Tom's Comments: One of the most intriguing
games I saw at this year's E3 was Flying Lab's Rails across America,
a continuous-time rail empire game to be published by Strategy
First later this summer. After playing some early builds, I think
I've discovered another gem that can take its place in the array
of this year's best strategy games coming from unlikely places:
Europa Universalis,
The
Corporate Machine, Starships
Unlimited, and now Rails across America.
At first glance, you might write this off as a Railroad
Tycoon II clone, but you'd be making a mistake. Although the most
interesting screenshots of the game are the zoomed-in views that
make it look up-close-and-personal like PopTop's homage to Sid
Meier's classic, these images aren't a good representation of
how it plays. Rails is more epic and abstract than Railroad Tycoon
II. It's a game that plays from a much higher level and spans
a broader swath of railroading. Whereas Railroad Tycoon II is
the hands-on company manager's perspective, Rails gazes out from
the wood-paneled office of the president.
The playing field -- your board -- is a map of the
North America and your basic task is to build railroads connecting
cities. Every city has a certain amount of stuff that wants to
get to other cities. For instance, New York has passengers and
cargo for Albany, Philadelphia, Hartford, and Salt Lake City.
If you connect any of these cities, you earn income for each carload
your line can carry. You can pay to improve your lines and trains
so they can accommodate more traffic.
But then there's competition, which is just as important
in Rails across America as actually building your network. When
two companies run routes between a city and its desired destination,
they split the fee based on the proportion of the traffic they
carry. Traffic will gravitate towards the faster line, so you
can steal business from your opponent by running a more efficient
route.
There are times when you'll be cooperating with
your competitors. Let's take the example of the passenger and
cargo that want to go from New York to Salt Lake City. No single
line can run that far, so the cargo will move along contiguous
segments. If one third of the route in owned by me, another third
is owned by Vanderbilt, and the final third is owned by Gould,
our companies split the money three ways. There's a sort of diplomatic
interaction where you can shut down cooperation, depriving you
and a specific competitor of shared fees.
Cont'd
