Transport Tycoon Deluxe
The original Transport Tycoon had been
distributed in Europe only.
1995 it was re-released in Europe and the USA as Transport Tycoon
Deluxe with some significant changes:
- There are four
climates
with different industries and
vehicles:
- The moderate climate is pretty much the same as the original
Transport Tycoon, but landscapes are a bit more, detailed, instead
of everything being covered grass, there are fields, too.
- The sub-arctic climate is a North American setting. There are
some smaller changes to the industries: Steel has been removed,
factories replaced by food processing plants, which produce food
out of grain and livestock. Towns require a supply of food to grow.
Sawmills have been replaced by paper mills, which produce paper,
that is converted to goods in printing works. Additionally, there
are banks that require gold.
- The sub-tropic climate is a South American setting. There are
rainforests and deserts. Rain forests are expensive to clear, but
you can fund a lumber mill (expensive too) that will do it for you
and produce wood. Additionally to food there is water, which towns
require to grow (in the desert, at least). Food is produced out of
maize from farms and fruit from fruit plantations. Factories are
back, they require wood, rubber from rubber plantations, and copper
ore. Banks require diamonds instead of gold. The changes in sub-tropic
are greater and it is probably the most interesting climate to play.
- Toyland is a completely unrealistic setting where the industries
have been replaced with things like Cola wells and toffee quarries.
There is a similar setting in Lord Monarch,
and I wonder whether it was added with an eye on the Japanese market.
- The game starts in 1950 instead of in 1930, and has more futuristic
elements later. Monorails are eventually replaced by maglev.
- There is general a greater variety of buildings and vehicles,
as you'd expect from a sequel.
- One-way signals greatly improve the handling of the railroad
network.
- A stock market that allows you to take over companies.
- At the request of Microprose's lawyers, the real-life vehicle
names were replaced by made-up ones. Chris Sawyer didn't like this
very much and gave players the ability to rename the vehicles.
- The world editor, sold seperately for the original Transport
Tycoon, was included for deluxe right away.
Transport Tycoon deluxe has a feature I have rarely seen elsewhere:
With Ctrl-G you can take a "giant screenshot" that covers
the whole map. Naturally, this will freeze the game for some
seconds. In A-Train you can do that too.
Unofficial Add-Ons
The TTDPatch adds an
overwhelming amount of features, all of which can be enabled or
disabeled seperately (this is just a random selection, there are
many more):
- New vehicles and graphics, with the ability to add your own.
- The maximum number of vehicles has been greatly increased.
- You can form longer trains, and multi-headed trains.
- A new handling of curves and slopes. You can set trains to more
realistic physics (which includes that trains may be to heavy for a
given engine), or set them to not be affected by them at all.
- Larger railroad stations are possible, and you can enlarge them
instead of merely replacing them.
- Pre-signals to further improve railroad handling. Some players
however had difficulties figuring them out.
- You can bribe the city council.
- You can set vehicles to auto-renewal, a very useful
feature.
- Improved cargo handling with selective stations and feeder
services.
- You can build tracks on slopes the way the computer always
could build houses.
- Subsidiaries: If you own 75% of the stock of a company, you
can manage it.
- You can start new games as early as 1921.
There are however limits to what can be done by way of patch. This
is where OpenTTD comes in. Instead of a
patch, this is a complete remake in C++.
Links
Links for graphic sets and other add-ons have been moved to the
OpenTTD page.
Last modified 2008-08-21
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