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 Sid Meier's Railroads!
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Firaxis' Barry Caudill talks about Sid Meier's RailroadsWhat kind of multiplayer modes will be available and how many people can compete against one another at one time? Barry: There is really one mode of play for multiplayer in Railroads and I guess you could liken it to Railroad death match. 4 players can connect and compete via LAN or Internet with the goal being to buy everyone else out and be the last robber baron standing. You will be able to choose any map or time period. We’ve been playing multiplayer games for a while now and the experience is very fun and frenetic. We expect multiplayer games to generally last about an hour for experienced players so you can fit a game into a lunch break. The buyout victory condition means that games are exciting right up until the end. One of the already known features, is the ability to put together your own train engine. Can you explain how this feature works? Barry: Actually, that feature hasn’t been as fun or interesting in practice as it was on paper so it has been moved to the back burner for the foreseeable future. You can, however, have complete control over the appearance of your engines in the game. We refer to this unofficially as "pimp my train". You can adjust the color and paint scheme of you fleet or individual engines and you can add logos, either historical or ones you create yourself, to the engines as well. As you progress in time, new train engines become available. Do you have any influence on how fast this progresses or is the availability of new trains set based on at what point in time you are? Barry: New trains are available in the year in which they were introduced historically. You will be able to choose the starting year in each scenario if you want to skip the “glorified lawnmower” era of trains. In real life, new products became available as new technology become available. Does the game reflect this and do new products arrive over time? Does this force you to change your supply lines? Barry: Demand for the later (and more complex) supply chains is controlled by city size rather than time. It ends up working about the same way but feels much more balanced as a result. How much influence do you have on industries? Can you place new ones or buy existing ones? Will their profits/losses become part of your company? Barry: You can place new industries in cities and towns that are large enough to hold them. You can also buy existing industries that come up for auction. Their profits and losses will become part of your bottom line. During what period of time does the game play? Does it peak into the future or stop in the present day? Barry: The game basically covers the time period from 1850 until 1950 (the golden age of railroads) but we are still tweaking the end year and that could change. Many Firaxis games have some form of modding support. Will this be available for Railroads! and what sort of objects/items do you expect people will mod? Barry: There won’t be as much as Civ IV but we do hope to provide a map editor and possibly a scenario editor at launch or soon after. Savvy modders should be able to edit scenarios by simply editing the XML, and map files are Targas so they should be editable as well if you have any Photoshop skills at all. I know that we have internal tools that we use to change things in the game and we expect to try to release as much of that as we can. Is there anything about the game that you would desperately like to share with our readers? Barry: Just that we are coming out this Fall and the guys are tired so send over some Mountain Dew. Thank you for participating in this interview. Good luck with the development and we hope to see more of Railroads! soon. Barry: Always a pleasure, thanks.   |
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