As someone who lived through those times as an avid gamer, and spent countless hours suffering from "one more turn" syndrome, I really enjoyed this piece. I wish I could tell clearly when it was written. As for this line: "Meier began coding Civilization on the IBM PC in early 1990, soon after MicroProse killed a sequel to Railroad Tycoon that he and Shelley had been working on," all I can do is /sob.
Sadly, they dumbed it down a lot - as someone who loved 3, Sid Meier's Railroads was a disappointment in that they handicapped the economics an d make route laying a lot "simpler", and not in a good way. I would kill for an updated version of RT 3.
I was in Hamburg earlier this year, visiting among other things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatur_Wunderland and I thought to myself, wouldn't it fun to play with those train routes again? I bought the "Railroads!" again on Steam, and had a lot of fun for 20-30 hours. Then I read the Railroads! wiki page and found out Sid Meier wrote it exactly because he visited the same Wunderland 7 years before.
Like me, he just wanted a fun train game, not a ruthless economic simulation and i think Railroads! has filled that niche well.
(It's not quite trains, but if you want a resource management game where you have to be careful, try the city builder Banished, built by a single developer)
Apparently their argument was "It's about the trains!", turning it into a 'model railroad simulator', which I found odd given that the most vocal fans of the series weren't train nerds, but 'resource strategy' fans.
I've never played A Train, a train sim by the Japanese developer Artdink, but it has its fans. I think it's more about the economics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Train
