Way too buggy

Im very disappointed. I was a big fan of the earlier Railroad Tycoon games, so I was hoping Railroads would be a worthy successor. But the game has so many bugs its just too frustrating to play - I feel gypped! Most significantly, there are pathing problems, so when I lay down tracks and build stations, I frequently find that I cannot make the trains run between the stations I had intended, even though the stations are connected in one continuous track. I just had to quit a game because I tried to run a train between three stations in sequence, but I couldnt save the route because the "OK" button was never enabled in the dialog box. Bizarre. Ive also had odd scrolling behavior, in that the scroll speed is inconsistent. I had to move it way up to be able to move around the screen, but then it would slow way down again sometimes randomly. I also had built some track right into a station, next to other track that was connected to the station. But the new track wasnt recognized as being part of the station, so I couldnt make a train stop there. Theres a lot of annoyances that make the game pretty much unplayable.

From what Ive been able to tell, the game is dumbed down from the Railroad Tycoon 3 that I enjoyed immensely. Gone are local variances in commodity prices. You cannot run double-track, you just think you can with the button that lets you run a second track parrallel to the first. But its not truly double-track, since each train will only use one of the tracks, back and forth on the same line. So you simply cannot effectively run more than one train on any particular piece of track. Stupid!! I guess Railroads! is very popular on the PC so this didnt bother other people like it does with me, but a lot of the challenge of complex routing is gone if you can only run one train per track. Overall if they fix the bugs I guess I would keep playing a bit more. But I wish they would come out with a Mac-specific update that had the more complex game play from the predecessor games.

craned addy about Sid Meier's Railroads!