Everlasting Trains

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It's now been 12 years since it was unleashed on the world, and it's still popular enough that there are still a handful of internet places you can go and get your computer-railroading urges satisfied. I'm talking about the best of the railroading games, Railroad Tycoon II.

Not only do I continue to make updates to my own strategy guide now and then, but there are others who keep the flame alive in their own special way.

You may not think 12 years is an especially long time, but computers age even more rapidly than dogs, and computer games age more rapidly still. In computer game years, Railroad Tycoon II is nearing 150 and still kicking, which is quite remarkable when you consider the incredibly high infant mortality rate; few computer games are on the shelves longer than two or three months, and even fewer survive their first calendar year, but Railroad Tycoon 2 is still selling just fine, despite being superceded at least twice. Off the top of my head, the only other game I can think of which has equivalent staying power is Diablo 2, which I'll talk about some other time.

Allow me to introduce you to some of the resources still at your disposal:

Hawk and Badger Railroad: Hawk has a considerable archive of maps and scenarios (which are pretty much synomymous with RT2), plus he has guides! How to play, how to make maps, how to create scenario events, and even a massive RT2 strategy guide, donated by yours truly. Hawk also has stuff for other railroading games.

The Terminal: This is a discussion forum, run by Gwizz, discussing strategies and tips to be a better player. Some of the tips in my strategy guide were gleaned from here. He also has a section about map help. AND, he's also got a butt-ton of maps!! This includes some map fixes.


And, of course, there is as ever my strategy guide, filled with information you won't find in anyone else's. I've got a few other tidbits I use, such as a spreadsheet and a couple scenarios I've tinkered with off and on but haven't released to the general public yet. Maybe some day when I can sit down and polish them up so they look pretty?

While my strategy guide was temporarily down earlier this month, I received a few messages from people trying to reach it, one of which came from a guy who has his own guide on how to make maps! Where was he when I was building my Alaska map from scratch? Well, I took a look at his guide today and made a few suggestions on how to improve it, and hopefully he'll come back with a bang-up document that'll really wow you. When he does, I'll link it up here.

So there's plenty of stuff out there for your Railroad Tycoon addiction.

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Other articles which may interest or entertain you:
Railroad Tycoon 2 Untold Strategies
Games I Play - Civilization 4
Good Thing these People aren't in Charge of our Economy

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Railroad Tycoon 2 Untold Strategies

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There are a lot of strategy guides for Railroad Tycoon II out there. For those of you who still play Pop Top’s “Railroad Tycoon 2” game, and want to know how to be a better player, and don’t want to read rehashes the same old strategies repeated endlessly in everyone else's guides, I created my own huge personal strategy guide for Railroad Tycoon II and jam-packed it with tons of gamer-goodness!

I originally wrote it not long after getting out of the Navy, in 2001, and have added to it and updated it several times over the years because I still play it. As a result, it is probably the biggest, bestest game guide for Railroad Tycoon 2 anyone’s ever made. On top of giving you the best strategies for whipping up on Railroad Tycoon 2's butt, I've also cleared up a lot of misconceptions about the game, and even offer a few suggestions on how to perfect the game, just in case someone were to decide to try to turn the best railroading game ever made into an even better one. (That’s right, I consider RT3 and Sid’s Railroads to be steps backward.)

Want to build track efficiently? Want to operate your railroad efficiently? Want to break the other players and keep your railroading dream financed all the way to the Gold Medal? This is the guide for you!

And how much will this cost you? A lot less than you'd pay anywhere else. First, go to our More in Sanity Facebook Page and hit the LIKE button. You can read some of the articles the More in Sanity team has linked up for you if you want. Second, Click here to read the best strategy guide ever made for Railroad Tycoon II, or any other topic. Third, leave a comment below to let me know you liked it. And fourth, bookmark http://rt2p.mopjockey.com/ and check back now and then for updates. The best strategy guide does still receive improvements now and then, so kep up with them.

And if you'd be so kind, please ask your friends to LIKE the More in Sanity Facebook Page too. And now that I have Twitter, you can Follow me. And don't forget to visit the Hawk and Badger Railroad for scenarios. Thanks a bunch!

If you don't have Railroad Tycoon 2 yet, I can help you out with that, and it's dirt cheap. The Platinum Edition is the most up-to-date version released, and has has everything you could ever want. I've also linked up a few other such games, including the Eagle Games boardgame, plus a couple other games for comparison if you really want to see why I prefer RT2.

Want to share this great guide with someone? Here's the link: http://rt2p.mopjockey.com/
















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My high-scores are Better than Yours

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I used to play a lot of games; not so much any more, but I've still got a few scores I brag about. A few years back, Text Twist was all the rage, and I did pretty good at it, as you can tell by reading this site. Me and the written word seem to get along pretty well. There was this penguin-batting game I got a great score on too. I've got a few other games you'll find interesting and want to play, so I'll share with you some information and whet your appetite and we'll see how well you can do at them. Read on!


First up is Hearts, which is part of Vista and now Windows 7. As you can see, I got a perfect score. The only way it could've been more perfect is if I had gotten all three computer opponents to exceed 100 on that last hand (probably by shooting the moon again).

TEXT TWIST - (Link)
Next we have Text Twist. The game has two modes: Puzzle Mode, which is untimed, and Action mode, which is timed. Puzzle Mode is good for getting used to the word list without the pressure of a clock, but there's really not a whole lot of skill involved. I got to a million points pretty easily, and gave up because 1,000,000 points was my goal.


The rest of the time, I stuck with having to beat the timer, and it can be pretty tough when they come up with words you've never heard of before. My top score slowly rose over the course of a few months and on a couple different machines.

Text Twist gives you bonus points if you get all the words, and I challenged myself to get them all as fast as possible. Here are a couple of my better times, but these aren't records; I lost those images.

To the left is a pretty fast solution, but there aren't a whole lot of words. To the right is a fast solution with a considerably larger number of words, making it much more difficult. If I remember correctly, 6-letter words give you 120 seconds and 7-letter words give you 150 seconds, so these are fantastic times.

PENGUIN BATTING - (Link)
This is a cute little game that involves a Yeti smacking a penguin with an icicle to see how far he can fly, because apparently, penguins dream of flying and this is the only way they can do it.

There are two versions of the game, one with normal scores and one with amplified scores, and these are my personal records at each. I happen to know it's possible to get over 600 on the amplified-scoring one, but I couldn't do it.

On each page I linked to is a link that takes you to the other version of the game, so you can try your hand at both of them. They require slightly different reaction times, so try them both. Just be careful you don't waste an entire afternoon!


FRACAS - (Link)

Fracas is a cool little game reminiscent of Lords of Conquest (which I found here!) and Risk, but way cooler and faster to play. The object is to grow your country and then wipe out everyone else's capital while protecting your own from conquest. The AI isn't especially difficult for me to beat (though I do get surprised now and then) so I set myself some extra goals.

First, I have to be the one to eliminate all the other players. Second, there has to be at least one territory from each player still on the board somewhere. I achieve this about every 5 games or so, and here are a couple screen shots to prove it.

Smozzie was nice enough to create a map editor too, be sure you get that and some people's custom maps for a few interesting ways to play, and of course, be sure you adjust the options once in a while; it feels like you've got like about 20 different games you can play just by adjusting the options.


RAILS - (Link)
The last game I'm going to mention for now is one called Rails, and it's made by Pluto Scarab. It's based on Mayfair Games' Empire Builder, which is one of those cool crayon games. You run a railroad company and build track around the map and deliver goods all over. It's pretty awesome! When MS got rid of the MSN groups, the support forum disappeared. I created a place for it in my own forum, and also created a location to hold user-made maps and such. Click here to go to the forum post about Rails, and get access to the fan-made maps, including 2 maps I made and 3 others I tweaked. (Yes, that's right, they've got a map editor too!)

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My Travels - Florida

"I've been everywhere, man, I've been everywhere!" - Johnny Cash

Not literally - at least, not yet - but as of this writing, I've been to 42 US states, 2 US territories, 11 countries, 4 continents, 2 oceans, and 7 seas. I'm going to take you to some of the places I've been, in no particular order. Sometimes this will be a place I just was, and sometimes it's a place I haven't been to in a while.

Next up: Florida. (Big surprise, huh?)

“Florida knows how to handle hurricanes because it’s filled with Floridians.” - Governor Jeb Bush, 2004, after 5 hurricanes hit the state in rapid succession.

Florida. It sounds beautiful without you even having been there or known what it was named for, doesn’t it? But you know Florida is jam-packed with things to see and do, and that’s why I love it so much. I've been to almost every part of the state without the accompaniment of my truck.

When we were little, my dad took us down there to see my grandparents every year, and we usually went to one or two theme parks and deep-sea fishing and other stuff. Our total round trip was typically over 3000 miles over the course of 2 weeks. It was a lot of fun, the kind he now gets to share with his grandkids and other friends and family who come see him now and then.

It wasn’t until I moved to Florida in 2004 that I got to experience a hurricane, and then I got to experience THREE hurricanes in that first month, and even saw one come back for a second try. I've since been in a couple more, including the eye of a very slow-moving one; it was like a normal day inside!

I like Florida so much, I made scenarios in two different railroad games that feature the state. One is for a little game called “Rails”, based on the “Empire Builder” boardgame (I have a post in the forum dedicated to the game too), and the other was for Railroad Tycoon 2 Platinum, but I haven’t released it to the general public yet (I will eventually).

Everglades National Park: (Official link, Wiki, Other Site of Interest)

“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them... ” - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Miss Marjorie, the world-renowned Grand Dame of the Everglades, is totally right. Nowhere else in the world is there anything like the Everglades. Nowhere else in the world do salt-water and fresh-water crocodiles mingle. Nowhere else is there a river a hundred miles wide, a hundred miles long, and only a couple inches deep. It’s unique, and it’s disappearing. Development consumed a considerable amount of the Everglades, but in 1947 the US government set aside most of what remained as a protected preserve. There’s still a considerable amount of it to see, and it’s not at all like a Louisiana swamp.

I went down there in August of 2006 with my dad as sort of a birthday present for him. There are plenty of places you can ride an airboat through the slough. A slough is a wide, shallow river which is chock full of reeds and weeds and other grasses and a few open spots of water. Our ride included a stop to a small island in the middle of the slough where Indians had made a hideout long ago. There was a guy was playing with a gator and a small, abandoned village.

We also drove along one of the alleys and encountered three gators sunning themselves on the road. It’s funny; as a truck driver, I see a lot of thrown treads on the road, and these are referred to as gators, so when we saw the first one, our minds dismissed it as nothing, until it ran off and jumped back into the swamp. The same thing happened to the second one; we just didn’t see it. But the third time, we saw it, and tried to creep up on it, but it must’ve been nervous, because it ran off well before we got close enough for a good picture.

Along the southwest edge you have a lot of little islands, and we arrived in time to take a boat tour of the coastal area. We got to see some dolphins — almost got close enough to touch them! — and learn a little bit about the ecology of that area and how it’s different from the rest of the ‘glades.

We spent the whole day there, taking a couple tours, the airboat ride, and the regular boat ride, and there were a few things we didn’t get to do, but it was interesting, peaceful, and we had a good day. Dad even got to buy his Federal Park Pass, which entitles him to enter any federal park for free! (Next stop: Yellowstone!)

  

 The Florida Keys and Key West: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

“Helping others is like helping yourself.” - Henry Flagler

In 1912, a year before his death, Henry Flagler, Florida’s greatest railroad tycoon and already plenty rich from his Standard Oil days, completed the Overseas Railroad, which linked Key West, a city of 30,000, to the mainland by rail. Having already built a rail line all the way along the Atlantic coast, from Jacksonville to Miami, complete with some of the grandest hotels ever built, this linked Key West to the rest of the nation! Unfortunately, in 1935 a hurricane destroyed some of the bridges. Later, the US bought the remaining bridges and constructed what is now US1 using much of what Flagler had built. You can still see a few of the old rail bridges where they weren’t reused.

The trip to Key West is interesting. You’re island-hopping without an airplane or Douglas MacArthur, and you’re not going to meet the Imperial Japanese Navy anywhere along the way either. Many of the keys have some signs of civilization, or some parks you can park in. You can camp out about 30-50 miles east of Key West, or you can continue on and pay for an expensive motel room; your choice. If I recall correctly, you can camp out at Bahia Honda, which is about 30 miles from Key West.

In the city of Islamorada, on the north end of Upper Matecumbe Key, there is a seafood buffet restaurant called the Whale Harbor. I’ve been to a few such restaurants, including the good ones in Norfolk, Virginia, that I enjoyed visiting while stationed there, and this one was at least as good; it ought to be, considering where it is!

Key West itself is a quiet little historical tourist town, reminiscent of some quieter place, like Fowler, Indiana, but with coastline and everything that comes along with that. There is a LOT to see and do there; you could spend a whole week, I’m sure. We only spent 3 days.

There are a lot of interesting things about Key West. It was one of the richest cities in the whole country, thanks to the coral reef; the only living one in the whole continental United States. No, not because of tourism, but because ships ran aground on it frequently, and the wreckers would go out and rescue people and salvage their cargo for themselves. The southern-most point of the continental United States is also on the Key, there are glass-bottom boat tours of the coral reef, there’s a lighthouse you can go to the top of, and Hemingway used to live on the island. And that’s just the stuff I got to see in the one day I spent there!

Ft. Lauderdale: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

My first visit here was in 1998 as part of the Air and Sea Show. Bataan sailed down to participate. During the show, we sat off the coast and watched the airplanes, and later we pulled in and gave tours of the ship. I would’ve expected we’d have helicopter or Harrier operations, but we didn’t. They won’t let people be on the flight deck during air operations, but it’s neat to see if you can. Those of us not on tour duty were allowed to go ashore and see the town. It’s not too much different from most of the other coastal Spring Break Vacation spots, like Daytona Beach and Panama City; there’s a strip with a ton of shops, and then there’s the rest of the city, which I didn’t get to see.

The next year, we came back and did it again! That time, several members of my family were able to come down and experience it with me, including going out into the ocean on our boat! An experience few civilians will ever forget.

Unfortunately, because it’s been so long since I’ve been there, I don’t remember a whole lot about the place. We went to a couple tourist spots, we went to the beach, and we just relaxed.

Kennedy Space Center (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest, Other Site of Interest)

“Be an optimist — at least, until they start moving animals in pairs to Cape Canaveral.” - Unknown

I’ve been a space-junkie pretty much all my life. There is no planetarium I won’t go to if I can, nor any space center. I know all the names of all the shuttles and I used to know all the important statistics about them. I used to know several of the astronauts’ names, I have met the parents of one of them, and I would probably faint if I ever met Buzz Aldrin. I used to draw the space shuttle often, and had several space shuttle toys and models. I've even got a whole series of articles on this site devoted to space. So going to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral is a big thrill for me every time I go.

They built it in a swamp in order to create a national nature preserve around the area, and they have some rare and endangered birds that live there.

You can get tours of the place, even to the launch pads (as long as there’s nothing on the pad) and they have several pads there. On their 50-some pads, they launch “normal” rockets, plus they also launch the Space Shuttles from two of the pads there. A few years back, they built a landing runway to save on costs associated with transporting the shuttle back from Edwards Air Force Base. The crawlers they use to move the shuttles from the Assembly Building to the launch pads are enormous!

If you go on a day when there’s a launch, you’ll be in for a crowd, but you’ll also be in for a treat. A rocket launch, and especially a shuttle launch, is a sight to see! There are only a few more shuttle launches scheduled, and then the program is going to be decommissioned while they build the next generation of launch vehicles, so if you want to see one, you’d better plan for it right now and get down there.

There are several tours you can take while you’re there, and it feels only a little like an amusement park. The tour that I’ve been on takes you to a close observation post about a mile or so from the launch pads, and one time, we got to get there about half an hour after the crawler had passed by (they delayed the tours until it got past), and it was carrying a space shuttle! So I’ve gotten pretty close to the Atlantis, within about half a mile of it, and watched over the next hour or so as they took it up to the pad and started securing it to the launch tower.

Orlando area: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

It wouldn’t be hard to spend a whole month in the vicinity of Orlando and not do the same thing twice — except resting after several days of activity. There are a ton of major and minor amusement parks, the dinner-show has really taken off and there are about a dozen different ones here, and there are plenty of trinket shops too!

 

A few of the major theme parks:

Disney World-

             Magic Kingdom

             Epcot Center

             Animal Kingdom

             Hollywood Studios

             Typhoon Lagoon

             Blizzard Beach

Universal Studios-

             Universal Studios

             Islands of Adventure

             Wet ‘n’ Wild

Sea World

Busch Gardens

A few of the Dinner Shows (I haven’t been to them all yet, and they come and go)-

             Arabian Nights

             Pirate Dinner Adventure

             Medieval Times

             Wonder Works Magic

             Sleuths Mystery

             Al Capone’s

             Polynesian Luau

             Outta Control

My first experience with a Dinner Theater was in Spain, of all places. We pulled into Tarragona, which isn’t very far from Barcelona, and one of the tours was a trip to Madrid to go to a Medieval Nights show. Very interesting! There were people from all over the world there, not just us, and they were kind enough to do most of the show in English for us, since we made up the majority of the audience. Then we got to experience some Spanish dancing afterward, which is a show all in itself. Since then, I’ve been to a few others, but they don’t seem to have the after-show like they did in Madrid. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting experience!

Even if you don’t enjoy expensive theme parks, there’s still plenty of things to see and do in Orlando. There’s golf, there’s several sports teams, there’s a butt-ton of shopping, and there’s a Mongolian barbeque! There’s plenty of seafood and other good restaurants too. There’s also plenty of condos and hotels in the area.

I could go on and on about Florida, but I think I've told you quite enough to get your interest. I may in the future devote one of these articles to a particular place; the Everglades practically begs for it! So until next time, enjoy your summer!