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I recommend Railroad Tycoon II to anyone.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 24 / 27
Date: November 10, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon is an excellent strategy game. Players design a railroad from the ground up. Where should you locate tracks? What engines should you buy? And just as importantly, what cargo should you carry and where will it fetch the highest price? The railroad genre should appeal to many and it is a refreshing break from military strategy. The user interface is intuitive and the graphics are nice. The game play is real-time. AI opponents are fairly challenging.

Excellent strategy game that you will find addictive!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 29 / 32
Date: November 18, 1999
Author: Amazon User

What a game. For the rail enthusiast, this is a must have! This game combines railroading, geography, politics and high finance into an incredible game of strategy. Build an empire and meet geographic, financial or political goals.

3 hours passes like 30 minutes playing this game. Each new campaign is progressively more difficult and requires its own strategy to win. I've been playing the game for 6 months and havn't figured it all out yet...but it's held my interest all this time.

Hands down, the best strategy game I've ever played!

Railroad Tycoon...gotta buy it!

Excellent graphics & strategy elements compared to original

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 21, 1999
Author: Amazon User

The graphics are amazing on all detail levels of this game and incorporates even more elements that must be overcome to be successful. The amount of options of maps and economies, etc is much improved from the first game. This is not for the amateur gamer, if you expect to succeed at this game, you must be willing to fail at it many times before you get the nack of everything. Even on the easy setting, it is quite complicated. The game is much better than the first version, although one element of the game I did not particular like was the territory use rights. I should not have to spend one million dollars to use Italy's land. It may be more realistic, but it is a pain in expansion when you only need one mine or one city over a border to pay for the whole county.

Thinking about selling my car :)

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: May 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

If you want to get a hint what is big business all about, if you can't understand why have the great personalities (brought back to life in this game!) persisted at their work, when they could have long retire, sit down, feed your mouse some cheese and go on. Graphics is excellent, game runs wonderfully, you have very lot of options, different campaigns, scenarios, around 50 trains and 30 cargo cars. You must master building, transporting cargo, finances & stocks and much more. You must be very accurate at laying tracks because it is made somehow tricky, plus you have to control the steepness of the track (very influential on train & delivery speed). You can also buy many additional buildings for your station, which adds good look and value to your company. I bought the game on second hand, so I haven't got the manual, because the first owner has ''misplaced'' it (would you expect from 12 years old kid in Slovenia to read English manuals? He probably threw it away). But if you are persistant, you'll get into game quite fast. I think it wil stay your thrill for a long time.

For me it is a fascinating flexible strategy game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: May 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon II is extremely flexible. At one level you can play it as an exciting multi-user game with robbers robbing trains, trains blowing apart and ruthless AI opponents. At another level you can read through the book and understand much more about how the game was built and its capabilities. You can control the speed of play, I use the slowest speed and even then I find it too fast when running over 300 trains in the UK at the same time. For me using the book, RailRoad Tycoon II Official strategy guide and the game together meant learning about the map editor so I could customise other people's maps and make my favourite map of England much more accurate to play. The game itself becomes much more interesting as you deal with more levels of complexity. You can even eliminate the AI opponents and robbers. Introduce new events and generally create your own world.

The game shows its North American roots. My background being English is very different, nowhere in England is more than 50 miles from the sea. Fishing and ports are much more important. My personal wish list would be to add different types of ports and a fish cargo to the game.

But to enjoy the game to the full you really need the Official Strategy Guide. Is it likely to have a harmful effect. Don't know. I have spent many hours playing the game, I have even learnt a bit of geography whilst playing it, I now know roughly where a few places like Denver and Frankfurt are. Also I can tell you exactly where the mountain ranges that are going to slow down trains are as well. It also gives an introduction to economics, how resources interact with cites and manufacturing plants.

NOT A FUN GAME!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: May 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

After spending a few hours trying to decipher the mysteries of Railroad Tycoon II, I finally experienced enlightenment and realized I was NOT having fun. The game has many tempting possibilities of entertainment, but I found the game frustrating to play. The manual does not explain much; building stations and laying track are difficult and unforgiving tasks. I have not played the first version of the game, and this may explain my befuddlement.

In short, I would not recommend this game. In fact if you really want this game, my trash pick up is on Thursday and this game will be in the can.

One of the all-time best!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I used to play the original RR Tycoon all the time, but gave it up as graphics and technologies moved past it...Now I'm addicted again, because Microsoft has this sequel out. It fixes all the complaints I used to have about the original, and adds many new features, so I don't feel like I am playing the same old game. This game is so simple, a child could play it. However, it provides the opportunity to set higher levels of difficulty. The graphics and sound are great, and there isn't a single thing wrong with this game. Go buy it!

Railroad Tycoon Video Demanding

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 29, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon II has extremely well done graphics. Unfortunately, this game is a system HOG. If you have an older i.e. pre-1999 system or plan on playing this on a laptop as I did, forget it. It requires higher resolution than even most brand new laptops have. If you have 800X600 on your system, forget it. It won't run.

It says it will run on a 133. Don't bother as it will hang as your game progresses. This is an excellent game but not for the older desktop.

Track laying is tedious and the most boring part of the game.

I really, really wanted to like this game...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

... but ultimately decided I never would.

The original Railroad Tycoon game ranked as one of my all-time favourite computer games. I wasted countless hours laying track well into the night and cursing computer players when they started buying my stock. When I discovered RTII for the Mac, I purchased it immediately...

And found a game that proves that bells and whistles aren't always good things.

RTII has a very pretty, forced perspective map of the area in which tracks are being layed, but the nature of the map makes it neigh-impossible to predict exactly where the tracks are going to end up unless one practices extensively. In other words, one has to *work* just to figure out how to play the game. And, as far as computer games go, that's not my idea of fun.

Despite not being able to play the game, I'm giving it Two Stars. It's pretty, the sound effects are nice, and the idea of laying tracks in Africa and Asia appeals greatly to me. In concept, the game *is* superior to the original RT and takes advantage of the advances we've seen in technology in recent years... but the designers (or developers, I'm not sure who to blame) just didn't know when to quit.

I think I could have enjoyed this game immensely if it had had been presented with an old-fashioned top-down/2D view of the play surface rather than enduldge themselves in making the game prettier. Maybe that could have been an option that could have been provided--I don't know enough about computer programming to know if such a thing would have been possible. As things stand, 'Railroad Tycoon II' is just taking up space in my game CD rack.

It takes a while to love it, but it's worth it.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: June 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

When I first started to play Railroad Tycoon II, I thought that it looked great (and it really does), but was extremely complex. But I soon realized that the problem wasn't with the game, but with me. Let me explain.

All I wanted to do was to build trains and track and stations until I ran out of room on the map. I wanted to whip out the European map, get three or four competitors and start playing. Much to my chagrin, you can't do that on the European map because it doesn't let you add other competitors. The game establishes certain goals that you are supposed to meet in certain scenarios. This, I did not like.

There is a wonderful scenario editor, but that really takes a lot of time and work and I just wanted to play with the trains. So finally I decided that, in order to enjoy the game, I would basically have to ignore the goals set up by the programmers and just play. Once I changed my mindset, the game absolutely blossomed. It was weeks before I even placed a different CD in the drive to play a different game.

I found myself coming back to this game time and time again. And in that, this game is exactly like it predecessor. If you liked the original, you'll love this one.

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