Cha-ching! Somewhere deep in the modern human brain there is a strong fondness for this sound. I’d wager that you will find it closely connected to some words and ideas that really dilate the pupil: cash, coin, profit, purchasing power, winnings, earnings, boom, victory and sex? There is a thorough feeling of satisfaction in accumulating wealth, even if it only means that your computer must turn a floating point number into a double in order to keep track of it. Sure - it is intrinsically exciting to watch a number become large in the positive direction. It becomes even more captivating when this growth has something to do with your actions. But this excitement quickly wanes if you can succeed always or easily. Thus the most gripping joy comes from winning when you might have lost, by chance or by mistake. That kind of victory will keep you chewing your fingernails and playing this game way into the morning, even though you are surrounded by empty beer cans, decaying dishes, decomposing clothes, unpaid bills and little genuine income or tangible productivity.

I truly hope that Railroad Tycoon 3 enhances my bargaining skills and economic intuitions in the real world. But even in the absence of any such transfer this game is still incredibly worthwhile and fun. Normally, I am drawn to the glittery graphics and startling action of 3D battle games. There is very little content of that sort in RT3. Occasionally a train will breakdown or crash, but it isn’t really dramatic or interesting - the damn thing just ceases to haul its load. The real intensity occurs when the economy crashes, bringing your purchasing power close to the margin and causing sweat to coat your palms and forehead. You will learn to extract dark satisfaction from that risky moment when you decide to sell short your enemy’s stock just to force him to meet a margin call. There are all sorts of nasty manipulations you can make in order to keep yourself just above the waterline and to push your opponents down into the dungeons of their creditors. RT3 simulates a dynamic economy that will keep you gambling and taking risks until you win big, go bankrupt and starve, or restart the scenario in frustration.

As a fledgling tycoon you will be turned loose upon a virgin landscape with a couple of hundred thousand bucks to get started. Ultimately you will try to generate tens of millions of dollars in fortune from this initial gem. Pool your cash with investors and start a company. The choices you make in the first year are critical because you have little equity, credit, or stability. In these months you can easily go over the line into the red. It’s important to take a long survey of the landscape. It will change quite a bit each time you start a scenario and you really need to spend some time identifying the routes and industries that are going to get rich. If you make foolish investments you will go broke and experience crushing shame.

Take a look at all the important primary and secondary industries. Primary industries (ie. grain, iron, wool, uranium, etc.) try to get their resources to secondary industries (ie. distilleries, tool-and-die shops, textile mills, nuclear power plants, etc.), and finished products try to get to consumers. Any way that you can facilitate this process will earn you coin. The game has a comprehensive overview mode that lets you look over the landscape and mask for supply and demand on certain commodities and products. Here I’ve screened for iron, and you can see it making its way overland down to a steel mill in Newcastle :

Commodities can move about the landscape without rail. Commerce takes place with or without your help as the natural economy dictates. You want to take advantage of the natural flow of goods. You don’t need to connect every point in your profit scheme. Rivers are great conduits of supplies and goods. Buying a secondary industry on a river that is connected to primary industries will usually result in massive profits. For instance, this river network connects a bunch of towns that are full of consumers that need clothing, and nearby wool farms can use the river to move their wool about. Placing a textile mill in a town near this river will result in steady large gains, without railroads!

You can do this with multiple industries and sit back and watch ridiculous amounts of cash just flow in. Livestock/meat is a huge moneymaker; take advantage of human carnivorous instinct. Locate and buy a meat-packing plant that is situated close to cattle farms and a few cities, early in the game, and you will enjoy lucrative earnings throughout the game. The problem is that when a scenario starts it has usually been run (simulated) for several years. This means that your target meat-packer has been operating for a while with high profits, and the value of his company will be high.

This may be out of reach for a fledgling tycoon. Meat-packing plants start at $2.1 million, and if they are profitable for many years, can be closer to $8 million. An industry that is this rich is not worth buying because it will not be able to return its value in profits over the remaining years of the game. However, you can get rich by having foresight. If you see a sweet spot to for an industry then take out a loan on credit and build the industry at its base price. Even better, if an industry has been losing money for a few years it will be cheap. You can buy it and then connect it to primary resources and consumers. You will reap filthy huge profits out of this arrangement. This meat-packing plant is starting to enjoy its new connections:

The trick to success in this game is diversity in investment. Make sure your first investment has good returns. If this is the case, the bank will give you more credit and you will be able to make another purchase. Meanwhile, you should be buying up stocks in your own company. It pays to take risks early in the game. If you do things right, your company will continue to grow and your personal debt will be counterbalanced by the growing value of the stock you purchase. Play this too far, or have the economy take a dive, and you will be forced to sell your stock.

If you only have stock in your own company this becomes a vicious circle: selling your stock lowers its price, and hence your purchasing power goes down in tandem. You will end up selling off a pant-load of your own stock, which is your lifeblood, in order to cover your debt. This is a nightmare, and if it happens I usually restart the scenario and/or crack open another bottle of wine. Your enemies will take advantage of your misfortune and buy up the stock you sell, at bargain price. You will weep, spill wine down your undershirt, and slam your fist in pathetic frustration. This is the point where I would put a pistol in my mouth if real money were at stake. The solution: keep a diverse stock portfolio. Watch your opponents’ companies, and if they are persistently lucrative or even stable, then buy their stock. That way if your company dives, your debt will be balanced by the value of the stock you own in their company. Alas, you will be able to ride out the down-cycle in your company’s life.

By this point you will be wondering if you even need to build a railroad in RT3. It’s funny because if it weren’t for the requirements of each scenario (like connect A to B by XXXX year), you wouldn’t have to start a railway to be a tycoon. It does help though. The higher-order industries take combinations of primary resources to produce their output. The Auto Plant is a perfect example of this: it uses tires and steel to produce cars. Tire factories take rubber to make tires, and steel mills take coal and iron to make steel. Also, for an auto plant to make money you need to ship its cars to consumers or to some other demand. Without this final step the chain of consumption will be broken and the whole plan will fail. But if you scheme this properly and buy up the tire, steel, and auto plants before they become rich along your route, you can have all the profit they make from being connected by your track. This is an ideal scenario, and making it happen is really fun. There are also a few ‘sump’ industries that are extremely valuable. You can’t buy these, but connecting to them is often very profitable. The warehouse and port structures consume various commodities and produce a wide variety of other things. If you find a city with two ports it is super-lucrative to connect to, because it demands and produces diverse loads each year, in duplicate.

RT3 has great geographic import. Having played it for a while I have actually learned some basic facts about the world’s layout (ie. that Salt Lake City is situated by a large salt lake). Geographic realism also brings with it a good deal of homey nostalgia. Building Toronto up from a cheap little stop-over into a bustling center had personal interest for me. The game also contains a good deal of knowledge about industry and geographic function (ie. aluminum comes from coal and bauxite). And I’ve already detailed the basic economic information and interest contained in RT3. These topics are great for kids. My kids will play this game for homework; I shall breed tycoons.

The other really satisfying aspect of RT3 is that the map changes dramatically depending on your input. You can turn a tiny town into a metropolis by making it a hub for several supply chains. Diverse commodity attracts greedy humans that consume large quantities of just about everything. By the end of a game your connected cities are huge, and they have just about every commodity on hand in bulk. This round-about way of building cities may interest people that were once addicted to Simcity.

All of this must sound pretty rich coming from a cutthroat gamer like me. You probably smirk at the idea of Art Blogworthy, a man known to make 40 online kills per session, squinting at prices and quantities under a translucent plastic visor like some fleabag stockbroker. I hear you on that - it’s a bit troubling. Every few hours of play I have to dash out onto my balcony and burst half a clip of 7.76 FMJ into the adjacent buildings, just to keep sane. This also helps raise the price of ammunition in the area…shit - it’s happening again. This game is totally awesome and addictive. Now I don’t even notice the rotting dishes and decomposing clothing strewn all around me. Hell, I’ve grown to appreciate my microscopic companions. I’ll hock them in bulk to some desperate chump once my railroad reaches the Third World . Railroad Tycoon 3 is a wonderful game, and it will provide needed relief for hardcore combat gamers with jumpy nerves. Take an economic break, die slow and smell high, and force your computer to roll over another register to keep track of your stinking, filthy pile of swag.