Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Here's some of the other similar games that i enjoy:

  - OpenTTD: free, open source, has a variety of transport, even crashes, low hardware requirements, but personally the train tiles aren't easy on the eyes
  - Transport Fever (1 or 2): lovely games that have really detailed 3D graphics, the UI/UX in TF2 is the best that i've every played with, however the train pathing doesn't appear to be dynamic, only simple signals present
  - Mashinky: a mix like the both of the above, developed by a single person, allows switching between an isometric tile based build mode and 3D visualization, currently has a variety of trains and some road vehicles, switches are automatically placed (either chain or regular switches, really nice logic); some might dislike its economy system (some trains need certain resources to run, which you need to get through supply chains, possibly with other trains), but i really like it
  - Railway Empire: focuses only on trains, seemingly the older variety too, has a large amounts of maps and interesting city growth mechanics but the UI isn't as good as TF2 and even though it has perhaps the best track building mechanics, managing lines becomes cumbersome when you have many
  - Workers & Resources: a city building game with a rather nice transport system, the UI needs work, but it might eventually be up there with Cities: Skylines (at least based on what others say)
  - Derail Valley: this one lets you actually be inside of a train and transport cargo, has crashes, simulates engine temperature for electric locomotives, even lets you use steam locomotives as well, really interesting

Now, i can't really talk much about their difficulty or late game experiences, because in OpenTTD i have probably less than ten hours of game time - it's a nice game, but it's not like i have endless free time.

Suggestion: you should be able to pick up most of these on Steam IIRC, so feel free to look them up and wishlist them. I actually got TF1 in a sale for just a few euros a while back.

I've spent hundreds of hours on OpenTTD, the UI is not great and brings back some 90s user experience.

I have an irrational love for that game, I discovered the original (TTD) as a teen so it will forever be "that game".

I also really love Cities Skyline, but I've got a grip about how car-centric the game is.

It's not possible to create a city that mostly bikes for instance, you _have_ to allow cars everywhere (or go into mods territory, not my thing)

I honestly love cities skylines for how car centric it is. It is the premier logistical challenge in that game, and it is a genuinely hard challenge.

There's plenty of games about building cities, but I've never played a game that really challenges you to understand the throughput and layout of road networks as skylines does. That said, I can see how people could get blindsided by it. You want to make a nice city and instead you're browsing wikipedia for how to make interchanges.

What do you find not great in the UI of OpenTTD? It's not perfect, but it's relatively great, compared to virtually every major build sim that came out in the next two decades. It's functional and fast. 00s UIs were plain horrible, and I don't think it got that much better.

Does OpenTTD not have A* track laying yet? It's such a bore doing it by hand all the time.

It doesn't. There's a single tool for laying tracks that you can click or pull, but only in a straight line. I'm not sure how could it figure out what you want between two arbitrary points. There's always other tracks, terrain, something in the way.

Yes, that is the reason they mentioned the A* pathfinding algorithm - to solve that exact problem.

The worst part about Skylines is that cars don't need parking lots/garages, they just magically disappear at the end of (many? all?) trips.

You can create car-free city with a single mod, the one that allows you to restrict the traffic types from each road segments... it's a giant pain though, cause you have to restrict cars from each and every road segment, if you forget some short path a car will appear out of nowhere and drive on it :) Surprisingly, it actually mostly works (although puts you in the hole money wise).

Although, unfortunately you have to have roads in front for deliveries, because there's no such thing as deliveries from the back. So, pedestrian-only streets are pretty much impossible if you want a city that actually functions.

"simulates engine temperature for electric locomotives"

As a first thought I imagined my laptop being heated up more when the locomotive does too... Technically even do-able I guess :)

Thanks for the list!

Thanks for the list. I love trains!

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