Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon

aka: Golden Age of Railroad, Tielu Daheng
Moby ID: 70
DOS Specs

Description official description

With $100000 in the bank after taking out loans and selling stocks, it's time to start a railroad! Choose from 4 scenarios across two continents with randomly generated resources, and design your own railroad that moves people and goods across the country. Use the revenue to continue expanding, while keeping control of your company and appeasing your stock holders with growth and revenues. Play the stock market with company assets. Drive your competitors out of business with buyouts and rate wars. Multiple types of resources to carry (roughly grouped as slow freight, fast freight, passengers, mail) and convert, own facilities to maximize profit (buy a steel mill and the conversion from iron ore to steel makes money for YOU). Use the latest available technology to your advantage (new locomotives). Your objective is to retire with a huge bonus (based on your company's assets) and become the President or the Prime Minister (depending on which continent).

The game is essentially a bird's-eye-view real-time strategy game with aspects of building and stock market manipulation. Each fiscal period is 2-years, which corresponds to 1-day of track time. Build different sizes of stations to take care of different local needs, create trains that switch consists at different stations and maximize throughput. Upgrade/retire/modify trains as times change. The faster the trains arrive, the more money they earn. Multiple options will keep you busy as each game is different.

Spellings

  • Sid Meier's レイルロードタイクーン - Japanese spelling
  • 铁路大亨 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

23 People · View all

Original Concept
Design
Programming
Graphics
Music / Sound Programming
Music Composition
Quality Assurance
Manual text
Direction & Design
Technical Illustrations
Screen Shot Illustrations
Pen & Ink Illustrations
Layout
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 29 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 80 ratings with 5 reviews)

Fun and highly addictive with lots of replay value

The Good
Freedom of action - once the basic features of a scenario are set (random resource locations, player-chosen difficulty level), it's all up to you as a player to decide what to do - which cities to connect, what locomotives and cars to use, what cargos to carry, when to borrow and pay back loans, when to buy and sell stock, on and on.

Building something - it's like a construction set or model railroad. It's satisfying to start off small, have it work and then make it bigger.

Replayability - once a scenario (100 years of game time) is finished, the immediate question is "could I do better?". And it's always fun to try. The random resource locations make each scenario sufficiently different that it really does feel like a new game (so you can't simply make the same decisions you did before), but not so different that you can't use general techniques you've picked up.

The Bad
Copy protection - when the game first loads it shows a picture of a locomotive and asks for its name. All the pictures and names are shown together in the manual, so you have to have the manual (so presumably you have a legal copy). But come on, it's over ten years later. The game hasn't been in stores for years. The company isn't making any revenue off of it in any case. Why do we still have to deal with this?

The limitation of 32 - you can have at most 32 trains running at one time (but I want more!). You can have at most 32 stations on one railroad (but I want more!). Once you reach these limits you can't make your railroad any bigger. Past this point the only way to increase your wealth (ie., your score) is to play the stock market. In one sense that's the most effective way to run up your score, since as time goes by the stock market valuation of your railroad can exceed its yearly operating revenue by quite a large margin. But after several years (real ones, not game ones) I ran into the final limitation of 32 - a railroad can have a maximum value of a little over $32 million (probably $32,768,000). Past that point the value is interpreted as a negative value, and the game abruptly declares that your railroad is bankrupt and you have "lost". And that is pretty much the only reason why I've stopped playing it - the "can I do better?" question has definitively been answered "No".

The Bottom Line
A game for people who like to plan and build things, who enjoy watching something grow and prosper strictly because of their own efforts. Not for those with short attention spans.

There are built-in limitations in the game (including one outright bug), but most players will never reach them without the performance improvement that comes only from long and repeated experience with it.

DOS · by anton treuenfels (34) · 2001

One of the best games Sid ever made!

The Good
Sid has a way to make a game so addictive that time itself seems to be travel at warp speed. Civ & Railroad Tycoon are two such games. What can I say.... The music is great, the graphics are great (for its time), totaly addictive, totaly replayable, easy to learn, fun to play.

This is probably the greatest example of how bring a good game together. Everything flows so smoothly in this game. You dont feel as if a part of the game got more or less attention, you dont feel that a critical or even important part of the game was left out. The music complemented the gameplay, and the game was easy and fun to play. But most of all it is replayable. I know people who are still playing this game 11 years after its release!



The Bad
Time has begun to take its toll on the graphics. But only just.



The Bottom Line
One of the most addictive fun games ever made!

DOS · by William Shawn McDonie (1131) · 2001

This game cost me *years* of my free time!

The Good
Where to begin... This game is a jewel, and you really only begin to appreciate its depth at the higher difficulty levels. On the higher difficulty levels, you have to manage a complex economy. For example a city will only pay you to deliver hops if there happens to be a brewery within the city limits.

Or, you could build a brewery in the city, if you had a large source of hops nearby, waiting to be exploited... but that'll cost you a lot of cash up front. Decisions, decisions. And of course, ANY old city will pay for the beer that you deliver, right? It's so wonderful, taking coal to one city to make steel, delivering the steel to yet another city to make manufactured goods, then delivering the goods to a third city for the final money-making run.

Then there's the constant concern about purchasing back enough of your company stock that the other tycoons don't get majority shareholder status of your company and run you out of town.

Then too, you have to worry about them tying their railroads into your cities and starting a fare war. You lose a major economic engine if you lose a major city, and then you are sunk!

There is incredible replayability to this game because although the maps are the same, the size of the cities and placement of minor impediments to building tracks vary. The stock market goes up and down like a yo-yo, forcing you to make economic decisions about borrowing money and paying off debt.

There are four starting scenarios: England, the first trains, Europe, pre WW I, Easter US with the first trains, and the Western US Post civil War. Each requires a different strategy to succeed, and strategies that work well in the opening game begin to fail in the mid game and are liabilities at the end-game.

The Bad
I liked everything about this game. I'd like to see a nearly identical game based on Windows, with cleaner graphics - and nothing else added or subtracted. That's an endorsement for a world-class game.

The Bottom Line
A really cool blend of trains, economics, and markets. Play at your own risk - you may never spend your free time the same again!

DOS · by ex_navynuke! (42) · 2005

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Have media; trying to figure out edition Ryan Armstrong (5065) Dec 15, 2017

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

1830

Railroad Tycoon was inspired by the Avalon Hill boardgame 1830. SimTex later adapted 1830 for Avalon Hill. Not long after, SimTex was acquired by MicroProse, and became MicroProse Texas.

Deluxe edition

In 1993 MicroProse released a Deluxe version, which added higher resolution screen, support for more trains, and more scenarios.

Freeware release

The entire game was released for a download to promote Railroad Tycoon 3. The link. http://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html.

Keypad

The Amiga version was one of the few non-Flight-Sim games to use the Numeric Keypad significantly - which unfortunately meant that it couldn't be played on the Amiga 600 model, which was launched in the UK in 1992 (one of three entry-level Amigas launched in little over a year!), and had no keypad in the interest of saving space and cost. Subsequent budget reissues of the game did not resolve this issue.

Title

The game was originally titled Golden Age of Railroads. Then MicroProse decided it doesn't emphasize the business aspects, and changed the name to the present form.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • September 1990 (Issue #74) – Overall Game of the Year
    • April 1992 (Issue #93) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #41 overall in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
  • EMAP Image's Golden Joystick 1991
    • April 1991: PC Game of the Year
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #27 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • Power Play
    • Issue 01/1991 - Best Computer Game in 1990 (DOS version)
    • Issue 01/1991 - Best Strategy Game in 1990 (DOS version)
    • Issue 01/1991 - Best Game Idea in 1990
  • ST Format
    • January 1993 (issue #42) - #50 in '50 finest Atari ST games of all time' list

Information also contributed by Kasey Chang, Martin Smith, PCGamer77 and Scott Monster

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  • MobyGames ID: 70
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Brian Hirt.

Amiga added by Rebound Boy. Atari ST added by Kabushi. Macintosh added by Pseudo_Intellectual. FM Towns added by Terok Nor. PC-98 added by Unicorn Lynx.

Additional contributors: Andrew Grasmeder, Rebound Boy, Kasey Chang, Unicorn Lynx, Martin Smith, Patrick Bregger, Rik Hideto, Jo ST, FatherJack.

Game added March 3, 1999. Last modified February 19, 2024.