* to grow, towns need to have their needs satisfied. * all towns start at a base size (level 1 is any population, level 2 is 40k, level 3 is 60k, maybe not exact numbers but you get the idea.) all towns have one factory slot already filled, but level 2, 3, and 4 unlock additional building slots, two of which are factories and one of which are special buildings with various modifiers. Railway Empire is a bit more "board gamey" than simulation. "Master Hellish" has some good OpenTTD introductory videos on YouTube: e.g. Then there are customised versions which make the vehicles more expensive, the routes less profitable, resource production is limited, and it's a lot more challenging to make a sustainable company at all. There are plugins which add specific goals, such as CityBuilder where you take a small city for yourself and have to supply it with whatever it needs to help it grow, and the first person to cross a certain city size wins and ends the game.
It typically runs through the 1900s and unlocks more vehicles later in the game, by the 2000s the game gets very easy to make money and the map is full and there are no more vehicles, so servers tend to have an arbitrary cutoff endgame then and you can compete "most valuable company" by the end. That said it does offer some metrics you can compare performance on, such as: OpenTTD is like playing with a physical trainset, you don't win you just play. I'd definitely draw some parallels with games like Factorio. To me, a lot of the fun is in planning out these supply chains and seeing how i could use the available types of vehicles in a somewhat efficient manner as well as building the roads and infrastructure that's necessary for that, though other players might enjoy an approach that focuses more on number crunching, while others might just want to make a total mess of things. In that regard, they can be reasonably forgiving, as long as this simulated company of yours doesn't go bankrupt, and you can usually pause them and play at your own pace. Some of those have end dates, others have technology research goals, in most you need to supply cities with a certain amount of resources that they need to grow.Īlmost all of them involve managing a transport enterprise that earns money by transporting goods of various sorts and ensuring that supply chains are uninterrupted (raw materials to factories, goods to the cities, usually with plenty of steps along the way). The original is playable even on integrated graphics on lower settings, although I don't think that's officially supported. The lack of goals (apart from the somewhat lukewarm campaigns) or of any real competition makes it more of a sandbox building game than anything else, though. There's something satisfying about getting a somewhat complex system of cargo transport working. I've played the original quite a bit, and it's fun up to a point. Many reviews seem to say the sequel doesn't offer that much new in terms of gameplay. I haven't played Transport Fever 2, partially because my laptop's a potato and partially because I already have the original Transport Fever. The game also seems to be available on GOG.com, although at least one review says the Linux version there is much older than what's available on Steam, so perhaps the publisher doesn't care about non-Steam sales that much. > And you can't buy it outside of Steam, but I can't help it if the developer doesn't want my money directly. I've also heard of Cities in Motion and Railway Empire, though haven't played them myself. Mashinky () is an indie game that mostly focuses on trains, but also is in 3D and looks pretty good, like Transport Fever, though some people say that the economy in the game is a tad odd Simutrans () is another transport simulation game, which has a lot of different tilesets, but the actual gameplay of which seems to be a bit less enjoyable than that of OpenTTD and others, though it's also freeware Some other similar games that people might enjoy: That said, OpenTTD is also amazing because it's free, has a lot of lovely content and definitely provides plenty of replay value, in addition to not requiring a beefy computer (unlike the aforementioned game). The best game in the "transport simulation" genre that i've played would probably be Transport Fever 2 ( ), because it not only looks better when compared to everything else out there, but the UI also feels really streamlined.