With nearly 60 locomotives in the game (nearly 70 in the Coast to Coast expansion), the game has the most locomotives of the Railroad Tycoon franchise with locomotives from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Poland, Russia and more even fictional locomotives like the E-88 and the TransEuro, the latter of which is a fictional name for the Eurostar.
The game interface is in full 3D, with free camera movement. The square grid is no longer rigid, as it was in Railroad Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon II - rail and structures can now be rotated 360 degrees.
Railroad Tycoon 3 Game
The economic model has been reworked. In previous games, goods could only be picked up at a station, and revenue depended on the distance between stations. Carloads in Railroad Tycoon 3 slowly move across the map (representing road and water transport) along the gradient of a scalar field representing price, where supply and demand sites function as sources and sinks. Revenue depends on the price difference between pick-up and delivery. This has several effects; raw materials can find their way to industries and get processed, without any trains involved, and a train does not need to pick up goods at the source.
Other changes include: each carload of mail, passengers and troops now has a destination; car setup can be automated, so that trains always pick up the cars that yield the most revenue; warehouse buildings also appear in the game, completing the commodity market the same way as ports do; trains can pass each other on a single track (as in the original Railroad Tycoon on the lowest difficulty level); no need for signal towers, as well as station improvements (post offices, restaurants etc.), are placed individually on the map; players can buy industries, and also build processing industries wherever they like; processing industries have limited capacity, but they can be upgraded.
By May 2003, the game had been in development for one and a half years, after another one and a half years were spent on its game engine.[3] In 2002, Phil Steinmeyer had expressed his dislike of 3D graphics in strategy games, and felt that his company's next project after Tropico "would probably look better in straight pre-rendered 2D".[4] To manage the popping inherent to level of detail systems in 3D graphics, the team created as many as six variants for the game's vehicles, buildings and other objects. Steinmeyer gave the example of a building that went as high as 931 or as low as 55 polygons, based on the closeness of the camera.[5] According to Steinmeyer, the Railroad Tycoon 3 team comprised 13 people and development lasted roughly two and a half years.[6]
GameSpy named Railroad Tycoon 3 the tenth-best computer game of 2003,[18] and the year's best "PC Empire Builder" game.[19] The editors of Computer Gaming World nominated it for their 2003 "Strategy Game of the Year" award, which ultimately went to Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. They wrote that "PopTop Software has done an amazing job updating this venerable series", but found Railroad Tycoon 3 too lacking in innovation to win the award.[20] The game was also a finalist for IGN's "Best Economic Simulation Game" and GameSpot's "Best PC Game" and "Best Strategy Game" awards, but lost to SimCity 4 and Rise of Nations in these categories.[21][22][23]
Loco Commotion is a train-based puzzle game included on the play disc as a 141 MB optional extra. Loco Commotion involves solving routes and shunting puzzles by moving trains at precise times over increasingly difficult environments throughout the multiple levels.
This section is chock full of add-ons for Railroad Tycoon III that have been created by members of the forum. These creations are not required for playing most maps, but can add a lot of enhancement to your game play and help to heighten your enjoyment of the game.
Note that occasionally a map may require some specific add-ons. These are usually mentioned in the map description, and included with the map zip. If any add-ons are required for a map they must be installed before you attempt to open the map in the game.
Blurry Texture Fix - 36 kB (Read Me). See this thread in the forum for details. Also see this post by the patch maker.The old "Vista Fix" - 0.77 kB (Read Me). Stops game crash for Vista/W7/W8/W10. See this forum thread for details.
As much play as "tycoon" has had in PC game titles over the last few years, it can be easy to forget that the term had another life before defining a game genre led by mass-market bestsellers like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. Railroad Tycoon 3 can claim an older and more authentic tycoon heritage as much because of the series' more than decade-long history as the fact that it deals directly with the cutthroat business practices of 19th-century industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt and his ilk. While it builds on nostalgia for powerful steam locomotives and for earlier days when the business landscape was wide open and ripe with opportunities, it's even more than that, with missions that span two centuries of railroading. Even though the impressive new 3D engine makes the trains plenty interesting to watch as they roar by, this isn't a strict simulation for train lovers so much as a strategy game of business and building challenges. But as such, Railroad Tycoon 3 is a breeze to get into and will offer anyone hours of enjoyment.
The typical scenario has you founding a company with your limited start-up funds. Gradually, over the course of 20 or 30 years, you connect the towns and cities of major regions from around the world. You can play in specific time periods, like the pre-industrial Midwest, Texas at the tip of the oil boom, or modern Europe during the last decade's reunification. Of course, you're not alone in trying to reap the financial windfalls of having a transportation monopoly, and computer players will race to grab prime routes and cut into your profits. Fighting back--on the tracks and on the stock market--is a natural part of the tycoon legacy. A dynamic economy ups the ante, with boom and bust cycles and the appearance of new industries you can buy up to diversify and create more business for your trains.
Laying track is the first and most important step of the game. It's intuitive enough that routes should connect cities that are full of goods and passengers in need of transport. Unfortunately, things like hills and rivers often get in the way. Taking geography and efficiency into account is what makes the seemingly simple task of connecting two points a satisfying challenge. In a process that a two-part tutorial effectively walks you through, the interface makes it easy enough to drag track from one point to the next. Before you release the mouse button to finalize track construction, the critical element to watch is the color-coded elevation guide that marks the grade from green to red for every track segment. Naturally, flat track is fast track. The great news is that there's an undo button. This all-too-rare feature can really save your bacon and keep you from wasting money you don't have when navigating difficult terrain. Also in your construction toolbox are options for double track, electric track, and buttons that regulate the frequency that tunnels and bridges appear on track as you drag it over obstacles. Building can be an intricate process of trial and error in hilly regions, but the reward of zooming in the camera and turning on the grid overlay is a faster route and bigger profits.
The bulk of the money to be made comes from setting up smart routes with the right match of locomotives and destinations. Payloads don't just magically appear. Passengers and mail now have specific destinations and will only be available if your rail network connects where they want to go. Since express cargos pay well, that's a reason to not only expand beyond a few industrial centers but also to connect to competitors' track. Another major change is that raw materials will now move (slowly) overland and along rivers, even without train connections, so you don't necessarily have to worry as much about getting the basics to towns where they can be processed into more lucrative goods. While building stations in the middle of nowhere just to pick up cattle or grain might have been an ordinary practice in the previous game, that's mostly a thing of the past. What underscores your role in a region's growth is that cities grow dynamically in response to the actions of you and your competitors, adding both population and new businesses. Cities are also somewhat randomized every time a map is played, and many scenarios include historical events scripted to radically affect the economy, though they mostly reflect technological change.
To put your tycoon skills to work, there's a campaign with 16 missions and a number of stand-alone scenarios, plus a sandbox mode that drops the financial part of the game to focus purely on building. The "campaign" is essentially a launch pad for the missions. The notion is that of a train museum with a helpful elderly curator who colorfully narrates the transition between four mission sets and also narrates cinematic intros for each map's setting. There's nothing to stop you from playing the missions in any order, or skipping the tutorials, but following the prescribed order does make for a gentler introduction. Except for the last three futuristic scenarios that use radical geographic and climatic change to create some odd, artificial challenges, all the maps are solidly grounded in historical moments, putting you in charge of: the Central Pacific's push to connect the Transcontinental Railway, the Orient Express, and turn-of-the century efforts to build a route across Africa.
Only some mission goals require you to play the stock market, but the huge funding requirements of building a major railroad will likely push you to the financial markets at some point or another. Running a two-town line won't hold your interest for long. For big cash infusions early on, there's the bond market to turn to, but not only will the spigot turn on and off depending on your credit rating, the interest payment can weigh down a young company. As in the previous game, there's a stock market that dynamically follows the fortunes of the railroad companies and the economy at large. It can be as rewarding as it is risky to buy on the margin or sell short, and hostile takeovers of a company with cheap stock are possible. General economic cycles and random events can have a major effect on how much cargo there is to move, thus influencing your bottom line. Since you don't have to deal with cargo on the level of buying low and selling high--the automated system does that now, with some settings to tweak--it's possible to run the game at higher speeds to see changes happen more quickly. There's also plenty more time to look for prime investment opportunities in businesses, which can be purchased much more cheaply in cities without a train station. These business can then be connected to your rail empire. 2ff7e9595c
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