I know this thread is long dead, but google took me to it and it might take other people here, so here goes.
First of all, Railroad Pioneer is on sale on steam right now with a 60% discount. It's certainly well worth the price at this point.
As for the question, I don't think we will really see something like RT4. Starting with RT3, the genre went towards simplification and it's a general trend. Civ4 also turned out to peak in complexity and the new releases talks to a larger audience, but at a cost of the quality in complexity. The whole gaming market moves towards some arcade like or casual like gaming. What really counts now is to put something (preferably cheaply produced), place it on steam and get casual gamers to buy and profit from it. Proper games are more costly to produce and apparently have a more narrow audience.
Then again there are indie games, which makes it despite being complex, like Factorio and Rimworld.
I really wish for a game to continue from RT2. What the game needs is better control of slopes. The fact that you can build a track, remove it and then build it again to gain a better slope tells that the game is lacking in that area. I would also wish for a new Railroad Pioneer. It's an awesome game, but the interface is less than perfect and it's not the most stable code in the world. It's also not intuitive in some areas like a level where you need a certain type of car and you can't produce it in the workshop near your starting location. You need to spend ages beating a competitor to go bankrupt and then you can pass the competitor to reach another workshop and here you can build the car you need to complete the level. This means you have to spend possibly a number of hours on the map while wondering if you can't complete the map due to a bug.
It would also be nice to have an English version 1.07. The English version is version 1.0 and the German version is patched to 1.07. However I suspect this is due to the German version being released first and the fixes are actually in the English 1.0. Still I can't be sure because there is apparently no official word on this and people have been asking for an English 1.07 patch since it was released in 2004 and still ask on Steam. It actually has negative reviews on Steam due to not including the 1.07 patch.
I'm guessing this mainly happened in the US. Certainly didn't get this effect in the UK, rather the railways linked towns and villages and people travelled to the location of the industry.
I get what you are trying to say, but I think the issue you are pointing out is mostly unnamed places in the new world vs placenames for every location in the old world. In the mid 18th century England (not UK, just in England specifically) started to build canals. Rivers and canals combined allowed sailing from London to Liverpool and from Bristol to York? (at least somewhere in the north east). This created an X of easy freight movements and industry started to appear at the crossing because it made transport for raw input and produced goods much cheaper. This location happened to have a local name already, which was Manchester. If it didn't have a name, they would have created one. When Manchester got crowded, they found a new place on the canal system, which was almost as good and started to build industry there as well. It was in the middle of nowhere meaning they didn't reuse existing cities or anything. However they did use the name of the closest village, which happened to be Bradford.
Cities grow at strategic locations for production or transport. This is for railroads, canals, Roman trading harbors etc. That's just how it works during any age. The only real difference between the UK and US is that most places in the UK have gained names ages ago.
You know, now I think about it, a railroad game could be designed as a Civ 4 modpack...
Considering I'm one of those who push the civ4 engine the most with modding, I would really like to know what you are thinking here. I don't see it as an obvious candidate, but if you do, then please tell how it could be done. It could be very interesting for modding purposes.
There's also Rails Across America, which didn't make it into your poll. I liked that game a lot, but it has a critical flaw that makes it unplayable. The traffic model just doesn't work the right way and your rails oscillate from being overpacked to unused and back, especially if you have more than one route to get somewhere. I tried to get the designers to fix their game, but they wouldn't have any of it, and now no one plays it.
It's an awesome game, but it's horribly unbalanced. The passengers and freight generation is based on the economy and you have no influence on this. Sounds interesting, but in reality it just takes the cargo away from you at random. There is no way to abandon extra tracks without downright removing them, meaning you can't stop maintenance of unused tracks without having to rebuild them from scratch 2 years later when the cargo is back. In reality if a railroad has 3 tracks and only need 2 during hard times, they will maintain 2. However they would use all 3, except the unmaintained one would be slower. Running bulk freight trains at 25 mph will make the track last longer than if it is completely abandoned because not grinding off the rust on top will make the entire rail rust faster.
Another aspect to remember is that tracks last a very long time. Railroads can easily abandon tracks for 10 years and then start using them again without replacing. Sure it's not at great speed at first, but it can be done. Removing and adding tracks and signals frequently like the game demands is totally unrealistic.
The game is a micro management nightmare. Managers works well, but only in a star track layout, meaning there is always just one way to go from A to B. If you say build one track from New York to Denver and another one from New York to Houston, it would be obvious to make a track from Texas to Colorado to avoid the transport to the east coast. However doing that will introduce the manager oscillation issue.
Fix those two issues and the game will become great.
RT2's big flaw - you couldn't build tunnels. This was apparently to make gameplay challenging, but whoever's heard of
There are tunnels... sort of. At least you can use tunnels to cross other tracks. The thing is when two trains meet, one of them becomes transparent and wait for the other to pass. This makes it difficult to make lines cross because you have 2 plots shared by both lines, which will stop traffic.
What you do is this:
Code:
..A...
..A...
..ABBB
BBBA..
...A..
...A..
Line A and B will cross here, but because they never enter the same plot, the collision detection system will not detect the other train and two trains can pass each other. I assume this to be a bug, but it's reasonable to assume some sort of tunnel or bridge solution and most importantly I didn't discover this on my own. The AI used this and showed me how it works, meaning you aren't cheating against the AI if you use an exploit used by the AI.
It should be noted that trains lose speed if turning too fast. If it enters a curve right after another, it will slow down.
Code:
SST... SST..
...T.. ...S.
...S.. ....T
...S.. ....S
S = strait
T = turn
Tight allows faster trains than left because left has 2 Ts after each other.
