Anyone who wants to talk about "1830 Railroads & RB" or UFO?

bakalov · July 24, 2003, 04:07

These are good strategy games too IMO and I didn't see anything about them on these forums ....

Main_Brain · July 24, 2003, 04:40

OH UFO Threads pop up quite regularry :=)
But more geared towards UFO: Apocalypse.

CapTVK · July 24, 2003, 15:55

1830? Heh, I know one of the original developers of 1830

Skanky Burns · July 24, 2003, 19:05

I know several cheats for UFO.

bakalov · July 25, 2003, 04:58

CapTVK, your friend have done a very good thing to implement this great game. I really enjoy the vast amount of possibilities generated by these simple rules.
This game must be popularized :-)

muxec · July 25, 2003, 05:05

UFO is great

One of the best strategy games. I dunno WTF railroads is.

CapTVK · July 26, 2003, 16:49

1830 was originally a railroad boardgame by Avalon Hill. A computer version was released in the early nineties by Simtex (of Master of Magic fame). They made the AI shine in this game. The goal was to earn as money much as possible by investing in and expanding railroad companies and also on the stockmarket. The stockmarket made this game very special because you could also become a robber baron by buying up stocks in other companies and wrest control from another player.

Standup · July 26, 2003, 18:30

Dug out my orginal board game version of 1829 (southern to be exact) recently. Much more emphasis on running trains and engineering than 1830 from what i remember.

CapTVK · July 27, 2003, 08:27

1830 is a very good railroad game I still play it on occasion. The computer version can be a bit daunting at the start but it's got an intuitive interface. It's actually gotten better with age at some points because it the AI can calculate its moves much faster on modern PC's.

It can be found at the "Site that may not be named".

muxec · July 27, 2003, 14:07

Quote:

Site that may not be named

Is it the site with copyrighted name?

bakalov · July 28, 2003, 10:11

Try http://www.the-underdogs.org/letter.php?id=Numbers. They claim for it to be abandonware. I am not sure but it probably is .... It is really small to download (4-5MB).

muxec · July 29, 2003, 06:31

Let's start speaking on UFO!

Do you belive that sectoids may be real allies of human?

Skanky Burns · July 29, 2003, 06:51

In Apocalypse they ended up partly allies. (Well, the half-human half-sectiod people were).

The snakes were my favourite enemy to go up against. They looked fearsome but they weren't too hard to kill, and as a bonus they stood out in combat environments.

Grumbold · July 29, 2003, 08:27

I hate all the train games where the track you can build is limited by the tile set. "I'm sorry sir you can't build your transcontinental railway straight across this open plain because at the moment only a right curve, crossroads and Y shape are available". If I remember correctly, this is one of them.

muxec · July 29, 2003, 08:58

1830: Also i did not enjoy playing this. Stock prices change in very strange way.

UFO: Sectoids were enslaved by Ethereals before, so they are not very aggressive but their culture and way of life was completely "wasted" by ethereals.

I hate Snakeman's crab's.

bakalov · July 29, 2003, 10:46

Grumbold, there is unlimited tiles option in the game that can easily solve your problem, and muxec - there is a stock prices table and if you right click on it you will learn the rules.

And for UFO - I have played ufo 1 only a little, I did not liked that bug when your people become too fast and the speed value overflows. I have played ufo 2 & 3 more ... In UFO2 the aquatoids were my most hatred enemy if you do not count the brains. There were some scallops that were quite nasty too :-) I'll have to try playing UFO2 on superhuman without saving ;-) Very masochistic but ....

Grumbold · July 29, 2003, 12:10

Cool, they managed an improvement in the translation from boardgame to computer game it seems

da_hal · July 29, 2003, 13:14

UFO= european title of Xcom, right? i loved xcom1.

it's too fast though for new computers, it's too hard to control.

it looks like it would be easier to make 2 separate threads.

Main_Brain · July 29, 2003, 14:02

UFO: The Worst enemy (at the beginning) was that Giant Crab(?)
It appeared at the first Terror Missions I think.
You know which layed its Eggs into Your soldiers which
A) Killed them
B) Spawned another one of those Beasts..

@1830: Never heard but I just say 1869 was better :P

Grumbold · July 29, 2003, 17:55

Won't Xcom work with moslo? I find it a godsend for slowing down all old games.

da_hal · July 30, 2003, 00:54

giant crab ruled man! *dusts off official strategy guide* Er, i mean chryssalids. :-)

In one magazine article, i remember reading that there was nothing else scarier at the time than a night mission or shadowed area and having a cryssalid jump out at you. I totally agree.

I would get moslo just for this game.

I have yet to find a squad TBS game nearly as good. i dunno why they reduced the terrain types in 2 and 3 (so i've heard) which is why i never got them. just when you start getting bored of rooting through another slum or campground, you can take a little break in a ship, desert, or base.

One trick i used to do all the time was shadow ufo's until either a) they landed, and i could get an intact ship/crew, or b) wait till they were over the ocean to shoot them down. it was too much of a pain in the butt to do an entire mission for a damaged small ship, but as long as you shoot everything down, it's ok.

DrSpike · July 30, 2003, 03:05

There are quite common x-com threads; one of these is also notable for giving Skanky his sig.

Skanky Burns · July 30, 2003, 03:40

Quote:

One trick i used to do all the time was shadow ufo's until either a) they landed, and i could get an intact ship/crew

That was one of the few ways to research the "pod" (my name for the tiniest ships). The only other ways I know are to capture an engineer, or to equip an inteceptor with the weakest cannons and shoot it down that way.
Of course, you would still destroy the craft 50% of the time.

Quote:

There are quite common x-com threads; one of these is also notable for giving Skanky his sig.

My sig is about Thief - unless you are talking about the Diss quote. In which case I am truely worried.

DrSpike · July 30, 2003, 03:55

Quote:

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
My sig is about Thief - unless you are talking about the Diss quote. In which case I am truely worried.

Yeah but wasn't it in that X-com thread where we were discussing cheats where I got you to admit that the only game you play fair was Thief? It wasn't a Thief thread IIRC.

bakalov · July 30, 2003, 06:47

If you like XCOM1 then you guys should try XCOM2 too - it uses the same engine and is almost the same, but with fewer bugs and there are some more complex missions (larger ufos, 2 stage terror missions, artifact sites). I don't remember the name of this hatred enemy that you described in XCOM1, but in XCOM2 it was "Tentaculat" and it looked like a large floating brain with some tentacles. I hated the artifact sites because there was a place with several of these ...

Skanky Burns · July 30, 2003, 07:02

Quote:

Originally posted by DrSpike
Yeah but wasn't it in that X-com thread where we were discussing cheats where I got you to admit that the only game you play fair was Thief? It wasn't a Thief thread IIRC.

Yeah, I was thinking that after I posted. Oh well.

Quote:

If you like XCOM1 then you guys should try XCOM2 too - it uses the same engine and is almost the same, but with fewer bugs and there are some more complex missions (larger ufos, 2 stage terror missions, artifact sites).

Are you kidding? It was a blatant rip-off!
Bugs were not only present in overwhelming numbers, but they were hugely crippling to gameplay! The tech-tree couldn't have been made less realistic if they rolled dice to determine research order.

For instance, you needed to research a certain creature before being able to research the submarine engines. Perhaps this could be somewhat justified. Regardless, that isn't the problem. Now, the creature that you needed to research only ever appears in the first level of 2-stage missions. Again, not too much of a problem so far. But due to a bug, ALL items in the first of 2-stage missions that you don't carry with you are deleted forever. Which includes aliens in the first stage that you have killed, and even those that you -with great difficulty- managed to knock unconcious. So regardless of what you do, you are stuck not being able to go further in the research tree without this single alien species. The only way around it (besides hacking save files) is to capture a medic in some other mission, and by some massive fluke, have this alien tell you about that certain species.

And that is just one bug.

DrSpike · July 30, 2003, 07:10

Yeah I think it pretty well known amongst X-Com'ers that TFTD sucked pretty hard.

Skanky Burns · July 30, 2003, 07:12

Oops. Forgot.

[/Rant]

There, that is better.

bakalov · July 30, 2003, 08:48

The bug that i hated more in XCOM1 was that overflowing of the people's stats that was leaving them with almost no movement when they became too good.

BTW many of the TFTD bugs were fixed in the patch:
* Equipment left in the X-COM craft on linked missions is now returned to base if you succeed in the second half of the linked mission.
* Alien molecular control defence stats have been modified.
* Proximity grenades now retain their prime from a reload on a tactical game.
* The 'funding' bug has been fixed so that there are no discrepancies in the X-COM accounts at the end of each month.
* There were rare problems with panicked soldiers dropping weapons in 'mid-water' - this has now been fixed.
* All craft automatically reload when you buy new ammunition.
* You now do not require a Deep One corpse in your inventory to research aqua-plastics. However you still need to have researched a Deep One corpse.
* One branch of the research tree has been modified. Whereas before you needed ion accelerators, magnetic navigation and a lobsterman navigator to be allowed to research magnetic ion armour you now need to research ion armour, magnetic navigation and ion accelerators.
* The Leviathon troop deployment bug has been fixed.
* A rare bug occurred which could kill live aliens on return to base. This has now been fixed.

Anyway I still think that TFTD is better and I like it more.
It is true that the research tree was a bit unclear, but the patch changed it and after that there is not anything you cant research.

Grumbold · July 30, 2003, 09:04

The only thing I really disliked about TFTD was the multi stage ship missions. Just too tedious creeping through all those narrow corridors. Guess I must have played with the patch because I had no other problems.

The only one I have never finished is Apocalypse. Both times I played until my super soldiers were investigating the alien envioronment I got bored.