CoS November Devlog - Railroad Tycoon 3 Retrospective, "What's the game?" of CoS; and Developer Q&A!
Hello Patrons! This month we wanted to celebrate and reflect upon 20 years of Railroad Tycoon 3. The game is an undeniable classic, and has informed a lot of our own design decisions related to Century of Steam. We wanted to use the anniversary of Railroad Tycoon as a way to talk about what some of the more "game" elements of Century of Steam will be, and also hit questions from you, our wonderful Patrons!
Customization Part 2 will be coming in December. We thank you for your continued support!
Comments (57)
Something I am kind of curious about How is interchange going to be handled? A lot of narrow gauge railroads were crucial to a relatively small select region and thus interchange and switching between standard gauge and narrow gauge was critical. For example the Sumpter Valley. At its largest point it was 80 miles and was the connection between logging operations and the Union Pacific mainline. Thus the interchange between standard and narrow gauge was crucial. So much so that even after the mainline was torn out in 1947, they still operated 1.5 miles of dual gauge track for another 14 years just to facilitate transfer of lumber between standard gauge trains and the lumber mills
Loving the passion behind the project really looking forward to what's to come. Couple of questions for the next Q&A, will there be the ability to use handsignals whilst switching? And if it may be discussed, what are coal and wood firing going to look like? Are you going to have to aim where the fuel is going? And presumably there will be options to simplify and complicate the sim as the player sees fit?
Hello! I'm a freight train driver from the UK, very hyped, really looking forward to playing this. I have a Q&A please, when you first get on a loco, will it be cold? Will you have to light the fire and build up both heat and boiler pressure first before setting of, if yes will this be real time, unlike derail valley, I find is to fast? Thanks James
Is Boiler Priming something that is going to be implemented ? Even if it’s just in a hard difficulty.
this thought is off the rails a bit. but it would be funny if you guys added a cog rail and a cog train for ridiculous grades idk what cog trains can haul up there lines besides tourists or one car of ore but a random thought haha or gear trains like heisler/shay/climax and have a track quality slider for track construction. the more money you spend on track the more material it cost but the smoother the operation vs if you spend the minimum on track construction you get spaghetti track and few ties and no fill. lol so the geared engines could excel at the bad track/ steep grades haha. maybe we could make our own track ties buy making logging railroads another use for gear trains and cheap track cause after we clear a forest we would have to rip up the old track anyway and get most of the material back. and maybe we could hire ai to run the logging and the jobs after we complete the track design and move on to other routes. i love the idea of having the beginning material and trains we purchased being shipped in of the coast and then as we get further out it would get more mountainous like going out from the west coast and start producing our own supplies. sorry for the random talk i get carried away in random thought. Game looks great so far!
it would be cool if you could connect maps with tunnels so maps could transfer material back and forth kinda like snowrunner. or just have a small meduin large and Big boy maps haha
If I'm allowed a second Q&A question: how will you keep car loading fun, especially for single player, and keep the game from becoming Century of Loading Crane Operator for large consists. Seems like an opportunity to make the game's economic system more interesting by adding equipment or buy or people to hire or something.
This is a great one! I'm adding it to the list, it'll likely come out as we introduce Industry Interactions in the New Year, but believe you me, no one wants Crane Loading Sim 2024 hahah
Q&A Question: You talked about having "scenarios" for gameplay, which sounds like "do these specific things on this map, game over". Maybe I'm misunderstanding that. Will there also be an unstructured "here's a map with some industries, and a little money, build whatever you enjoy and can manage within the game's economic system" mode.
Q&A question: How will repairs work, will you have to replace components yourself or will they magically be fixed like in Derail Valley?
I'll tell you, wings is right that the Song and line " oh can you here the mournful crying that soaring through the summer trees, the haunted wailing of a steam train, it takes me back and sets my spirit free" is powerful and sets the tone of the game. It has a sting emotionally that makes me tear up to this day and the feeling of both the atmosphere and the sound track are what keeps folks like me and yall coming back, this being a great example of what to emulate In your game.
I was wondering. Is there going to be a sandbox mode where you can just free for all build your railroad
We'll be talking more about Game Modes and settings to customize your experience in the New Year, but I can confirm that we are offering a Sandbox style experience from the get go :)
This is something that probably not too much thought was put into at this stage as this is more of a fine detail oriented question, but are you guys planning on animating things in the cab? Most if not all of the locomotives in the game have Johnson bars, and from what I've seen in videos they tend to jostle around in place as the engine works. This goes for a few other things in the cab as well. One of the most interesting parts of Cab rides on the D&S engines is how things shake around a good bit as the engine works. I don't know if anything like that was discussed at all yet, but it would be another detail to make it feel more like the cab of a steam engine.
Someone's probably already asked this, but how will maintenance work, and will there be track maintenance/wear/damage? And going off that, will there be any scenario or anything where the player starts with an old, abandoned ROW, and have to slowly repair it, and expand the line? I think that would be very fun to do.
This is a pretty brilliant scenario. In that it could allow a player to start with a previously graded/surveyed route, while still doing some track laying, upgrading etc.... It would make for a pretty great "demo" or "tutorial" I would think. Just think: reopening the Alpine Tunnel, or the Colorado Northwestern and getting to expand beyond Sunset and repairing the flood damage, etc...
Q for next Q&A I've touched on this per PM some months ago, but it got lost in a different topic. Over here it was (inofficially) common practice to apply a tiny little bit of independent brake to prevent slipping under subpar track conditions. Not constantly, of course, only while accelerating strongly. This cleaned and roughened the wheel/tire surface, resulting in significantly better traction. Will this mechanic be modelled in CoS' physics? /Quork aka Skogsfred
Very happy to see where this project is headed, well done indeed. A touch on polling since it was mentioned, will pulling cars with cable be implemented as well? Many a picture depict a cable with loops or chokers in addition to a polling pole. Would be interesting to see if and how cable snapping would be implemented.
Will there be a compendium for the locomotives? I think it would be cool to have and help teach people, myself included, facts about the locomotives and which railroads would have had them. It would make basing your locomotives off a real life example, for me I would love to have the same model as the steam engines at White Pass and Yukon here in Alaska.
It would be hard to stop our Research Team from making this even if we wanted to lol! That said, we plan on offering historical information on the prototypes we offer to help educate our Players on these incredible machines and their stories.
Will the era and location of maps be customizable or linear, I think both could make sense but as someone who lived in 2 places likely in the game, the NNGC Demo map was such a treat to see as someone who lived in the Central Valley of CA for the first 14 years of my life, it would be cool to see many different eras of the same place.
I'm very hopeful that you guys can accomplish all your setting out for, but don't forget to take some time for yourselves as well. Don't push so hard you get burnt out and stop. We all are excited for it, but don't want it to cost your well being. Thanks for all you guys have already done!
I’d rather wait until 2026 for a full game than next year get something half baked. This game has so much heart from the team and it would be a shame to see them have to release it early to meet some peoples standards. This is a game I can’t wait for but I will happily wait for it to be the best game they can make it.
I'm at a loss I am a Patreon member I left a Question in the October comment post thinking I would get a answer to it but did not. Am I posting Questions in the wrong place?
Hello! I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to properly address your questions! Let me take a look and see what we can talk about.
I loved the retrospective on RRT3. I loved that game growing up and it was a huge factor that drove me into pursuing preservation. So I know that you mentioned you would tell North American narrow gauge stories, would that also include stories for Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American narrow gauge? The United States, for better or worse, played a large part in the introduction of railroads into these countries and influenced rolling stock and operating practices. It would cool to see these stories represented in the format you are developing for a new audience.
I loved the game growing up as well! It was a great influence on the genre and is useful to this day to think back on, and make clear choices where we want to differ. The Scenarios that are talked about in the video are built to let us convey some story telling while giving players the ability to go after medium-term objectives, and each scenario will be flavored to fit the different industries across maps and levels of technology that the player's company has access to. These things will limit the scope back to our maps which all reside in the U.S., but we feel this will keep our scope manageable and allow us to give time to the Scenarios we craft.
Hey guys are we going to be able to customize the bells 🔔 as well because there’s examples of where the bells are just as unique as the whistles
Yes we're working on getting good samples of other bells, and as our library of bells grows like our library of whistles continues to, we'll be adding them in :)
Uhm... been waiting for a month for another dev vlog. And you deliver a railroad tycoon video.
Thematically it makes sense for us to look back at RT3 and talk about how CoS is different. We talk about our goals to use Scenarios and Contracts to guide commodity traffic across our maps, and how these co-exist with the ability for players to run their own companies as freely as they desire, moving commodities between industries as they see fit, while making money and earning experience. Ultimately this video was more tell than show, and we recognize that. We always want to show more than we tell, and we're planning on showing more very soon to help balance this out.
yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy 3 Q&As and nothing on my question on AI help or anything related to the topic
I'm sorry we haven't been able to cover this yet Stephen! We're working on defining how we want the cab to operate seamlessly when you're working alone or have friends helping you out on each Train. Meaning we know what we want it to do, and now we need to make it, so that we can show not just tell. I know this video was all tell, and we recognize this as one of our weaker posts. But we continue to work hard as a Team to make this thing and we'll be *showing* more shortly :)
Will there be signals? Either player operable from stations and towers, or automatic? I'm sure it would be a challenge to figure our, but pulling levers from interlocking towers is something missing from pretty much every train game. Hearing you all talk about the project with such passion really gives me hope that this will be one of the greatest Sims made to date.
Fun hearing about how y'all plan to do gameplay! excited for the future!
Every dev log I get more excited I can feel the love and passion going into the game, this game will probably revolutionize the train simulator genre
You bet I want 300 cars and locomotives. When I play RT3 as I kid I tried to have at least 1 of every locomotive on my railroad, even if that meant having a sad 1800s locomotive running next to modern desels lol.
Personally I plan on taking locos that no longer quite thematically-fit the road I'm modeling, and giving them a place of honor somewhere in the map to make way for the larger power lol. But it is definitely a fun idea to consider a late 1900's Diesel and a late 1800's Steam loco working together till the end :)
I really hope to build a super long railroad across the Blue Ridge in this game! A Super-Tweetsie with Mikados, perhaps?
Can't wait to deal with the snow drifts at high altitude, different from the flatlands. And how some lines of the railroad will have to be closed for the winter months, kind of like Alpine tunnel. Really like the idea of how you can unbolt unwanted equipment and the use of headlight ornaments from antlers, lanterns, flags and markers sounds awesome too.
It is just about Snowy Season isn't it!? Haha, keep an eye out here, we love showing things off when thematically appropriate ;)
Should have just been made into a YouTube video for free. Waste of 5 bucks this month. More interested in COS then an old game that I never played. It would be Prefect if you did podcasts about old railroad games.
Agreed, im kind of dissapointed.
My personal thoughts: There is nothing concrete yet. 49 minutes of mostly filler. The selected questions offered little of substance, gameplay-wise, and no concrete answers on most of them. A lot of "waits" and "more to comes" and "wants", and I don't like the sound of that all, early days or not. Those "waits" could be forever, for all we know. Gives me No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk or KSP2 prerelease vibes, and I don't like that at all. I also don't like the fact that the game seems to be split into 3: a set of tycoon scenarios; realistic, gritty sim; and fun, casual digital model trains. I know you guys want to cater to all 3 playstyles, but I'm mainly concerned about you guys spreading yourselves thin, leading to none of them being the best they can be. Master of none and all that. Please pick one, and make it as best as you can make it. My questions: - What will be the "default" for starting a new save? i.e. launching the game, with no setting changes, and clicking "new game". What will that be like? - Assuming the scenarios will be the "story mode", what measures will you be taking to make sure it's completable for everyone? - Will the multiplayer allow multiple competing companies on the map? - How many players in one multiplayer? How about dedicated servers?
I am not sure if I see the game being split into three outright distinct games scenarios. More so that there are three flavors of game that need to be addressed in the title, which can be adjusted via difficulty options or map design. Look at something like classic Roller Coaster Tycoon (another game Wings mentioned while discussing stuff) you can indeed play sandbox mode in that, or play a scenario. The scenarios have different difficulties, and some have prebuilt parks and some are nearly blank plots of land. The difficulty can be fine tuned by what items are available to the player and the geometry of the map itself. Where-as Planet Coaster for all of its strengths, feels almost to sandbox-y, that rather than letting players enjoy the management and the "game" it just wants you to detail little fiddly bits of scenery instead and create something that looks nice on a Twitch stream. Railroads Online especially with its new scenery and building props, is falling for the Planet Coaster trap of offering sandbox pieces that look pretty on Twitch streams but actually are not fun to play with. CoS has already said they want Roller Coaster Tycoon over Planet Coaster, Railroad Tycoon 3 over Railroads Online, etc. as their guiding direction and that is is a very clear pointer in my opinion as to the type of game they want to develop. The classic Halo games are another great example of how map and environmental design coupled with some difficulty sliders can change the gameplay up significantly without it being a separate game. Even the same maps can play differently as a good Forge maker knows by choosing what weapons to include or omit from the map, and it is why Halo Reach and Halo 4's weapon load-outs were so controversial since they broke a key aspect of environmental design. Or just think of the differences in Minecraft in Creative vs. Survival vs. Hardcore. All Minecraft gameplay modes are the same game but with some choice changes are very different from another. There are ways to deliver many flavors to Century of Steam without having to create three separate games under one banner like you fear.
39:30 That "short answer: no, long answer noooo" can also be your default response to when people ask if you'll put British narrow gauge in the game as well. 🤔
Absolutely love everything im hearing, this is really starting to sound like the game ive been craving for years. Hope you manage to do it justice.
7:40 the California Western mascot is "Mr. Skunk", trust me I'd know. 🤣
Thanks for the new devlog. However I am somewhat disappointed to have advertisement for another game as the core of the message instead of actual footage from your game. Keep up the good work, I am looking forward to your game.
Thank you for being here! We understand that it is so much better to show and not just tell. We wanted to spend some time talking about the design choices for our gameplay loop and it's hard to show that when it's not done being built. We're continuing to work every day on this, getting us closer to showing off more about our gameplay and rollingstock as they're ready :)
Couple of questions: 1. I know the locos are getting all the customization ever, but what about the player? Will there be just one model, or a selection of preset models, or the extra extra spicy option of attribute sliders everywhere? 2. How will track laying be handled? Will it be from the players POV like in the game that shall not be named, or from a birds eye/map view like in a city builder or transport fever? Or will it be something that is a bit more prototypical where you need to survey the land,set a route plan then have a MOW train come by and build the railroad? 3. Are there any fun narrow gauge/railroadims you plan to include, for example, will building track over derailed rolling stock and locomotives reduce the cost of fill? Can you bully the industries you "serve" into submission(e.g. you buy an order of rail from a steel mill but don't like the price so you pull up the tracks and stop serving them until they decide to give you a price you agree with.}, or do you have other fun little features you want to share with us that are along those lines? Edit-Side Note: I assume the "sticking with 3 foot narrow gauge" means no New England 2 foot gauge which means my home narrow gauge railroad the Billerica and Bedford won't be in the game. Shame, I think it could make a good memey hell scenario considering its short history. IRL the railroad went belly up in under a year and the guy who started it went up to Maine to create and inspire the 2 foot lines up there.
I know I live under a rock but what happened with RRO? All of a sudden I've noticed people not wanting to talk about why it's suddenly not something to talk about.
Can we all take a moment of silence to appreciate that whistle at the end of the video?
Will custom map creation be a thing?I’d love to take track plans, Sanborn maps and photographs and recreate part of a real line. Would this be possible? Will any maps published with the game be 1:1 “true to life”?
Custom maps are not planned at this time. 1:1 maps will also not be included, as they don't fit the goals for gameplay.
RRT3 it was a classic. Happy Anniversary. I actually think there is something new about “Century of Steam” and not about old things from the Stone Age.
one of my favorite scenarios in RRT3, the Central Pacific. Did take me two tries the first time. Cant remember which but there was a version of this map that had a slope that ran most of the way up the face of the Sierra Nevadas.