Upgrade to Railroad Tycoon? not so sure.

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.

svenanderson about Sid Meier's Railroads!