Sid Meier's Railroads! Demo

Although they might seem clumsy and unfeasible nowadays, trains have been the center-point of the transport industry for almost a century, thanks to their robustness and the capability to carry a substantial amount of weight back and forth. In Sid Meier's Railroads! you are offered the possibility to create your own train network and supply the country with everything it needs.

To start off with, the first thing you have to do in order to kick start your railroad empire is to lay the actual tracks, by connecting cities with each other. To do this, all you have to do is use the mouse to add as much as you want, as long as you have the money to pay for it. Obviously, both ends of the track must end or pass through a city in order to take advantage of them, but even that is not enough to start transporting commodities from one place to the other.

Beside the tracks, you also need to place a station in each city, where the trains load and unload the carriages. You also have to purchase the actual trains and add the desired number of carriages, which is dictated by the supply of the city in question. You can connect the tracks with factories separate from the city, so that you can transport materials such as wood, oil and fish into the cities that need it.

As you might expect, it is rather costly to maintain a railroad, especially if you are planning on extending it to a large number of cities. Thus, every train requires maintenance, which is subtracted from your profits each time they reach their destination. Beside the actual money, there is also the matter of your company stocks, which increase in value as you business grows. In case you are in need of money, you can always sell part of your stocks, although you should be careful, since if someone else holds 100% of your stocks, the game ends.

Since the game follows the same mechanics as Civilizations when it comes to the passage of time, most of the goals must be achieved before you reach a certain year. More and more trains become available as you advance through the 20-th century, each one of which delivers more power and can transport the loads much faster to their destination.

Although the game can be played with just you on the map, it is also possible to add more players, as well as AI opponents. Thus, Sid Meier's Railroads! can quickly become addictive, especially since there are a wide variety of possibilities and achievements scattered throughout the game that keep you glued to the screen for hours at end.