Railway Empire

I love train sims so this should of been a insta-buy for me, but I held off on this one due to the bad reviews. I even passed when it was on sale, so I ended up paying full price. (don't regret it though). The dev's got the train mechanics down pretty good. The track laying is great, the trestles and tunnels that are built on the fly are amazing. The switch signals allow you to route trains and control the flow of traffic. All of this is great, I love it. OK, now the bad. I almost deducted two stars because of the annoying AI players. The artwork, or actually the character's that are the AI players, do not match with this game. Not a one of them looks like a legitimate rail baron, they are cartoon character's. And they have annoying cartoon voices always chiming in. Then they put in this thing where you can hire a spy to steal tech from your opponents and sabotage their trains, etc. The AI players do it constantly, and they always tell you all about it (annoying voices). I've played many games with spy's you could hire, and it did not bother me, but it don't fit well with this game in my opinion. There is a financial aspect, stock market, issuing bonds, etc. Like a rail baron game should have. I did not even know it was in there at first. So I've played the game quite a bit in the week since I bought it. I will probably never finish a game, I like the early game, laying out my tracks, optimizing the traffic, especially around my biggest cities. I ignore the AI players and just play with my trains. They sabotage my train, its just another break down to me. About 2-3 hours in I get tired of listening to the AI players so I quit. Next time I always start a new game and do it all over again. I do get a lot of enjoyment out of playing this game, but I'm not sure who the target audience is supposed to be here. It's like there where two teams working on this, the team working on the trains nailed it, but the rest of the game is not a serious train sim. It's a cartoon.

I've played significant hours on Railroad Tycoon 3 and I was really hoping that this was a natural successor to that game. This is not it - at least not in its current form. Others will be far more eloquent than I am about the faults of this game but it all boils down to the UI. Its simply terrible. I'm really hoping for some mod that completely redoes it.

Nice Music, nice design, nice tasks, nice research tree and some other nice things. But now the bad things : # AI follows not the same rules as the player, ( you will see it after you fusioned with an ai company -> all AI trains will be stuck ). # Sand+Watertowers everywhere. You cannot build sand and watertowers in stations. You have to place them somewhere between the stations. I think it looks ugly with many tracks and these towers everywhere. Would have been better if the locomotions would refill in stations and when I had only to place them if there were very long tracks till the next station, or if a train had to climb a long way. # Only 1/2/4 platforms stations. No 6 Platforms station, no 3 Platforms station. It is to restricted. # Only 2 Station per Industry/City. So if I build 2 stations in a city, the AI is blocked. Same counts for me. Was a easy way to keep the AI out of cities/industries for me. # Hire People for you trains. What was nice when I had 5 trains and a few people, became not so nice when I had 50 trains and lots of hired staff. Every one has an attribute that will make him/her like or hate to work with others. Like traindriver A with attribute A will like to work with people with attribute D and dislike people with attribute F. Four hired people can be on every train. With 50 trains that are 200 people you have to micro. By the way, the time does not stop when you try to micro them, so you are under pressure. # no Saxonia in the german dlc. # and now the biggest thing for me, the to tiny maps. The longer I played the game, the more ugly my tracklayout became. And that is because the maps are so small. The bigger the towns get, the more different goods they need. Now with the only 2 stations with 4 platform each station the switches, slopes, bridges, tunnels are so close to each other that is for me, NO FUN to lock at them. So THE LONGER I PLAY a map, the LESS FUN do I have. And that is a big NO GO to me. I prefer : Transport Fever

I have this game and all those DLCs but no map editor. GOG you should add this feature, it is already available. there are already videos in YT about the editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X761AtlSH6E.

i bought this game incl. all current dlcs, because they really add to the gameplay. the game has a great atmosphere and good amount of detail in it. the managerial aspects are quite simple, but at the same time this leads to a quite relaxed gameplay. if you take joy in building up and planning your personal railway empire without any disturbances, this game could be for you. if you seek challenge, the AI can be quite aggressive and the gameplay will become more fast paced and hectic at times, because you have to keep expanding or try limiting the expansion of AI opponents. i wish there would be more maps in the future with a greater variety. after completion of their current update/dlc path accross Europe i hope they would focus on russia and asia: maybe the transsiberian railway which is leading to new maps accross asia...? :) i think its a great game, where i already spent more than 40 hrs in and i will keep playing it. it has a solid and efficient design and i am happy to see more from the developers in the future. thanks for this game!