

You can build a railroad to these industries, construct an annex to load your trains, and then purchase an engine and assign it a number of cars. Near most towns there are several industries, such as grain farms, cattle ranches, lumber mills, coal mines, or oil wells.
#Sid meiers railroads trailer how to#
From there it's entirely up to you how to go about building your railway.

You start out with a single train depot, usually in a small town. Sid Meier's Railroads! plays very much like the Railroad Tycoon games, so if you've played those you'll be right at home here. You can also choose to randomize the location of cities and resources to ensure that you never play the same scenario twice. Both the historical and the fictional scenarios offer a variety of challenges that make each one interesting, if not entirely unique. As in the historical scenarios, you're given various objectives to complete within a time period and you can either fulfill those objectives or ignore them and just focus on building a massive shipping empire. There's a wide-open plains area where your routes are fast and cheap to construct a giant lake where everything is separated by vast stretches of water, which makes it difficult to build efficiently and a giant red cyclone-shaped continent modeled after the Firaxis company logo. The fictional scenarios are of course unconfined by history, so they're a bit more off-beat. Depending on how many of the goals you fulfill at the end of the allotted time period, you'll be rewarded prestige points and one of several rankings ranging from Traveling Circuis Freak to President of the United States or Prime Minister. The goals are divided by era, so you're always working within a time frame. You might have to do something as simple as connect Liverpool and Manchester, or something a bit more ambitious like earn $30 million. In each scenario you're usually given several goals to meet. For example, if you play in any of the European countries in the first half of the 20th century, you'll want to focus on processing and shipping steel to support the war effort. The era affects what types of engines you can purchase, as well as the general economy. These scenarios cover the entire history of the railroad, from its beginnings in the mid-19th century all the way through modern day. There are 15 different fictional and historical scenarios to choose from in Railroads! The historical scenarios take place in real-world locations such as the American Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, Great Britain, France, and Germany. It's interesting to watch a tiny little town grow into a thriving metropolis as a result of your efforts. But as complex and rewarding as building a railroad empire can be, it rarely feels daunting or tedious, which is perhaps the best thing that can be said for a game of this type. You can connect cities to trade goods and haul passengers, purchase and supply industries, play the stock market, bid on new technology, and watch cities grow as you supply them with the goods to take them from tiny backwater towns to thriving metropolises. Regardless of your affinity for trains, Railroads! is an engaging and surprisingly deep game that lets you do much more than lay track and watch miniature trains chug across the map.

Sid Meier's Railroads! might not have "tycoon" in its name, but it's still a very addictive economic strategy game that just about anyone can enjoy.
