Wizzard is taking the week off to catch up on college work, so I'll be filling in for him this week. Sorry about the proliferation of sim type games over the last few weeks. The write up for today's game was on my desktop waiting to be finished of in preparation for next week or the beginning of November. It was already late when I offered to fill in for this week and I wanted to get a game posted before the end of the day, so decided to post Transport Tycoon early. While finishing off the review, I re-discovered the open source version, which I've added to the post as it's supposed to be slightly better than the original. I would tend to agree that it is better from the short time I've spent playing it. I'll try and post something different tomorrow. :)
Transport Tycoon and Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe; (9.13Mb and 2.91Mb)
To start building a transport empire, the player must construct transport routes, consisting of stations near industries or towns, and in the case of trains or road vehicles, near physical routes. One transport route can utilize several different forms of transport, e.g. truck→ship→train. The player's company and the individual stations each have ratings that depend largely on their efficiency at moving goods from one stations to the other. A station with high ratings may attract more goods.The game begins in 1930 (1950 in TTD), and ends in 2050. The player starts out by borrowing money to finance construction of transport facilities, and is charged interest until the loan is repaid. As the user plays the game and earns revenues, they have the choice of expanding service along existing routes, or expanding their transportation network. The game features a progression of technology: in any particular year of the game generally only contemporary types of technology are available. For example, railroad signals which allow more than one train to use a section of track are initially semaphores. Later they are replaced by red and green traffic-light signals. Similarly, in the beginning there are only steam engines, but later diesel and electric engines are introduced. In the game year 1999, monorails become available. These require a separate track system from railroads. If the player remains in business until 2050, the game announces that they have won, allows them to post their name on the "hall of fame" and then continues. At this point, the year stays 2050 and never goes any higher, although the game can continue indefinitely. Playing the entire 120-year campaign takes about 40 hours. The game allows the player to save at any time, and multiple saves of a particular game at any point are possible.
Vehicles in the game must be constructed at corresponding depots, which must be connected to the road or rail networks. Towns and cities have their own road networks, but extra roads may be needed to connect them to other towns, or to various resources.
The player earns revenue by picking up resources or passengers at a certain station, and delivering them to another station where there is a demand for them. Demand is determined by the area which surrounds the station; for example stations close to towns will demand passengers. The revenues will depend on the delivery time, distance, and quantity delivered. The influence of these factors on revenue varies according to the type of goods being delivered. For example, mail will rapidly lose in value, meaning that it can only be delivered profitably over short distances, or over long distances very fast. On the other hand coal loses value very slowly, so it can be transported in bulk over long distances whilst remaining profitable.At times, subsidies are offered to the first company to move a particular resource from one place to another. This encourages the player to create a larger more complex transport network, rather than focusing on previously profitable routes.
The game features a system of Local Authority. Each city has a rating for every transport company based on the impact of their transport network. When the rating falls too low, the player will no longer be able to demolish buildings or construct new stations. The rating depends on, among others, the level of service and the deforestation caused by the company.
In the course of a game cities develop and expand according to various economic factors, and new industries (demand) or other resource sites (supply) may appear. Some natural resources may also eventually be exhausted and industries without adequate transport service may shut down. Also, new models of vehicles are introduced and eventually come to replace older models. At introduction such a new model will likely have improved characteristics, but may suffer from reliability issues.
The above was taken from the transport Tycoon Wikipedia. You can find more information about the game HERE
The game plays best with DOSBox, but may work with windows XP or earlier versions. There are modding teams developing content for Transport tycoon, the most significant one being the Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a game that has completely reworked the second release of this game. And fixed any problems running the game in XP. The latest version, which was released on the 1st Oct 09 also works in vista.
You can find details of the open project, screenshots and download links HERE. The following are the main features of the open source game, but there are loads more, which you can see on the home site HERE
OpenTTD is modeled after the original Transport Tycoon game by Chris Sawyer and enhances the game experience dramatically. Many features were inspired by TTDPatch while others are original.
Significant enhancements from the original game include for example:
• bigger maps (up to 64 times in size)
• stable multiplayer mode for up to 255 players in 15 companies or as spectators
• dedicated server mode and an in-game console for administration
• new pathfinding algorithms that makes vehicles go where you want them to
• autorail/-road build tool, improved terraforming
• canals, shiplifts, aqueduct
• larger, non-uniform stations and the ability to join them together
• mammoth and multi-headed trains
• clone, autoreplace and autoupdate vehicles
• possibility to build on slopes and coasts
• advanced/conditional orders, share and copy orders
• longer and higher bridges including new ones, full flexible tracks/roads under bridge
• reworked airport system with many more airports/heliports (i.e. international and metropolitan)
• presignals, semaphores, path based signaling
• support for TTDPatch newgrf features
• drive-through road stops for articulated road vehicles and trams
• multiple trees on one tile
• bribe the town authority
• many configuration settings to tune the game to your liking
• save games with zlib compression for smaller sizes which does not interrupt gameplay
• big support for internationalisation. OpenTTD is already translated into more than 40 languages
• dynamically created town-names in 18 languages and new grf support
You can watch a video of the original Transport Tycoon’s game play HERE, and see a video of the opening video of the game HERE and visit the Transport tycoon forums HERE, where you’ll find enthusiasts who can help you with any questions you may have and/or point you in the direction of any extra content or add-ons that may have been released.
Download the original Transport Tycoon HERE
p.s.
Just found a post by Andrwmorph that was added to my Railroad Tycoon post that mentions the open source version of this game. You can find the post HERE, way back in week 6. The original hasn’t been posted though and although the open source game promises improvements I think the original is still worth a trial at least.
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