional operations. That open source game is a BIG mistake! The toolbar already has a button for a $1,000 gift card from Wal-Mart! RIIIIIGHT!