Railroad Tycoon II

That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.

I remember Corel Linux!

It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark.

I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, and working on the Steam Deck (which ships with KDE Plasma) at a contractor for a hot minute to bring gaming back as well. At least on the personal level it was an impactful product :-)

I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.

What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-(

I'd love to buy the linux native version.

I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.

However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see which company has bigger budget to spend on lawyers, whatever.

> RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart.

Aside from OpenTTD, the only games that come to mind are more modern in both their looks and how they play, but they might be worth a shot regardless.

Transport Fever (1 and 2) - the first game can be found for cheap, the second game has quite possibly the best UI of any game in the genre, plus you get trains, trucks, boats and planes, large and pretty maps with towns that develop into proper cities over time.

Mashinky - a more grid based game with trains, trucks and planes, as well as an interesting token based economy system, where you unlock new types of resources as you move along within the game world and therefore have to build out your network gradually, ensuring that everything works okay as it scales up.

Train World - a pretty recent game about trains, which has a larger scale than any of the other games I've played in the genre, might need a bit more polish but is pretty promising! It is focused purely on trains though, so is a bit more of a focused experience when it comes to actually laying out the network and setting up lines.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic - a slightly different genre (city builder), but it puts you in charge of both the economy aspect, as well as city building (and utilities like electricity, heating, water and sewage, which can be toggled on/off), production chains of various resources to use or export, transportation for citizens and a bunch more stuff. There's a lot of different mechanisms, but it doesn't feel horribly complex if you have some time to sink into it and it's quite lovely.

Honestly I also liked OpenTTD, but couldn't really get past the UI long term, it has that classic feel sure, but just wasn't quite as pleasant to use as in some of the other games.

There was a Railroad Tycoon 3, made mostly by the same team in the same office in Fenton. The changes to a more free-flowing tracks didn't necessarily make the game better, and were a headache for most of the production.

I was also told that there were attempts to make the economic simulation far more dynamic, simulating that the cargo could leave by other transport methods, as you'd find in a more serious economic simulation. That just made the game worse: The more efficient the market gets, the harder it is to find the profit, and the more likely that an old 'good' route suddenly stops making money, which is just annoying in a single player game.

It's a common problem with market-centric games: Good simulations make everything unfun, as most of the enjoyment comes from easily finding opportunities or getting away with misbehavior that would make real-life barons very difficult. This is IMO why you don't find many spiritual successors: Most steps forward would be steps back when it comes to making the game fun. So you'll find games focusing just on the tracks, but as puzzles (like the Train Valley Series). Optimizing routes trading items (spaceways), or outright market manipulation (Offworld Trading Company). Doing it all at once basically demands copying the game with newer graphics.

Speaking of older games that never had a successor that quite managed to capture what they did well, there's also SimTower, where the main successors are Yoot Tower (which never really made it out of Japan) and Project Highrise, which just doesn't scratch the same itch.

one of my all time favourite games too. for me the best aspect was that I felt I was playing out the story of how railroads helped settle a continent, so its spiritual peers were civilisations and to a lesser extent simcity. the closest modern game I've found that captures that same sort of evolving story + open ended management aspect is stellaris.

Anno 1602 was my favorite game when I was young, I wonder what game type do you usually play? Official single player missons? Community custom missions or multiplayer?

> and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart

OpenTTD, Simutrans?

It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.

I'd suggest trying Railway Empire and it's sequel. It's the closest successor I've found.

This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes. Kind of a let down.

It may not be enjoyable, but for about a century, railroad schemes were often as much about entrepreneurial fundraising, land rights, and corruption as about actually delivering infrastructure - it's thematically correct.

Colm Meaney delivers an entertaining performance with regards to this in 'Hell on Wheels'.

There are parts of Pennsylvania that briefly got violent with each other over gauge changes (and thus, which town had a rest stop, and no doubt, which investment would prove profitable). The "Erie Gauge War".

I’ve never played this game but it reminds me of some railroad game I did play where you could put all of your money into a commodity, and that would raise the price of the commodity… which would start causing the overall value of your assets to explode exponentially… which allowed you to justify absurd loans from the bank… which compounded in a loop where you could start to break the math of the game as the price of coal detached from reality and your market cap soared into the quadrillions and beyond…

Good times

Huh, I've always just ignored the stock market and haven't had any issues.

Yeah, that reminded me how too easy diplomacy (in particular tech trading) can make almost everything else pointless in some strategy games...

RRT3 economy was great with the addition of the moving of goods outside the rail system it made everything much more organic and realistic as you couldn't just gauge prices anymore

RT3, in 3d, made it a model train simulator. Going first-person on a locomotive, puting the camera close exactly like every kid has done with every train set, that was a revolution. I saw that joy once again a few years ago when nerdcubed tried a VR model train simukator.

https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8