I always played it as a meta-game: you can control transportation, but my real goal was to increase city population and ultimately build a single large metroplex.
ya exactly. i liked to treat this whole genre as gardening. simcity is more constrained gardening; you dig your plots and watch stuff grow. transport tycoon is more like guerilla gardening; fundamentally you're in the wilderness, but with the right interventions - irrigation here, a latticework there - you in time dramatically transform the landscape
This is true but if you add in some game scripts or download specific scenarios and add in the FIRS resource packs (with much more complicated supply chains) it can be quite challenging.
My personal favorite was doing 5min city builder blitz online. Wasn’t ever very good but would keep me occupied for hours on end!
Also the economy doesn't make much sense factories are victim of the distance of travel pricing so will overpay coal from the other side of the map even if they have one just on their doorstep railroad tycoon delux did price maps much better and nothing compares to industry giant.
> will overpay coal from the other side of the map even if they have one just on their doorstep
Aye. It can be very profitable if you find a pair of matching resource sources and sinks a nice distance (given current technology available) between them – take coal from region 1 to a power station in region 2, and pickup more coal over there and pull it back to region 1, and of course repeat. This way your trains have cargo in both directions so make more profit than if they return all the way back empty. It makes more sense for passengers, who may have reasons to travel long distance (holidays, long commutes, …) no matter what is on their doorstep.
Back when we played the original game, there was a bug that leads to underflow in the money. You had to build a tunnel that spanned the entire width of the map, which would cost just more than 2 billion dollars, underflowing and giving you 2 billion instead. Afterwards, the game was a pure sandbox, and that's the only way I played it as a kid.
I have a friend who used to do that and dominate the rest of us, but he also had to insist that we play with the "local authorities" disabled -- you know the people who get tired of you flattening a neighbourhood to fit in a high-profit oil line and prevent you from going on.
Are you saying this strategy is viable also with local authorities enabled?
1. On the scale of "the whole map", going around a city isn't that much of a detour. You only need local authority permission for stations or bulldozing city buildings/roads, so build stations first the rail around obstacles.
2. Forestation projects are an easy way to build local authority rep. There's also a floor to how low rep can go, so if you need to bulldoze a forest to make room for your reforestation project, that still works out
you build a small service that gets you enough capital to build a line for e.g. oil from one end of the map to the other
that's it, then you can treat the entire game as a giant sandbox (which is the best bit)