[jaggederest]

It's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine.

The modern equivalents (I'm thinking of Transport Fever 2) while they are fun games just lacks the ability to build and manipulate a real economy by doing things like e.g. putting an industry in a town and then transporting goods there to satisfy the industry, making both your train line and the industry wildly profitable.

[boring-human]

> I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine.

My feelings exactly. I still play it regularly for this reason alone. A really amazing game under the hood.

The Rhodes Unfinished scenario is probably my favorite. On the highest-difficulty level, it starts out as a hard map, then becomes an insatiable resource grab. By the end you're building vanity suspension bridges over chasms and digging tunnels the width of Kilimanjaro.

[p0w3n3d]

I really admired Transport Tycoon which had those 3 additionals transport channels. Have you tried it? I love the shuttle buses which you can use to connect to an external (to the city) airport, railroad track that can go throughout the whole map, and the ships that transport mostly oil for fun and profit...

[nikitau]

There's also a whole, albeit niche, board game genera of so called 18xx game (eg. 1889 Shikoku) that deal with the economic aspects of 19th century railroads.

Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there in terms of complexity.

[nprateem]

Would love sth like this. Any modern games (not that boring edutainment one about supply chains) that let you play with the stock market as well as doing something fun like in Railroad Tycoon?

[unixhero]

Thanks for an insightful comment! I have two university degrees in Economics and have never heard of reactive diffusion field pricing engines until today.

[jaggederest]

There's an interesting arxiv paper here, I haven't read it in depth but shows some academic activity in the area at least

https://arxiv.org/html/2502.07071v2