Be Excellent To Each Other

WARNING: People who aren't Dimrill, romanista and possibly Mr Chris will find this tedious in the extreme. And maybe some others.

This was £5.98 in the GAME sale at the moment. I've seen it around (and on the xbox360achievements website for AGES) but I never got around to grabbing it until now. It's only fair to say that comparisons will be needed - with both the Maxis port of A-Train III, and Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD.

Unlike a number of other computer strategy games which have had a console port recently, this doesn't cut, dumb down or simplify anything. I am thinking specifically of Civilization Revolution here, which takes the glory of Civ and reduces it to an (enjoyable in short bursts, mind you) turn-based wargame with serious balancing issues and ridiculously aggressive AI (if you ever wanted Gandhi to delcare war on you, this is where to go). If you're coming straight from A-Train, you'll have a pretty darn good idea of what to do here.

This isn't SimCity, where you build (or at least, provide zoning permission for) an entire city. Nor is it Transport Tycoon, where you just provide transportation between the cities. You are an independent company (albeit with the local government's favour) and can build not just the transportation, but also the local shops, offices, recreation areas and homes.

You have two types of trains at your disposal - passenger trains carry passengers, goods trains carry building materials from a factory or port to where you specify so you can then use them to build your subsidiary businesses. This is the first frustration, as there is no way of stopping the locals from taking the materials to build their own apartment blocks or offices. Got a grand plan for a huge skyscraper or commercial district? Put it on hold, as you will watch huge trainloads of supplies vanish almost as soon as they're delivered, until the AI builders have sated their needs.

Thankfully, you have a monopoly on transport so you don't have to worry about AI railways screwing up your long-term plans. You can build simple or complex railways - huge stations or tiny one track halts. You can also build elevated railways (and stations) and even underground trains. There is a large selection of different types of trains to run based on what you're intending the line for - slow, high capacity commuter trains, lightning fast express trains or comfortable limited-stop expresses? Your primary concern is their top speed, as a slow train will hold up faster ones behind it... but scheduling will overcome that.

The scheduling in A-Train has always been miles ahead of that in other transport games. In the old A-Train, you could make the most money by scheduling your trains to leave the residential area at 0800, and to leave the business district at 1800. There are so many options to choose from - including the earliest any given train will depart from a certain station (so you can run slow freight trains at night to avoid jamming up passenger services); how long a train will wait at a station; and what route a train will take at each set of points to the extent of what route it will take at those points at A GIVEN TIME OF DAY (know that a fast express will be coming up from behind late afternoon? Order your slow commuter train to get out of its way!).

Unfortunately, the whole 'time of day' thing is somewhat hamstrung by one of the A-Train series' idiosyncrasies. While it has a full 24 hour clock cycle, it flies by so quickly that even with a short route your morning commuters arrive downtown just in time to watch the train doors open and close as it forms the evening train back home. The scheduling remains more a tool for keeping things running smoothly than any realistic peak passenger handling.

Or so I think. I have to base this on the older games, as the manual barely explains any of the game's concepts. As a veteran, I've figured it all out, but a new player would be utterly baffled and likely to just give up. Which would be a shame, as this game will absorb you for HOURS. All you have to do is run trains, get people around, build buildings, make money.

The Good:
-glorious 3D engine... nothing to match the ridiculous detail of GTA or Gears of War, but perfect for the purpose
-excellent time acceleration controls. turn your game into one of those time-lapse videos where an entire day's worth of trains out of King's Cross come and go in 30 seconds... or slow it down to real speed.
-a proper, deep strategy game on console. Nothing's been removed from the original A-Train... indeed, HX has added a lot more.
-a plethora of construction options - tube trains, huge complex stations, and the scheduling power to ensure to all works perfectly.

The Bad:
-train AI. You plan a train's entire journey, and it dumbly follows... including trying to enter a platform that's already occupied. While this doesn't result in an explosive crash, it does mean things can get jammed up very quickly.
-unbalanced pricing for buildings. I really need a new elevated station, but don't want to spend the $450million for it.
-very much a game for those with HDTVs. You can make the text bigger, but it can still be hard to make out in SD.
-the promise of more trains to download hasn't been fulfilled. And likely never will.
-only a handful of maps to play on, and all come with a pre-built (and crappy) rail network that you'll have to live with at first.

The Ugly:
-the manual. Granted, Maxis wrote one of the best manuals in history for A-Train, but HX gets a thin booklet that barely explains HOW to do things, and not WHERE or WHY.
-track laying controls. In spite of a friendly-seeming system that shows where tracks will go, it never seems to want to do what you want (until you figure out how it works); connecting different lines up to each other is a pain. You need to keep clicking A to cycle through different arrangements of switches before finding one that suits your needs, and then connect THAT up.

How very dare you.

[reads post with great interest]

How much of a problem is that, in terms of gameplay and keeping your trains running where and when you want them? Are there penalties for late running trains?



Have you unchecked the "PFI" option when you try to buy it?

It's more a matter of keeping a frequent service - the more trains you run, the more money you'll make. And given the maximum station size is five platforms, you cannot assign every train its own exclusive platform at your busy central station as there simply won't be enough room. With careful timing (and once I've increased the amount of tracks) it might not be so bad, but at the moment it is a real concern. I've got two commuter trains, two express trains and a frequent freight train all trying to get in and out several times a day. The only penalty is the train is spending time stuck and not dropping of passengers and going back with more and making more money.

In theory (and I've seen a lot of players do this) you just give each train a dedicated track from A to B... but that is incredibly inefficient in terms of both space and money.

There's no PFI option, sorry. For some reason (and I hope it's just because of my subsidiary businesses) part of the taxes (!!!) you pay every year are VAT (but in the UK, there's no VAT on train tickets).

Somebody write a Transport Tycoon Deluxe mod for Gears of War plz.

you sound more positive than the damning EG-review (2/10 orso); the hdtv thing is a point though, think i stay with the '93 version in classic mode on the mac

(did ask for this at the game shop though some time ago, and they couldn't even order it)

Tickets and passes for Nerdsville - population 3.

Perkies, are you familiar with the term `Busman's Holiday`?

Yay! A-Train. Good write up, man. I was interested in getting this but couldn't justify the 30/40 quid price tag for something that may have been shit. I'll pick it up for a fiver, though!

NERD

DWEEB! We've been through this, Dimmers.

Most of the achievements aren't too hard... the stock market just rises and falls on a fairly steady pattern (just like in the old game, where there'd be a huge peak followed by a massive crash every 18 months) so if you like you can spend the first year or so of the game just stock dealing... buy when it's below $7/share, sell when it's above $13/share and you can reach the $10billion target for the map quite easily. Then, with your huge pots of money, you can easily build the 60 subsidiaries/2000 squares of track/etc etc etc in no time at all.

Granted, this will make actually playing with the trains pointless for some folks as they just want to WIN... but the game is about building a network and getting it working smoothly, not trading stocks. If you wanted stock dealing, you should have bought Sid Meier's Railroads! (which was a disappointment of a different kind - it WAS all about the stock market, with the trains a cursory distraction)

Just like in the old A-Train, you can build a Shinkansen (bullet train) line... and just like the old A-Train, this involves an elevated track slowly assembling in a straight line across the map. Quite what purpose it serves (you can't build stations on it, and though you can buy trains to run on it some just appear on their own and go zipping past every few minutes) but I suppose it's cool.

So, is this a replacement for OpenTTD? Not really. It's more of a companion. This has the advantages of gorgeously smooth 3D graphics, fluid trackwork, a day/night cycle and that lovely scheduling. OpenTTD, meanwhile, gives you buses trucks planes and ships as well as trains, something close to scheduling (as at least you can build those signal boxes to direct trains down certain tracks), a vastly more detailed industry model, and the gradually improving selection of trains as you move from steam to diesel to electric.

i've asked a few people about this and actually tried to find it on Saturday for a good price. Wow... so odd to see it come up as a topic.

I'm tempted. not that I like trains, but that I want something a bit chilled to play.

It is extremely chilled... and like all good strategy games you will lose an entire evening to it without realizing.