Choo-Choo!
Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion from Atari puts a heavy transportation spin on the
traditional Sim-City game mold.
Start with the three tutorials that take you through the basics of building
your transportation empire. In an interesting twist, you can first watch the
tutorial run itself, and then take control at any time. It is a good idea to let
the tutorial run its course, and then give it a try yourself.
The tutorials will help you through road building, land development, and
establishing your transportation routes. This last piece is a bit more complex
than it may first seem. Considerations go beyond simply buying a bus, and
include station placement and even road design (a windy road will slow your
buses down, and reduce the fares collected over the business day!).
Once you have a comfortable feel for the basic controls, dive right in and
play one of the 40 single-player scenarios, which vary in difficulty from
beginner to expert. The scenarios will challenge you to accomplish various
transportation goals. Some of the more basic tasks include setting up bus lines
or transport lines to get raw materials to your industries.
Following the Sim-City mold further, everything has its price, and watch out
for those news bulletins! Building of roads and rail lines has a cost, and
vehicles and ships require a capital investment. Don’t get yourself in trouble
by running out of finds before you develop sufficient revenue. Unless you are
under serious competitive pressure, try to finish off projects one at a time.
You need to have set up proper terminus points for your lines in order for them
to run effectively, and generate that much needed cash for you. Speaking of
competitive pressures, this is a market economy, and you don’t have a monopoly
on transportation. You will have other bus and rail barons hotly contesting you
for your hard earned revenue. Keep a tab on other companies in the status
display. News bulletins keep you posted on “world” events, as well as happenings
in industry and with your competitors. If something makes the news, it is
probably worth paying attention to. Watch the news to look for new revenue
generating opportunities, as well as warning signs to pay attention to an aspect
of your business that may be primed for a fall. Once you have mastered the one
player world, move on to real human competition in the two-player mode via a LAN
or the Internet.
Once you lay out the infrastructure for transportation, you need to get the
wheels of commerce rolling with vehicles. Choose your buses, trains, ships, and
planes carefully. Each comes with its own price tag, but you need to consider
the long-term ramifications of your purchases. Capacity, reliability, and
specialty are all important. You will need to be able to transport enough of
what you are trying to transport to meet demand, and your vehicles need to be in
service and not in the shop. Plus, having the world’s greatest bus lines are no
good when your city is lacking rail transportation for coal. Use the status
windows to check in on the upkeep, revenues, and routes of your vehicles, and
see if you can make small changes to rake in bigger bucks.
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