Having played both Railroad Tycoon II and OpenTTD, I must say that I prefer RT2 immensely more. (I've not played the original, so I can't comment on its quality).
Some of the advantages of RT2:
- Less tedious micromanagement without need for signals (although it does mean there's no way to build a 4-track mainline in RT2 that works like you can in OpenTTD).
- The stock market and competitive play is more fun. I never found the AI of OpenTTD fun, except when I was bored and wanted to watch their cars get plowed by my trains.
- The economic aspects of RT2 were more enjoyable. You can buy industries, for example. It's also laid out more clearly how the economy works (you can turn off these features to make the game easier, but it's much less fun). There's also lots more type of cargo (ship iron and coal to a steel mill to make steel, rubber to a tire factory for tires, the steel and the tires to an auto plant to make cars which go to the cities).
- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.
- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.
^ You can install GRF sets for OpenTTD that have even more locomotives than railroad tycoon. NARS or UKRS2 have extremely expansive sets of trains compared to the small selections of bland name trains the base game comes with. Also NUTS has a set optimised for gameplay over realism, if you want to go the other direction.
It's a different game than RT, but if you play OpenTTD there's a community on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/ with a couple of dedicated servers.
Server 1 is a vanilla multiplayer, games last ~2 real days.
Server 2 is a custom client with a lot of community patches, games last ~5 real days (IIRC):
It has transport load overlays, a city building challenge mode, way more types of transport and types of trains, much lower margins on routes meaning compound routes are more necessary, easier UI tools for laying and routing track, heaps more trains and buildings.
And the in-game chat from both servers merges with their IRC channel.
If you're a fan of Chris Sawyer's games, Roller Coaster Tycoon is also getting a remake via OpenRCT2: https://openrct2.org/
And "Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic" was just released by Atari to iOS and Android, which is a port of the original games modified for touch. (It's a fantastic port, btw, I highly recommend it.)
The original RCT becomes even more impressive when you find out Sawyer coded the vast majority of it in assembly language:http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
> The game was written and compiled using MS Macro Assembler V6.11c, MS Visual C V5, MS DirectX 5 SDK, plus assorted custom-written tools... It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.
One thing I worry about wrt OpenRCT2 is that after a quick browse through the history it looks heavily based on a disassembly of the original exe, which was then manually deobfuscated to standard C. I'm worried if Sawyer et al. would send it a ceasw and desist.
Omg, I will. I was thinking when posting the above "they should remake RCT for mobile". Perhaps a perfect moment for nostalgia as my daughter turns 3 tomorrow and we can build a theme park together :) thank you!
