When I play computer games, I go through phases. Sometimes I will only play one game for a month every chance I get and then lose interest and find another game. Usually I find all the flaws and then I get bored.
Recently, I’ve been playing Railroad Tycoon II, a game that I’ve had since ~1999. Basically, you create a Railroad empire and make money. And boy, have I found the flaws.
How the hell do you acquire personal wealth? You are given a salary by some of the most tightwad board of investors ever. Based on your performance of the last year (mostly your corporate profits), they will raise, lower, or keep your salary the same. Mostly, they just cut your salary. If profits are down by $100K from $2 Million to $1.9 Million, they cut your pay by $5K. Raise profits by $2 Million? You get a $1K pay raise. Goody, I now make what I make in real life (not that much). HOWEVER, my opponents are swimming in cash within five years. Their cash stockpile is $500K. Mine? $15K. Profits are about the same for my company and their companies. What the hell?
Did I say within five years? I meant one year.
And do you know what they do with their oodles of cash? Buy enough stock to control my company! Every time I try to merge with a sickly, failing company (yet the owner has millions of dollars and makes more than me a year), they vote against it. Also, they own 98% of their own company but I can never manage to own more than 30% of mine. My company can issue stock, which lowers the price and frees up shares to buy, which I try to do (there are no small private investors as the computer opponents buy up all the stock so that five men control 75% of my company). However, due to my pitifully small salary, I can only buy a few shares with my cash and the computers buy up the rest. I wind up owning less of my company than before.
The only way to ever convince your competitors to sell their stock on your company is to screw yourself. Stop all trains, declare bankruptcy, go into huge debt, and watch the stock fall in price. When it hits a dollar per share, they sell like crazy. You can now buy up the stock for cheap and end up owning 85% of the company. However, you only have a year to turn a profit before your creditors liquidate the company and you are kicked out of the game. When you allow the trains to run again, they actually cause you to lose money (as the value of the cargo decreases to nothing as time goes on) and the cost of running them and not making a profit on delivery puts you further in the hole. You can use a cheat to give your company $100 Million and think of it as a ‘government bailout’ (but the government at this time in history was relying on millionaires to bail the government out. One of which, J.P. Morgan did twice, you can actually play as in the game) but I tried not to cheat. So the whole method of intentionally bankrupting you company doesn’t work.
These aren’t even the really hard rules either, just the average rules. You don’t want to play on hard. The easy rules don’t allow you to buy stock in anyone else’s company, but that’s boring.
It is nice knowing that this there is also no government in the game to stop you from doing things that were illegal and are highly illegal today.
The less annoying thing about this game is the lack of economic diversity. Cities produce and demand things. What they produce depends on what buildings they have (steel plants, textile mills, car factories). Cities demand food, ‘goods’, and any raw materials needed for their economic buildings (iron and coal for steel plants, cotton or wool for textile mills, steel and tires for automobile factories). Cities always demand and produce mail and passengers. There are about a handful of buildings in the game and they mostly just make food or ‘goods’. It makes no sense to ship food and ‘goods’ to one city just to ship back food and ‘goods’.
Also, it’s not even profitable to ship raw materials to the factories. For example, the Textile mills need cotton (or wool). Cotton is produced on farms outside of a city. You could build a station next to a group of farms and ship cotton to the city, but the returning train is carrying no goods to the cotton supplying station region. Therefore you make no money on the returning train (unless the city just so happens to produce fertilizer, the only thing a cotton farm ever demands). I know this sounds confusing, but it really isn’t. You ship cotton to the city and bring nothing back.
So that’s Railroad Tycoon II. Since 1998, there have been two sequels, Railroad Tycoon III and Sid Meier’s Raildroads! (Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series, created the original RR Tycoon game but not the second or third ones). I would like to try these games someday.
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