Railway Empire

The main issue i have with the game is that at least to a "novice" its not as easy to quickly see at a glance what needs what and from whom. You need to click first on the town, then on the details menue to see what it needs, and then go and look for those recources (say if you want to grow a town) No deal breaker just annoying and i guess this will solve itself with time once i have memorized who needs what. Also the controls in regards to track building have cool ideas but the "clicks" you have to do is so totally different to other games i played so far in this genre it takes some time to adjust. Nevertheless a super cozy game that looks great and is just fun to chill with.

I shall be commenting on the Linux version. Issues may differ. Railway Empire is yet another railway-building game, but its core falls a bit short for gameplay with a mixed bag of other components: (1) There is a »commercial buildings« component included: Profit from your own factories. (2) There is some auction mode included (for factories or progress). (3) There is some sort of stock trading included. (4) In the Free Game mode, there are AI opponent magnates with ever-the-same sound bites. (5) And there is some personnel management included (almost all have one trait, and this trait needs to fit to the other staff on the same train) This said, every single one of the approaches is half-hearted: (0) The main thing, rail building, is just poor. There is no advanced way to set signals or have trains take different routes on condition. Sometimes, fragments of rails will remain on the map after destruction of elements, without any option to get rid of them. Grouping of trains is not possible, each train must have its own schedule which mus be set manually. Which is really bad when redesigning a map with dozens or hundreds of trains. And while you are setting your new routes, time will be ticking away. Schedules do not exist. Even more so, there is not a single good overview of trains or personnel. You will need to scroll up and down forever in your big-lettered train list. There even is no chance to have passengers with a set destination. They will just take the next train to anywhere, which is poor design. The rest is too rudimentary. Therefore, features annoy rather than add to the game. Gameplay is strenuous -- the UI is just painful. You will end up clicking a multitude of buttons because there is no direct way to get wherever you want. Auto saves do not work with Linux at all. The game crashed once within a week or so. Overall, though, the game has some board game appeal to it. And due to its generic nature, it has good replayability. It is okay.

My first impression was truly WOW! The graphics are great and the train models are beautiful detailed. At last a sim where the track-layin cuts trough the landscape (instead of complete unrealistic climbs over high mountains), bridges and tunnels appears whre it should. You may choose from a wide selection of stations, from the simple singletrack rural platform to the large -track citystation with signal controls. The track-laying take som time to get to grip with. The signal posting and double-tracking too. This is due to a rather poor tutorial section. But alas, after playing this for some time the weaknesses start to irritate. One issue is the availeble commodities. i.g. London has textile-mills and needs fabric,- the problem is that the fabric does not exist anywere, and this is just one isolated example. So even how hard you try, your cities does just evolve to a certain extent. It's not a fault as such, but I is baffled over the developers facination for steam-locomotives beccause the locomotives does not develop into modern -times electric locomotives. Railway Empire has the potential to be an all time great game, but... TC/Oslo

This game made me lose a couple of good days in front of a PC, it's like a disease :) IMO it's better that Tycoon games. Graphics are great,music is ideal for this kind of game (add some more), gameplay is also very good, although it would be nice to see improvement in some areas. First thing, why only USA map? I would like to see also maps of Europe, Asia, Africa... That's a patch thing, it can be done in one update. Also it would good to have more automatic arrangements for some parts of the game, like arranging your staff on trains automatically. It would be nice if a supply depot could have more than 6 different items to storage. When destroying rail, IMO it would be better if we can select which part of rail we would like to destroy, not the whole thing if nothing is build on that rail. The in-game tasks ( the green star) are very short, i didn't manage to complete half of it.

I can't understand why the GOG edition doesn't have an scenario editor. It's a great fault, in my opinion. I love Gaming Minds (former Ascaron) trading games. I own and played lots of hours all of them. This Railway Empire is fresh air in the series and is a well done game. But I can't forgive the lack of features compared to other editions, argued by devs with poor and false excuses. So I can't honestly rate it with more than those three stars. ps/ Please, add an upgrade pack to the complete edition to the store for those who already own the base game.