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Excellent strategy game that you will find addictive!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 29 / 32
Date: November 18, 1999
Author: Amazon User

What a game. For the rail enthusiast, this is a must have! This game combines railroading, geography, politics and high finance into an incredible game of strategy. Build an empire and meet geographic, financial or political goals.

3 hours passes like 30 minutes playing this game. Each new campaign is progressively more difficult and requires its own strategy to win. I've been playing the game for 6 months and havn't figured it all out yet...but it's held my interest all this time.

Hands down, the best strategy game I've ever played!

Railroad Tycoon...gotta buy it!

I recommend Railroad Tycoon II to anyone.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 24 / 27
Date: November 10, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon is an excellent strategy game. Players design a railroad from the ground up. Where should you locate tracks? What engines should you buy? And just as importantly, what cargo should you carry and where will it fetch the highest price? The railroad genre should appeal to many and it is a refreshing break from military strategy. The user interface is intuitive and the graphics are nice. The game play is real-time. AI opponents are fairly challenging.

It takes a while to love it, but it's worth it.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: June 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

When I first started to play Railroad Tycoon II, I thought that it looked great (and it really does), but was extremely complex. But I soon realized that the problem wasn't with the game, but with me. Let me explain.

All I wanted to do was to build trains and track and stations until I ran out of room on the map. I wanted to whip out the European map, get three or four competitors and start playing. Much to my chagrin, you can't do that on the European map because it doesn't let you add other competitors. The game establishes certain goals that you are supposed to meet in certain scenarios. This, I did not like.

There is a wonderful scenario editor, but that really takes a lot of time and work and I just wanted to play with the trains. So finally I decided that, in order to enjoy the game, I would basically have to ignore the goals set up by the programmers and just play. Once I changed my mindset, the game absolutely blossomed. It was weeks before I even placed a different CD in the drive to play a different game.

I found myself coming back to this game time and time again. And in that, this game is exactly like it predecessor. If you liked the original, you'll love this one.

For me it is a fascinating flexible strategy game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: May 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon II is extremely flexible. At one level you can play it as an exciting multi-user game with robbers robbing trains, trains blowing apart and ruthless AI opponents. At another level you can read through the book and understand much more about how the game was built and its capabilities. You can control the speed of play, I use the slowest speed and even then I find it too fast when running over 300 trains in the UK at the same time. For me using the book, RailRoad Tycoon II Official strategy guide and the game together meant learning about the map editor so I could customise other people's maps and make my favourite map of England much more accurate to play. The game itself becomes much more interesting as you deal with more levels of complexity. You can even eliminate the AI opponents and robbers. Introduce new events and generally create your own world.

The game shows its North American roots. My background being English is very different, nowhere in England is more than 50 miles from the sea. Fishing and ports are much more important. My personal wish list would be to add different types of ports and a fish cargo to the game.

But to enjoy the game to the full you really need the Official Strategy Guide. Is it likely to have a harmful effect. Don't know. I have spent many hours playing the game, I have even learnt a bit of geography whilst playing it, I now know roughly where a few places like Denver and Frankfurt are. Also I can tell you exactly where the mountain ranges that are going to slow down trains are as well. It also gives an introduction to economics, how resources interact with cites and manufacturing plants.

Still chugging along

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: March 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Do you still have any 2 year old games on your hard-drive? Probably not. Most gamers delete games that are even a few months old to make way for new ones, or the game's simply sit there on our desktops - pretty little unused icons. This game though - Railroad Tycoon II, is a definite exception to this deleted/unused game rule.

The reasons are numerous - graphics, gameplay, replayability and of course it's strategy element. The game is a lovely mix of complexity (the business model) and simplicity (setting up stations and laying track). It is real time strategy and economic simulator; as a virtual train set it's playful and yet with all stock market options turned on, it's as cuthroat as the world of the historic robber-barons must have been. The red in the game is not from bloody combat but simply your company bleeding to death as these tycoons (your computer adversaries) take you to the economic woodshed, short-selling your stock if they see an opportunity in ruining you in doing so. From all this it's obvious that economic factors are important, but how does this work in gameplay?

Game play takes place in scenarios which are meant to allow us to delve into all aspects of the game. Some objectives may involve accumulating the largest personal worth or hauling the most cargoes or creating the wealthiest company. Still others may be as simple as connecting two cities or doing something else the fastest. Income is earned hauling cargo. There are dozens of cargo types, either as inputs or output from the dozens of industries that are featured. Setting up is simple. Choose from one of 3 station sizes, lay your track and choose your engine. There are dozens of trains available (not all at once - it depends on the historical period) The secret to making substantial income is to lay routes that create a production cycle. For example: two cargoes available are iron and coal; haul these to a steel mill; take the steel output plus orchard crops to a cannery and then haul the resulting food back to your city completing the cycle and earning all along the way.

The route laying and running of trains takes place in a 3D window which can be rotated as required and zoomed in to give you a good view of your railroad at work. The ambient sounds provide background or serve as clues to what's going on. The sceech of your crashing train is suitably disturbing to make you pay attention.

Have fun tycoon, or are you more of the Robber-baron type?

Thinking about selling my car :)

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: May 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

If you want to get a hint what is big business all about, if you can't understand why have the great personalities (brought back to life in this game!) persisted at their work, when they could have long retire, sit down, feed your mouse some cheese and go on. Graphics is excellent, game runs wonderfully, you have very lot of options, different campaigns, scenarios, around 50 trains and 30 cargo cars. You must master building, transporting cargo, finances & stocks and much more. You must be very accurate at laying tracks because it is made somehow tricky, plus you have to control the steepness of the track (very influential on train & delivery speed). You can also buy many additional buildings for your station, which adds good look and value to your company. I bought the game on second hand, so I haven't got the manual, because the first owner has ''misplaced'' it (would you expect from 12 years old kid in Slovenia to read English manuals? He probably threw it away). But if you are persistant, you'll get into game quite fast. I think it wil stay your thrill for a long time.

Addicting and well worth the money!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: June 23, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon II is one of the most addicting games I have ever played! The general theme of the game is that you are in charge of a railroad company with the goal being to gain the most money. What is really going on is this. For example, You look at one of the many maps (Europe, U.S.A., China, etc) and you find a city that makes wool, than you find another city that wants wool. All you have to do is lay some track and order a train to pick up wool in one city and drop off the wool at another.

This is just one of the examples that lies within the game. As the game progresses the cities demand cars so you get to choose to provide them. Within this lies the one true strength of the game and that is it is nearly always a "win-win situation". In other words, if London is demanding cars but I decide that I don't really want to bother with the city, the game will not punish me. The only thing I am missing out is the financial gains of providing London with cars. This is different from other simulation games. If I decided I don't want to worry about unemployment in Sim City than I am sure to suffer in the long run. In Tycoon the only thing I need to worry about is what I want to do! If I want to only build tracks in one section of the map than the game will go on and I will make money from the South. And guess what? When and if I decide to expand to the other cities they will still be ready to accept my rail road with open arms. It is as if the game wants you to have fun and to decide on what you want to do.

Now to the areas that need improvement. Some people say the manual is weak and I must say some additional information would be helpful. But the learning curve for the game is quite simple. Within an hour you will be comfortable with the game and after two hours you will be a pro. In other reviews people have complained about the method of track laying, specifically the difficulty of the process but don't let this one flaw stop you from buying the game.

Railroad tycoon 2 is a fun and highly addictive game that will keep you coming back for more.

Like It So Far

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I just got the game a few days ago included in a value pack. I am currently playing the campaigns and so far I am enjoying the game. Even my husband is playing it.
Pros: Sim type game
Different type of trains and several campaigns which I love
Is challenging for an average game player don't know about hardcore players
Con's: The game tutorial was okay, but wish I could find a way to start back at the beginning of it. When my husband wanted to play I had to tell him how to do it instead of him doing the tutorial because it wouldn't start back at the beginning
Other than that I don't know of any other cons since I have just started playing and haven't started the scenerios.
You do get tired of laying down tracks all the time, and have to zoom in and out.
So far I am really enjoying it

Promising...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

"Railroad Tycoon II" is the 1998 sequel to the 1990 classic "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon". Even though Sid's name has jumped ship, this is a solid sequel to a great game. The premise is simple enough: Build a railroad, buy some trains, ship stuff from where it is to where it's needed. Get rich.

From humble concepts mighty games are grown, and enriching this basic idea are things like: train quality, which forces you to choose between [cost], fast, good on slopes, or reliable; keeping demand high by supplying only small amounts versus the cost of connecting other places where demand is high; short routes with small payloads and fast turnarounds versus long routes with big payloads; buying and selling stocks to take advantage of economic trends; buying the businesses whose materials you're transporting; defending against train robbers or hiring shady characters and exploiting legal loopholes; and so on.

Basically, this premise works, and supplies hours of good, addictive fun. There's a lot of replay value as well, since you can take a different approach to each game. The graphics are (still, even in 2003) pleasant and communicative, and the sound is mostly good. The scenarios are pretty challenging without (for the most part) being crushingly hard, and the three levels of victories encourages replay as you try to "go for the gold".

The are a number of hitches, unfortunately. The manual and tutorial are really inadequate--which tends to sting given that most of the fan-supplied data on the Web is gone. The supply-and-demand process is actually somewhat opaque. (I did figure it out, but it took me a while and some research on the 'net.) Your board of directors is very gullible, not able to look ahead even a month (this makes them easy to manipulate). The stock market stuff makes it easy to lose with a thriving railroad and doesn't add much to the game that I've experienced.

Further, trains really only go from point A to point B. That is, say you have cattle yard (B) that needs grain and two grain farms (A1 and A2) that supply grain, you can't set up a train to pick up grain at A1, travel to A2 to pick up more grain, and then travel to B to drop it off. When the train stops, it's completely unloaded. This is never spelled out anywhere, and certain ways of setting up a train's route suggest otherwise. But in the above situation, your train will actually unload grain at a grain farm (for no money) rather than haul it another ten miles to the cattle yard, where it's actually needed.

The scale of the game is such that each train moves about 1/50th-1/100th of its actual speed. In other words, a trip that should take a week takes a year. This is probably a necessary abstraction(train-model fans will want to keep in mind that this game has NOTHING to do with their hobby) but it has the effect of exaggerating every mistake or mishap. Jesse James didn't just rob a single train, he robbed your entire route for the year.

All of this detracts a bit, but it's a testament to the strength of the concept and execution that this would still be a five-star game, even with these issues. The killer--the thing that made me subtract a star--is the track-laying interface. It's really easy to lay track you didn't mean to. There's no undo. It actually costs you to remove it. The way the UI figures out the smoothest route is dubious, and there's really no decent handling for the fact that finding the smoothest track is best done at the closest zoom while finding the shortest route is best done at the furthest zoom.

Coupled with some bugs that make stations seem disconnected, you can end up in a situation where you lose a game because the track-laying interface was not up to the task. And that's the only =real= sour lemon in this package. Again, though, even with this, there's still a lot of fun.

It'll definitely whet your apetite for "Railroad Tycoon 3".

NOT A FUN GAME!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: May 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

After spending a few hours trying to decipher the mysteries of Railroad Tycoon II, I finally experienced enlightenment and realized I was NOT having fun. The game has many tempting possibilities of entertainment, but I found the game frustrating to play. The manual does not explain much; building stations and laying track are difficult and unforgiving tasks. I have not played the first version of the game, and this may explain my befuddlement.

In short, I would not recommend this game. In fact if you really want this game, my trash pick up is on Thursday and this game will be in the can.

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