Great news!

My train / resources transport fix is met with Factorio ( https://www.factorio.com/ ) , if you are part of the few you don't know this game and love logistics/automation, give it a try.

But be prepared to sacrifice a bit of your social/love/professional life for a while..

I actively avoid games as a general rule due to the amount of time one can sink into them, and how relatively unproductive that time is... but wow I’ve fallen deep into Factorio on a few occasions. Fantastic game.

Does not look like it’s launched/final yet... what os do my you need to run it?

It's stable. Most of the core community even hangs out on the "experimental" upgrade channel, because even that seldomly has noticeable bugs.

As for content, I'd say there's enough of it, especially if you include the content that the modding community has produced.

The biggest problem here might be that it doesn't really drag you through that content, as it's a sandbox game. There's no real goal.

You sort of build a factory to produce components for building your factory, to produce science for unlocking components for building your factory.

Also, there's alien creatures that dislike you building a factory (or rather the pollution from it), so they send a small squad every now and then to try to smash your stuff. And when you want to expand your factory, you have to smash their stuff. But their AI is rather limited, so it's not a central component of the gameplay.

All in all, I think, it's best described as a sandbox puzzle game. How do you wire up your belts, pipes, rails and wires to produce the thing that you want to produce in the least spaghetti of ways?

Thanks. Will give it a shot.

Factorio is one of those early access successes, it could launch as-is and be fantastic.

It has support for Windows, OSX and Linux.

It's quickly approaching a 1.0 release, and from what I hear when that happens it's going to see a price bump as well.

By 10 USD on the 16th: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/016-price-change

Trains & Railroads - is best part of OpenTTD! And its look like someone working on deeper railroad implementation[0]

I discovered that there is also cool opensource CAD for model railroad layout design & train running simulation - XTrackCAD 5.1.0[1] (few days ago new major version released[2,3])

[0] https://github.com/Furthen64/lumo

[1] http://www.xtrkcad.org/Wikka/CurrentRelease

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/86kp7n/xtrackca...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/modeltrains/comments/86kom5/xtrackc...

Okay, now OpenTTD 1.8.0-RC1 installed & start "Downloading content..."[0] ;-)

[0] http://i.imgur.com/mzZWPrq.png

Like MineCraft, this is a great world-building game. I'd like to see OpenTTD as the 2D variant of MineCraft - or vice versa.

Anyone who wants to conquer the VR world should build a world-building game and build a lasting community around it.

Even though I appreciate the retro look, I've found installing OpenGFX got me a lot more hours out of OpenTTD (along with the bigGUI kit).

Any tips on decoding the railroad signal logic?

After I installed the graphics update, that was really the piece that limited my interest

just use path signals most of the time. "Programming" the signals is sort of the "fun" :)

aBase is the upgraded graphics I'm running too

I have lost untold hours to this magnificent game.

OpenTTD 1.8.0 released as stable release![0]

Noted on downloads page

> Latest release in stable is 1.8.0, released on 2018-04-01 13:07 UTC.

in `readme.txt`[1]

    Last updated:    2018-04-01
    Release version: 1.8.0

and in `changelog.txt`[2]

    1.8.0 (2018-04-01)
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    (None)

[0] https://www.openttd.org/en/download-stable

[1] https://binaries.openttd.org/releases/1.8.0/readme.txt

[2] https://binaries.openttd.org/releases/1.8.0/changelog.txt

Simutrans (https://www.simutrans.com/) is also a good option if you like this sort of thing. I like the "Simutrans Extended" version, which is a bit more simulator-ish and fixes some silly behaviors of the base.

Simultrans always looked nice, but scarily in-depth too.

OpenTTD is great but I highly recommend checking out Jan Zelenys Mashinky on Steam if you want a more modern take on this game. He's doing railroads right now but has long term plans for multiple transportation options.

> Jan Zelenys Mashinky on Steam

Proprietary, payware, only on Steam, with empty installation instruction[0]... No, thanks.

I prefer OpenTTD as already avaliable for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, Symbian, etc. Fully free & opensource.

[0] https://mashinky.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation

Your point is what exactly? Its another option... more options are good. I like it, and none of those things you listed are important to me and many other people.

Another "modern" take on transport tycoon is transport fever [1]. Its the second game from urban games studio, and while it is not as feature rich as openttd, its the closest I've seen. They also provide linux support and continuing to make improvements. Its not open source, but I like to support developers who do include linux support.

https://www.transportfever.com/

No offense, but I never seen any commercial tycoon to come even close to amount of features and flexibility built into OpenTTD. Since this is kind of game you usually spend thousand of hours playing during gameplay you usually get that "would be cool if there was feature X here" feeling. And OpenTTD actually have almost every feature you can imagine. And amount of polished mods and availability of damn smart AI for the game is amazing addition.

So I kind a skeptical. Is the game you recommended actually allow to build complex railroads like OpenTTD does?

Best Game ever.

I really think the best part of OpenTTD is the multiplayer component. It works well and it is very fun.

Indeed. My nephew and I played it tonight. He's 10 and I'm 35. We had no troubles and had a lot of fun setting the company owner's name to stupid stuff like "butthead".