I liked Railroad Tycoon. I love Railway Empire! I have literally played this game for thousands of hours!
The minute this dropped, I picked this up. I love RE (see comments at the end). I like scenarios where all your goals aren't known at the start (ones like Mexico where you can choose a side are pretty cool too.) Japan does not tell you all your goals. You can choose any Leader you like. I do have a problem with this. (I actually liked the earlier DLCs that specified which Leader to use.) Here, because you don't know if there are major things like Passenger Revenue that would dictate a specific Leader, I default to Professor which seems kind of unfun. Japan looks like it has territories. I don't the Maps that have Territories that you have to buy. You are constricted so much that you almost can't go wrong. I notice that Japan includes something else new. I haven't played much yet so I don't know what it is or if I like it or not. General Comment on RE: I have played RE to death and was therefore happy to have some new scenarios. One of the things that I like about RE over say Railroad Tycoon, is that it seems to me the game is much more of a "box of legos" in that you are able to do pretty much anything you can conceive. (You have very simple tools that go together in very complex ways.) Recently in one scenario I happened to be running quite a bit of interconnected single track lines. This was really cool to see the simple tools and simple rules result in something complex and robust!
I remember seeing this game when it was new and the graphics were great! Now with DosBox it is almost unusable.
All of the DLCs are decent. The ones with territories (which this DOES NOT have) I find rather bland. If I were to buy just one of the DLCs this is the one I would buy. This offers three different (very different!) scenarios each of which brings unique challenges. Best of the bunch (so far - hoping to see Japan available here soon!)
Railway Empire is NOT RRT! I had just about finished the base game scenarios when I decided that I was still interested enough in the game to get the expansion. One thing that RE has going for it is that there are a huge amount of moving parts in the game. Some games are about making money. Other games are about producing a lot of a particular resource. Although you employ some similar tactics your change in focus keeps the game new and interesting. It seems that the Medium Difficulty Expansion Scenarios are not as hard as the Medium Difficulty Base Game Scenarios. If you buy this Complete edition I would go in this order: Campaign, Expansion Medium, maybe then Expansion Hard. The Expansion Scenarios are structured more like the Campaign than the Scenarios in the Base in that you don’t have all your tasks in front of you all at once. Some suggestions for the Devs about what annoys me while playing: 1. Confirm Track Deletions! 2. Don’t Discard Line Changes. Too often I forget to OK the rail line that I have just set up by prematurely selecting Building or Track Building and find out “changes to rail line discarded”. 3. Buy Out doesn’t make that much sense. Maybe at 51% you should be able to put 51% of the profits of the other company into your company. 4. Terminal Stations should be a little cheaper. 5. Stop the Trains getting Confused when their routine really hasn’t changed. Suddenly that train is running home to mommy to start the trip all over again. 6. When laying Signals there should be some “train length indicator”. SPOILER: 7. The Signal Controlled versions of the buildings are vastly better than the regular versions. Because of this it makes sense at the beginning of the game to rip up any existing stations and put in good stations. Allow the others to be more useful or just get rid of them.
