Hey Rusty!
RT2's big flaw - you couldn't build tunnels. This was apparently to make gameplay challenging, but whoever's heard of
IMO tunnels were unrealistic and useless anyway. Most of the maps in RT2 would make tunnels impractical most of the time. If they allowed you to preplan your route and then okay it, they might find an occasional use, but largely I think they're not really missed.
I'm curious as to how you modified the scenarios TheDS. What kind of changes did you make?
Mostly I turn off the limitation that won't let you build unconnected track. 90% of the time it's very annoying to be unable to build track from some other direction, and 75% of the time you get stuck with highly inefficient routes over mountains. There's a couple scenarios you simply can't win if you're not allowed to take out loans, some you can't win if you can't buy stock on margin, and some are just flat out impossible. Frex, the Dominican Republic scenario is insane and I doubt it was ever playtested or played. It's so bad I'd have to see hard evidence before I believed it.
So basically just simple stuff most of the time.
There's also a few maps where they do a poor job of reserving cells through a city so you can't build track through it! I've adjusted the reserve cells on a lot of maps to make them more playable. And some I found they didn't do the resources right. Frex, Auto plants but no way to get Rubber. And I really like the new buildings (Distillery, Ammo, etc) and add them to some scenarios. Now and then there's poor distribution of some industries so it's almost impossible to work some of the chains; frex low odds of a Paper plant, maybe only one or two cities with a Paper plant, etc.
There's a couple of scenarios that are in the modern times and they start you out with just $100,000 (which means you start a company with only $1million when most trains cost that much). Any scenario that starts after about 1980 needs some kind of boost to get you going.
And there are plenty of maps that would need a complete overhaul to be any fun. Cities all too close together or too far apart, cities all too big or too small, not enough or too many industries, crappy port industry selections, ridiculously rugged mountains, too hard to grow your company and pay off your loans, etc. Some of it could just be a matter of taste, but there's only a handful of maps I enjoy without modification, and only another handful I bothered to modify to make them playable.
Rails cross America - too simple to fix the trafficig problem - just push a few buttons and it does it automatically.
Actually that only makes the problem worse. The managers can't keep up with the demand and they're not allowed to change track or signaling levels. Your traffic winds up going from oversaturated to completely barren and back and managers only react every month. I never went to the effort to try, but I think you'd have to turn managers off and leave the trains at a certain number on a given line and just live with it, but I doubt that would work either.
The solution the fans give is NEVER EVER upgrade your track. Live with single track and basic signals the whole time the whole game. You lose out on business, but you don't have dry spells where you pay for unused capacity either.
The real solution is for the routing algorithms to get unfutzed, but they won't do it. Otherwise it's a very cool game!
Hexagonal tiles for RRT - now that would be interesting.
You know it would! They could probably take a page from the crayon games too.
BTW, Railroad Pioneer seems to be a bit too overcomplicated for my tastes. I didn't have time to learn the whole thing and nothing was obvious to me. I think I woulda liked it a few years ago when I had that kind of time, but not nowadays.