Sid Meier's Railroads! App Reviews

I love tycoon type games. While nothing comes close to the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, this comes pretty darn close. Its simple but deceptively complicated (especially if you change the setting to not allow trains to pass through one another!) and provides hours of play. Im good at these types of games and it took me many tries to complete the objectives playing on an intermeidate difficulty. The only negative is that it has crashed a few times (three times in probably twenty hours of playtime) and locked my mac mini up, forcing a reboot. Runs great with full settings on my 2011 Mac Mini with 2.66 GhZ Intel Core 2 Duo. Runs okay on my macbook air but will slow as more trains are running simultaneously. Worth the money if you are a fan of tycoon type games!

Played this game forever on the PC and happy to have it on the Mac. Looks great on my Macbook Pro. The only issue I have is you sometimes cant pick a city to set as a stop. Even though it demands what you are trying to ship.

I could play railroad tycoon (1,2,3) for hours, days even on end, but i got tired of this one quickly. Maps too small, every game aspect over-simplified. I liked the more realistic track configurations, but otherwise, please put one of the tycoon games on this app store and ill buy those

The game is fun when it works, but is generally unstable. Must save often due to frequent crashes.

First I like the game, it can draw you in. Never having played a train game it took about 20 minutes for me to get the hang of it. I had many false start laying take where I didnt want to lay it. However, i was surprised that after leaving it on for a few hours, check mail, do chores come back and play etc… that it crashed wothout saving on the new maxed out iMac. It looks great on the 27 inch screen though, and the crashes arent a total deal maker. You just need to save if you arent shutting the game down after a while.

Ive enjoyed previous versions of this game, and this is far better then the previous incarnation. But. the current scenario files are boring, and there does not seem to any importable files that work. If Feral wants this game to get big they better get some good DLCs available soon. Great technical execution, good game play; poor game files.

It crashes very often waste of money

The gameplay is really good. It does have one bug that I have seen come up a couple of times. Even if you buy all your own stock, you can still be "booted out" with a hostile takeover.

I was excited when I saw that they finally had released a replacement for Railroad Tycoon. It does certainly have an "upgrade" in graphics, but it has some glitches and other issues. There are very few scenarios to play, I had finished all in a day or two. RR Tycoon had far more. You can play a single scenario in Norheast, Southwest, Midwest, England, France, germany and thats it. RR Tycoon had many scenarios with each map. They add a few multiplayer maps that are based on the economies of a couple of the other scenarios, just a name change and landscape change. Basically thy just plop 2 to four players down in different corners of a map and have at it. Laying multiple tracks is neccesary but problematic. tracks need to have many crossovers created or else trains will sit and wait forever even though they have plenty of rail space next to them. In some cases, even with the crossovers to other lanes, traffic jams up and goes nowhere. AI players tracks can cross your own and block access to resources while you cant do the same. The biggest difference I see is that the complexity level has been reduced. This makes for easier game play but takes away a lot of the skill required to play well. All goods and products are produced by a single resource. In Tycoon, you had to gather coal and iron to make steel, steel and tires to make cars. In SM Railroads, you just supply coal to make steel and steel to make autos. Grain simply makes food, as does cattle. You dont need to supply cattle with grain etc. Its all single step processes. You haul a resource to a facility to make a good and deliver it to a city that needs it. The complexity of the economy is greatly reduced as well. with SM Railroads, you can make a safe bet by buying stock at any time. Your overall wealth will fluctuate but not your buying power. Purchase of trains and upgrades to them can be done without having cash or even a negative balance. I must say its nice to be able to upgrade an engine when you need to, but its a little silly to be able to be greatly in debt and buy twenty new engines. There are no maintenance facilities or water towers. You lay track, build stations at cities and annexes at resources and add trains, they just deduct maintenance costs as time goes on. no breakdowns, no fires or train wrecks. All tracks can handle any kind of engine, steam, diesel and electric, no need to lay electric track or wires. No need for a power source for electric. No option to duplicate trains, no option to select and upgrade multiple trains, you have to do it one at a time. All track must be contiguous, so you cant start a line unless it is connected to your start point. All facilities in cities are auctioned when a player wants to buy it. Some cities start with a facility like a stockyard or refinery, if you wish to buy it, you start the auction with a price set by the program based on its size and profitability. the auction starts with a little over 20 seconds and time is added each time someone ups the bid, but auction time gets shorter as the auction moves along. you can add to a bid by 10k or 50k dollars. Once a city is large enough, you can build on an empty lot. A city has space for 3 facilities, so if it started with 1, you will be able to add two more when it is large enough. adding a facility costs 500k. If you really need a certain facility, it is safer to build it since you wont have to worry about being out bid. I wish they did away with the auctions for buying facilties part. In the early going, you have to make sure you have at least 200k over the open bid price to purchase something because one of other AI players will out bid you. At the start, you dont have much money to burn. The other thing they auction off, are patents. If you win the patent auction, you get exclusive benefits of it for ten years until it is available for all. These include Air Breaks to speed trains on curving track, refridgerator cars, pullman cars, steam turbines, Truss bridges, Tunneling equipment, sanders, lubricators etc. Each one gives you an advantage from more speed to cheaper track or higher revenue for a certain type of product. the map scale is kind of small so mountains are enormous. It looks kind of funny to have a trestle bridge scaling 45 degrees up a mountain. I would prefer a much smaller scale and more territory to build. You are also limited to start where they place you. You dont get to look at the map and say "Ill start here", you start where they put you, with the starter section of track pointing in whatever direction they laid it in. Often it is a bad start spot and the track is going perpendicular to where you want to go. All in all, it appears that this version was thrown together to have something that would run on a recent version of Mac OS X. It is pretty to look at, and yes you can alter the color of your trains, but game play is less complex. It will be a lot easier for a newcomer to get into this game, but you will tire of it quickly since there is not much to master. I really hope they release (free of charge) more scenarios, like it should have had to start with and that they add in some options for a much more complex economy. I want to be challenged to build an economy and railroad empire, not just run trains back and forth. I also hope they will improve the train operation. Its frustrating when a train just sits there and wont go anywhere when there is nothing in the way, or an available track. Now with all these complaints, you should note that I did like it enough to play it everyday for many hours a day over the last week. It just crashed a few times in many hours of operation and does not take too long to load in the first place. Oh well, thats all because Im at my text limit for the review, hope it was helpful.

Would be nice to be able to play more than 60 seconds without crashing! Im running on a 2012 I-Mac 27" with 14GB of RAM. Dont waste your money until its fixed! So disappointed!!

Feral, thanks for this port! Sid Meiers Railroads is one of my favorites. To those who have not played, think resource management with a model railroad builder. The revolutionary aspect is free form track laying. There are no "spaces" or "tiles" like in most RTS games. As another reviewer said, the multiplayer options really make the game. (Game Center Nickname: Firehorse 66) There are many things to manage, and in real time, so youre hoping your opponents are not managing them quicker than you are. Lay track to get that resource, or is it too far away to be profitable? Will nearby cities buy it? Is it more efficient to steal goods which are being produced by another player? Is that old engines maintenance getting too costly, should it be upgraded to a shiny new model? Sell my own stock to expand, or buy out other player before they become profitable and their stock goes up? So many components, so fun, and seconds count when youre playing against other players. Its not often a stragegy game gets your adrenaline up! Its a blast! Just buy it!

Ive played all of the Sid Meiers railroad games. Ive loved them for a very long time. When I found out RT3 wasnt supported on the new OS I was devasted. So finding Railroads! was great. I still prefer RT3, but there are plenty of things to love about Railroads! and still enjoy playing it. I havent had any of the problems with crashing that others seem to have and I have and older Macbook Pro. I highly recommend it. I hope they eventually come out with more single player scenarios!

Love Sid, Love CivRev, Love Pirates. This game just lacks depth, and doesnt hook you into hours of gameplay. The Negs, Not enough maps or scenarios to play. I havent found anyone to play multiplayer thru the game center yet. Crashes a lot, like a lot. Suggestions, map of the week more trains more techs

Would be fun, but once you start getting a good setup going it starts crashing. Remember the old days of railroad tycoon, this is no longer it, the scenarios are limited, the graphics are basic, and the constant crashing is annoying! I used to think Apples had standards for what was in their store. I guess it really is about exployting slave labor for them.

I used to play a much older version of this game and found that rich in detail, filled with many more scenarios. Like many reviewing here, I was excited to see this game. While the scenarios have been tweaked a bit, they are somewhat similar to the older version. There are also fewer of them. I would love to see add ons to this game. All of that being said, I do enjoy this game a lot. The game play is familiar so it is very easy to pick up from the quick tutorial. The train graphics are great and look nicely detailed like small HO trains which is very cool. The sounds are fun, and it is always nice to see your city grow based on what you do. The bid feature on the businesses and train tech upgrades is a nice feature. This is one of those games that is fun to watch, even after you have completed the objectives in each scenario. Watching your rivals build in multi AI mode also is a great way to visualize good track layout (and bad). For the dollars spent, you will get your entertainment value out of it and be left wanting more. That is a pretty good game standard in my view. I would give it 5 stars if it had a few more scenarios available.

The game looks fun, but after a few hours it crashed on my older (2009) iMac. But my newer iMac (2011) and Macbook Pro (2012) work fine. NOTE: In full screen mode, if your screen corners are set to a screen saver, you will need to disable that.

As the game progresses, it frequently crashes. If you open the game back up immediately, resume the game and it crashes again, it often causes the system to lock up and crash. And it is not as though the game is being played on an inferior system. Im using a 3.4 GHz Core i7 iMac with 16GB of RAM. It is fun to play and offers a variety of scenarios, but the play experience is significantly hampered by the crashes.

This game does crash a lot. It is fun, but while the graphics were not as good, RRT2 was much more complicated in the supply chain while this one is overly simplistic. Can you remake RRT2 for mac? Please!

Im a huge fan of train games. And this game is the worst Ive ever played. Scenarios are totally unrealistic - Each play-through generates a completely different set of resources and industries. If they actually match any history of the real world, its purely by random chance. Ironically, the Santa Claus at the North Pole scenario (where you have to deliver cookies, eggnog, wooden horses, and so on) may be the most realistic one, because you simply expect it to be a pure fantasy. The number of single-player scenarios is very limited (just 8, and no mod-ability), and reply value is very low. The multiplayer scenarios all crash. Of the 8 single-player scenarios, Ive never been able to finish 2 because of video crashing (despite the computer being well above the minimum requirements). Lots of UI and game management features seem horribly lacking compared to railroad games of 15 years ago. Sid Meier clearly attached his name to someone elses mediocre work.

I love train simulations… and I dont expect them to be perfect… but this game has some glaring bugs at its core that take what starts to be a fun simulation and ruins it. Trains start turning over on themselves… take CRAZY bad routes to get somewhere… and track laying can be really frustrating. I had this game for MONTHS and MONTHS and these problems remain. That is unacceptable in a game that costs this much. VERY disappointed in the "Sid Meier" commitment.