Simutrans

[Railwaymodeler]

This I have found to be somwhat similar to Transport Tycoon, but it's free! A little hard to learn, but there is a manual on the site. I'll let the official website, www.simutrans.de do some of the talking about the game:

Simutrans is a transport and economic simulation game. There are versions for Linux, BeOS and Windows available. Simutrans has not yet reached production state, but it is quite possible to build big transport networks between the industries and cities.

The player can create bus and rail connections and transport passengers, mail and goods in and between cities and industries. Even passenger ferries and oil tankers are included in the game. Goods are produced by industries from raw materials, sometimes over many steps of intermediate products. I.e. coal and iron ore are needed to produce steel in a steel mill. Oil may be transformed to plastics in a refinery. Plastics and steel are used to build cars by the car industry. Finally the cars are sold in the cities. Now they need gas to run, which also will be produced at the refinery.

All goods need to be transported. This is the players task. Transport the goods and let the industry live up. But be careful not to destroy your environments.

Simutrans is developed by me (Hansjörg Malthaner) in my free time as a non-commercial project. There are no warranties. You can get it free of charge from my download page. You may make as many copies as you like. You may distribute the copies for free, but you may not charge for them.

Download: http://curlysworldoffreeware.com/game_i ... ?gameid=51

Official website:
www.simutrans.de

Status: confirmed freeware

[Chroelle]

I just got notice from the new developer that it is totally ok for us to host this game, however they do recommend that we link to their page on the downloadspage, as the game is constantly updated at the moment...

The license said that we needed permission to host it, but it was otherwise freeware. I noticed that when reading through the full thing...

Played the game by the way, and it is quite a gem when it comes to this type of game considered that it is freeware...

[Railwaymodeler]

I just saw the download page. Says the minimum system requitred is a 350 MHz (Presumably then a K6 or Pentium II.)

I have Simutrans loaded on my Compaq Armada 7800 workhorse laptop. That machine has 160 MB of RAM, Win98, and a 266 P II CPU. Simutrans runs fine. Maybe a liiiiiitle laggish at times, but usually fine.

Also wanted to note that you need the unicows update from Microsoft to play this on Win98.

[Chroelle]

We also once more uploaded the latest version onto the gameinfopage. So once more we are up to date.

[Chroelle]

Because of some fixes done to our gameediting tool we cant update simutrans to the newest versions, but we will soon. Please visit the official site for the newest version.
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?PH ... pic=7294.0

[Railwaymodeler]

I've been playing version 112.0 today, and I must say that Simtrans has really become a fun game, similar in concept still to Transport Tycoon, but with its own flavor. For example, you don't pick up passengers and take them just to the next stop, they have their own ideas on where they want to go.

For new players, I highly recommend "Beginner" mode, which makes the pay for carrying freight and passenger slightly better, but also disables "Just in time" service. With Just in Time service enabled, you can only deliver a certain amout of cargo to an industry before its full and doesn't accept anymore.

For example, if I have JiT enabled, and am trying to deliver coal to a steel mill, that will work for a little while, but without iron ore, it will not process the coal, and the stockpiles will become full and the industry won't pay for any more coal deliveries. With JiT disabled, I can deliver coal as much as I like and the mill won't "fill up".