specification for a game

[abigailbrady]

There should be a game. Probably a computer game. It should be called 'Metropolis'. It should start in 1850. The game board is London, Middlesex and the nearer parts of the Home Counties, as they existed then. It should be a fairly realistic map, not a stylised one. You are the chairman of the Metropolitan Railway Company or one of its contemporaries. (Possibly a fictional contemporary). You have to raise capital, secure Parliamentary approval for routes, build lines, buy trains and run services. You can agree to joint ventures or get running rights over rivals' lines. You can buy land near your lines, build houses on it, and sell that. It is done on a maps-and-timetables level, with real prices for tunnels and trains. Where you build your lines and the service pattern you set up affects how London develops. If you decide that suburban Essex is the right place to expand into with your railway, maybe you don't even get a Metro-land in north-west Middlesex, or maybe someone else comes along and does it instead. Around 1890 you get the option of building tube railways too. I don't know when the game ends. Maybe it always ends in 1933 with the formation of London Transport. Maybe you can carry on.

Does this game exist already?

[Edit: It's not Transport Tycoon. That's far too stylised, I want a simulation].

Comments

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I think that's inevitable. After all, you cannot literally take 100 years to play the game, nor examine 100 miles in track in detail, so you already know time and distance scales are going to be messed with somehow. The approximation whereby a train runs once over several calendar weeks and that represents many journeys is not a bad one.

RRT3, especially, avoids much of the OTTDism of complicated implausible junctions by its mechanic where if two trains meet the slower one becomes intangible and stops, representing the operation of passing places or whatever.

RRT3 can't simulate the movement of passengers inside a city, though, let alone the detailed growth of one.

How else would you deal with the time and distance scales? I suppose you could abstract it further; set up a map and a timetable, design the approaches to major stations, and ordinarily just get a series of "end of day" (maybe "end of week") reports on operations, with a large number of train movements being simulated under the hood - perhaps occasionally being called upon to play signalman when things go pearshaped.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's basically what I'm imagining. You wouldn't see individual train movements in the game any more than would see individual personal combats in a strategic war game.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Hm. I don't believe anything like that exists, no. The only hardcore simulation train games I can think of are the "realistic looking train driving" ones like Trainz (*sigh* and what a terrible disappointment its steam model was) and SimSig.