Upon installing Sid Meier's Railroads, I was immediately taken by the game's intuitive design and the straightforward interface. This way, players are given a chance to enjoy the game and its numerous traits, regardless of their previous experiences with train sims. So, all it takes is going through the simplified 5-minute tutorial, and you should be ready for the challenges that come with the game's single-player and multiplayer modes. Sid Meier's Railroads boasts a unique way of allowing the player to get into the game as quickly and easily as possible. In addition, several single-player scenarios are on offer as well as a range of well-designed multiplayer maps.Firaxis managed to disregard any aspects of the gameplay that could burden the player or create unwanted micromanagement issues. Also, there's a choice of over 30 different industries to purchase and organize, 20 resources to manage and over 30 unique train models to produce and utilize. Each scenario revolves around completing a wide range of tasks, after which you can look forward to many cool bonuses - thus improving your cash balance and instituting a more stable economy for future endeavors.Looking at the graphics, Sid Meier's Railroads includes just about everything you can hope to find in a train-sim. Realistic and colorful surroundings and detailed locomotive models manage to capture the player's eye almost straight away. As your very own mass transit system begins to take shape, you'll be able to acknowledge the developer's admirable attention to detail. In closing, this game is catchy and has a little something for everyone.

Excellent game for all economics and trains lovers. Like original Railroad Tycoon game from Sid Meier. A bit boring without AI competition, so you should always play against AI. After short tutorial game is quite easy to get into.

Sid Meier's Railroads! is the first train tycoon game I've ever played. I don't know why; tycoon games are one of my favorite subgenres of simulation games, and I love any games having to do with transportation of any type, from cars to ships to farming equipment. In saying that, know that this review is from someone who loves the genre and trains despite being relatively new to the railroad management subset.

Sid Meier's Railroads! is a game that kept pleasantly surprising me. I went into this game figuring I would be building trains and connecting the tracks to various destinations. I hadn't known it would be this in depth, and yet so easy to learn. The game and its userface is extremely user friendly, and it has a short tutorial to teach you the basics. Everything else is figured out by playing scenarios. Since I was brand new to this type of game, I began by selecting a multiplayer map but electing to play first on my own so I could figure things out. That's when I realized that even when not playing competitively, this game is a ton of fun.

You start out by having a city with a small track already built that you can build off of (also, all maps can be randomized, so playing through on the same maps over and over again is different every time). You need to then decide where to go from there. Different cities request different products, and you can deliver it to them from either suppliers or other cities. This gets to be a little more in depth because you can end up having a multiple step process to have one train deliver products to various cities (for example, Train A can be set up to pick up corn from a farm supplier, deliver it to City A, City A will then convert corn to food, Train A will take food to City B, etc.). You can also have trains deliver passengers and mail from city to city. Over the course of history, trains are unlocked that have better performance. It's extraordinarily simple to upgrade these trains to better trains that have been unlocked, and all without hindering its route.

This is essentially the type of gameplay you can expect. To make things more interesting, however, depending on what cities and products you decide to utilize, cities and suppliers will grow to supply your demand and vice versa. By growing, suppliers can supply more resources and more quickly, while cities may be able to hold stock of more resources while space opens up where you can build your own industries. Cities will also request supplies from time to time, offering a cash reward for a certain product. These are some of the reasons that playing a fairly long game refrains from being boring; options are constantly opening up for you.

Competitive mode with the AI is also fun, though I prefer the single player building aspect better myself. With the AI, they will do all the things you do, building tracks, causing cities and suppliers to grow, etc. The difference here is that you are obviously competing for the goal you have set, while also having the option to buy stock in your competitors and eventually merge or liquidate their company by completely buying them out--provided you have enough money.

While this game has been a blast (it makes me regret not trying a railroad management game before this), it does have its problems. On modern systems (I have Windows 7 64bit, for example) the game begins to crash once a good amount of railroads and trains have been built. The game is set by default to restrict itself to using only 1 GB of RAM, and once you've been in a game for a half hour or so, it will surpass this and begin crashing to the desktop. HOWEVER, there are fixes for this (see the community forums). I downloaded a .exe file from http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Railroads! that fixed everything, and haven't had a crash since. Also, the game is set by default to autosave, which saves your game every 60 seconds. Needless to say, even when it was crashing, I'd simply start it right back up and be just seconds away from where I was.

In summary, this game is an amazing game that I would recommend to anyone, particularly simulation, tycoon, and management fans. I haven't been so instantly engrossed in a game in quite some time. I'm so happy I found this!

I built a line delivering cows, then JP Morgan bought out my company and made me homeless.

10/10 Best capitalism simulator

Do you like your management sims to be masses of spreadsheets, reams of information and to survive by the difference between 13% and 13.1%? if so, go buy Railroad Tycoon 2. This is a slimmed down, dumbed down, quick-fire management game. But hell, it's fun, it's cheap, and it hides a surpising amount of depth when it tries.

Plus trains are god damned awesome.

I've been playing Railroad Tycoon series since the first edition, yeah... that old one that looked like Civ I...
This edition has pretty nice graphics.
Very Easy to play.
In less then a month I've manage to win in all levels.
So if you're looking for a complex Railroad game, this is not for you.
But if you have little time to spend playing games, I'd recomend this one. You can play the whole game in less then 1 hour. And still have a good amount of fun.

It's fun, takes me back to the 90's when I used to stay up late at night playing the first Railroad Tycoon. If you want a good throwback that runs on modern systems (I haven't experienced any issues), this is it right here.

Don't let the screenshots fool you, this game runs at a full 1920x1080 (or 1680x1050).

Enter bidding wars for new technologies, buy and sell stocks, watch your towns grow as your trains supply them with passengers, mail, and freight. Buy depots and upgrade them, build industries in your town for supply-chain economics. Upgrade your engines with the click of a button. Edit routes, lay tracks, get creative. Sometimes this game reminds me of building circuits. It's not always easy to set up routes for maximum efficiency, because at the highest realism settings, trains will stop if they run into each other on the tracks. You have to be careful how you lay your tracks, but that's part of the fun!

Very fun game! Just like Civilization, you won't see time pass.

Great game, a dumbed down Transport Tycoon with the high addiction levels you would expect from a Sid Meier game. Only issue is the frequent crashing which I assume is caused by modern hardware. Looks good even for a game that is 8 years old. Recommended.

This game is very addictive. You choose historical locations and play through time periods. The achievements in the game match the historical development of the region as technology progressed as those countries grew. You build a railroad empire by connecting raw materials with prodution facilities and then spreading finished goods and passengers. The more businesses you own that produce finished goods the more money you make. The graphics are really good, its an old game and it still looks good. The terrain features and plotting of railroads work very well.

Throughout a game, you upgrade your trains and stations to keep in line with technology and to control maintenance costs. You have stock in your own company to sell at first, but you have to buy it back or someone might buy you out of the game. You can also purchase other players stock. This can be a good investment stragegy as you can sell high, but a major goal of the game is to buy out all your competitors. The music is very amusing. You feel like you are gold digging in the Old West. There are several included historical regions that range form Southwest and Northeast United States to Germany/France and England. You can also generate maps based on certain scripts, such as no hills or mountains. There is a multiplayer but I don't think it is used much.

Definitely a good game. The songs get stuck in your head.

Just make sure to get the 3GB modification file , helps to keep it from crashing. Search in Forums to find it.

If you have a real gaming PC do not bother buying this game. It crashes constantly and apparently Steam has no problems selling games that will not run on a modern PC.

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon was the third game I ever purchased back in the 1800's, no, I'm kidding (Though it feels like it at times.) I actually purchased it in 1990 not long after acquiring my first desktop PC. I have played the series religiously since. I have roughly 100 hours in this game in the original 2006 disc retail box version. It certainly isn't a successor to the venerable Railroad Tycoon III, but it's still quite enjoyable if you realize this going in. The game is more of a "beer & pretzels" type real time strategy game with an emphasis on attracting more casual type gamers. The game has a charming art style more akin to an HO or N scale model train layout than the ostensible real world look of the previous Railroad Tycoon games.

Industry acquisitions and playing the stock market against other AI railroad barons seem to have become more important in this title with train consists and railroad track signaling unfortunately taking a back seat. Being able to build your own train consists is possible (and necessary), but the importance seems to have been watered down compared to previous titles. Manual signaling has been removed altogether. The scenarios and their variety are adequate, but pale dim in comparison to Railroad Tycoon III. Firaxis encouraged fans to build maps and scenarios to add to the scenarios available. These additional scenarios can still be found on fansites. The game originally included multiplayer. Be advised, this feature has been truncated from the game entirely. The Steam version of Sid Meier's Railroads! has no multiplayer feature whatsover.

My boxed version would not run on Windows Vista without crashing to the desktop continually. It runs on my current iteration of Windows 7 64-bit, but there is a known bug concerning multi-core processors the game doesn't like. I noticed specifically when building long stretches of track I would get crashes to the desktop. I've played the Steam version for over two dozen hours as of this writing, and I rarely get a desktop crash anymore.

I miss the previous versions of Sid Meier's wonderful railroad games, but oddly, this one has become my favorite of the series. Despite its lack of seriousness, it's still challenging. The game exudes Sid Meier's influence in every pixel. It's colorful art style blooms beautifully, and the sound design which has been lovingly crafted really adds to the ambience. Music from each time period sets the tone and changes along with the times. Zooming in to view the busy animations of each industry and city building is the icing on the cake.

A gem of a transport/trade simulation game.

Simple mechanics - build rail lines -run trains - transport things and people - earn money - manage your finances - grow your company . After you start losing to AI bots - you start seeing the finer nuances that the game packs below that obvious layer of simplicity. The effects of terrain , random events ,the stock market , aggressive expansion slowly start to make sense. Like any Sid Meier classic- this one grows better with time.

Sadly, the multi-player aspect is gone . The graphics are surely out -of-date but in no way ugly. I had to download a patched file from pcgamingwiki - for a memory bug to be handled. Heck this game is old - ok ? It needs some help from you to run well on modern systems. But for me, the simple tweaks are totally worth the experience.

I wish this was remade today with Steam Workshop support and modern graphics - with no changes to the basic mechanics. Please Mr. Sid ... VOLVO PLS ?

Amazing design, simple interface, great replayability, everything works.
overall great game.

How old is this game?? When was it released?? Doesn't matter still playing !! Despite a decent library I find myself throwing time at this old tested and true gem. That will end for awhile when Beyond Earth drops but I will come back. Oh yes I will.

Excelent game! Time just flies playing it. It's simple, fun and insures hours of gameplay. Theres also several different scenarios with different challenges to try and complete.

One thing must be noted however, if there is too many train tracks/trains/stations out in the world, the game is going to crash to desktop since it only supports upto 2gb memory no matter how much memory is installed on your system.

There is a simple fix for this however, download the Sid Meiers Railroads 3GBEnabler and follow the instructions. It removes the 2gb limit and my game hasn't crashed once since.

Definitely recommend the game after the crash fix is applied. 9/10

I laughed at "Sid Meier's Railroads!".... And now I have a minor addiction....


Vintage Sid Meier.

Nice game. Graphics are such that even today it still looks ok. The graphics are a bit ated but it ages well. Still a good stratagey game. It looks simaliar to a modle train but olny uses your monitor and the compuers memory. How ver Train Fanatics is comming out in September 2014 and it looks to be better but then again its 2014 and this game was made soon after Windows XP came out. Still even for a game that came out during the firs years of Win xp it's still aging well but TF will probably religate it to the geat nostalgia bin.

A+