Train Tycoon: Railroad Empire

Start with one station — and one day your rails may circle the globe.

Train Tycoon is an economic strategy game played on a real map of the world. 395 cities from New York to Melbourne are waiting for your railroad. Build stations, lay track across countries and continents, put trains on the lines — and see to it that every run brings the treasury a profit, not a loss.

THE WORKS Logging camps yield timber, mines yield iron. Workshops turn raw materials into beams and ingots; the factory turns those into sleepers and rails for new track. Raise your buildings' levels — every level raises the output.

THE HIRING OFFICE Fresh faces at the labor exchange every morning — each with a name, an age, a trade and a price. A master at his own bench works half again as hard. But your people need a home, a job and a bus between the two: neglect the city lines and the city grinds to a halt.

CITY HALL Power, police, medics, cinemas and restaurants — every city has its needs, and its rating climbs only when they're met. A city at one hundred percent opens a diamond mine.

THE LEDGER A market with drifting prices and daily limits. A bank with deposits and loans: miss a payment and the branch gets downgraded. Trains wear out, buses burn through their range, wages fall due every day. Profit isn't handed out here. It's earned.

THE ROAD DOESN'T WAIT — OR PUNISH A game day lasts 30 minutes. While you're away the road keeps working: come back and collect the takings. Dispatches will report a stalled bus or a finished line.

THE RECORD BOOK More than twenty multi-tier achievements — from your first kilometre of track to an empire on six continents. Your total score goes to the Game Center leaderboard.

No timers to sit through, no energy that runs out. Just you, a map of the world, and the railroad you're going to build.

Your train is waiting, tycoon.

What’s new

A CIRCULAR FROM THE RAILWAY BOARD

Gentlemen tycoons! This issue is repairs from end to end: one fault was pointed out by a player, three more turned up while we were tracing it.

• The railway works again while you are away. Returning after a long absence, you could find your stores untouched: no raw material at all, though wages and upkeep had been charged for every day. The order of business was to blame — the buses spent their whole range before the office counted who had come to work, and by those dry machines it appeared that nobody had. Now the shift is counted before the buses set out, and the workshops are credited with exactly the time the buses could cover

• The power station is now within a city's means. Last issue we made power compulsory and misjudged the measure: a station fed one building per level, while a city holds a dozen and a half. Where stations stood without an electrician, the city stopped altogether. Now one station feeds five buildings per level, and in older games the capacity is recalculated by itself

• The ghosts are gone. In long-running games, places at your buildings were held by people long departed: the office could not find the building's record and never freed the place. Those ghosts counted towards city power, police and medical coverage and the takings of your leisure houses — in your favour, but untrue. Places are now recounted against the living when you enter the game

• Retirement no longer takes you unawares. A shift hired all at once used to retire all at once, and a city would crumble in a couple of days without a word of warning. Now notice comes a week ahead, and the city panel holds a line reading «Retiring soon» until you hire a replacement

The engines are under steam. Your move, tycoon.