Game 472: Take the A-Train

Artdink's initial entry in the A-Train series is weird. I was expecting a primitive version of Transport Tycoon, but what I got feels almost more like a primitive version of Factorio.

It hadn't helped that I couldn't find any full copies of the manual. The PC-8801 version of the game, and a digital manual, are available on the Nintendo Switch Store, but I don't have a Switch to view it on, so I'm stuck with the first page of it.

At least the in-game language barrier is thin. About half of the game is in English despite never being released outside of Japan, and the other half is terse enough that I didn't need a translation guide.

I chose the FM-7 version of the game, which launched first in December 1985 according to various sources (though the ingame copyright states 1986), using eFM77 to emulate.

Before writing this, I went through a lot of trial and error to figure out just what exactly I'm supposed to do and how to do it. Early on, there were a lot of crashes, derailments, and general frustrations with the interface. Then there were bankruptcies. And then there were crashes and derailments again. But now, I think I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing.

The ultimate goal here is to transport the president's train, seen here outside the white house and marked with the star symbol, several screens north within 365 days. You have $100,000 and 750 tons of materials, which isn't nearly enough, but it's a start.

The A-Train, the circle marked with the letter A, is your construction vehicle, and you directly control it. Or at least you will once the weird controls start to make sense. Rails follow the vehicle in insert mode, and are picked up from behind you in delete mode, but both modes are subject to a lot of edge cases which can set the rails in unexpected ways or just cause the game to yell at you that you can't do that. The A-Train can't derail, but a collision with any other vehicle is an immediate game over.

The first challenge is the controls. Even now, I often find myself fighting with them, not being able to move in directions I think I should, laying down tracks where I don't mean to, not laying down tracks where I think I should be able to, or not being able to remove tracks that I do mean to, wasting a lot of time and money. Compounding the problem is a day/night cycle; a full day last just under 30 seconds, and construction is impossible from 7pm to 5am, during which time the controls also immediately shift into an automatic rails-follow mode. Too often, I'd be struggling for several seconds to connection a junction or delete an erroneous piece of track, only for night to fall and force me to wait until morning to try again. And that's before the other trains start moving.

Also, inexplicably, signals at junctions and stations can only be changed at night. If dawn breaks before you're finished, tough luck. Hope you didn't need a train there today.

What the. I don't even want a junction there!

 

The next challenge is procuring more building materials. Money isn't a problem yet, though it will be. Trains IV and V are your cargo vehicles, and there's plenty of rail supplies at those stations, but they are inaccessible to you. You've got to use these trains to deposit those crates somewhere you can retrieve them from.

Planning this is crucial. You can put the receiving depot just about anywhere, but you need a loop that gives enough room for you to maneuver in and grab materials from the receiving depot, while also leaving you room to build a passenger line with all those materials you're about to get. Several of my games failed because I built myself into a corner here. Two rules to keep in mind - only three rails can ever meet at a junction, and never at 90 degree angles.

This design should work pretty well.

Once the rails are connected to a rail yard, the train parked there will be scheduled to start moving in 24 hours - just enough time to set the signals. Train IV will deliver cargo to the station on the west, loop around and return to the switchback, back up into the yard for more cargo, and repeat.

 

Now we have to worry about money.

This is the only place where you'll see how much cash is left.

The red window is the important one right now - we have $90,070, we've spent $390 today (so far), $1,190 yesterday, and $520 the day before. The numbers below are revenue, and so far we've made none. Everything costs money - moving, building, demolishing, operating trains, even switching signals. The more track you have laid down, the more you'll need to spend every day on maintenance and trackage fees, and the farther up north you build, the higher the rates get.

Your only revenue stream is passenger fares, collected by the trains marked O, I, II, and III. Passengers are picked up at stations in proximity to villages, and dropped at other stations - doesn't matter where, all passengers get off when the train stops, and the farther the arrival station is from the departure (measured by latitude, not track length), the more money you get.

I'm sure you can get fancy with an elaborate system of loops, junctions, and switchbacks, but I don't really see any advantage to anything more elaborate than a simple loop that goes between two villages fairly spaced apart. Fares seem to be directly proportional to the distance between stations, so having four stations in the loop instead of two means you get paid half as much twice as often, only it takes longer because the trains stop twice as often. And a complicated routing system that gets different trains to different destinations without any collisions is tricky to design in the map's often cramped terrain, and for very little benefit I can see.

Leaving the starting screen

Ah, a village!

Station positioning is important. Maximize the houses in proximity and minimize impassable terrain.

Periodically, I must return to the start for more track. Not a big deal.

Just passing through the next town.

 

Halfway to Hartford. I think this little hamlet will be my terminus.

Making a return loop

It's done!

Cash is down to $35,000. Weirdly, the does not show this on the main screen. But we're nearly ready to start bringing in some revenue.

With a simple two-point passenger loop, we can deploy all four passenger trains right away. First I wait until nightfall and divert the cargo train into the switchback so that it doesn't get in the way. Then in the morning, I connect all of the passenger trains, making sure to stagger them at least two hours apart so that they do not collide.

 

And they're off!

At this point, the best thing to to is sit back and wait. I will need a lot of money, and these trains are money losers at first. I am spending $3000 per day just waiting, and the trains are pulling in about $1500 each on a round trip that takes two and a half days. That's a $6000 loss on each trip. But keep waiting; with each delivery, the towns grow, and the revenue grows with them.

This hamlet is getting bigger!

 

A bustling metropolis.

 

Revenue starts to cap at about $16,000 per trip, certainly profitable, but not amazingly so. By day 100, I've got just over $100,000 in the bank. And I keep waiting because I will need more. By day 150, I have $200,000, and this, I feel, is enough.

No need to expand the loop - from here on, we are building the presidential line.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Won!

My greatest foe is dead. My next-greatest hasn't got half the forces I do. Time to finish this.

#37 goes down by the end of the month.Yuan Shu had been killed in combat, and his subordinate Wang Ping was already on the ropes.

 

I'm not going to spend any more time micromanaging provinces or babysitting generals. First thing, Sun Ce's red provinces in the middle are going down. I can mobilize crushing forces easily; I just need to get generals there and transfer soldiers to the loyal ones (i.e. away from the ones I won in battle) before going in. 

This can also be tedious.

Sun Quan's (Ce died) last stand

 

Next target -  Yuan Tan. Regrettably, he breaks through my wall, but I know he won't be able to expand quickly enough to escape a multi-point invasion.

Sending reinforcements to #50

Which isn't to say he (or his eventual successors) make it easy for me. Where he is weak, he withdraws into unoccupied territory when attacked. Where he is strong, he attacks where I am weak. Where he must defend, he utterly abuses smoke and fire to delay the inevitable. I have so many useless generals that I wind up sending them back into southern China for some personal development and recruitment. And one summer, Cao Ang dies, depriving me of a loyal general, and worse, 20,000 soldiers.

The state of China in 203AD.

 

But they're fractured in a few months.

 

Looking grim for them by September.

 

I finish by conquest of south China by winter, which delays my final conquest of the north a few months.

Spring 204 brings more disease, and Yuan Shao dies, leaving his son Yuan Xi in charge. So does one of my generals and another 20,000 soldiers with him. By now I don't really need them.

I begin mobilizing troops northward.

Summer brings poor omens - locusts for me, which are bad news, and rebellion for Yuan Xi, which I didn't even know could happen.

In May, I begin my final attack on the northeast. 747,000 soldiers against a combined roughly 200,000 between both remaining masters, and this time I don't need to reserve all that much to protect my own lands from counter-invasion.

The old monkey rice trap formation. It never fails!

 

Yuan Xi's last stand. He dies in September after foolishly charging into the rice trap.

 

Winter. So close to victory! The inaction is painful.

 

Finally, at the end of February, I catch and behead my last rival in his castle at Youzhou.

 

Sure! But not this one.

GAB rating: Average.

I am so glad to be done with this one. 

On paper, this is a much better game than Nobunaga's Ambition (the 1983 version). It's a more complete and cohesive game, better designed and balanced around its expanded systems. And you no longer get wiped out or set back irrecoverably in the first turn. War, in particular, is a massive improvement, with meaningful tactical options that give the underdog a chance, and the economic and diplomatic layers are meaningfully broader. There's still some illogic carried over from its predecessor (arms/training are independent variables of army size, provisions travel anywhere instantly but armies travel one state per rotation, etc.) but overall this aspect is still a major improvement.

I also have to give some credit to the game's localization. I can't speak to its accuracy or efficacy in capturing nuance of the original, but this is, by my estimation, one of the first Japanese video games with a significant language element to be translated into English, and shows none of the awkwardness that plagued so many of its contemporaries and games released well beyond.

It isn't a great game, not even at its best - even though it's deeper than its predecessor, the systems and their interactions are still more broad than deep, and outside of combat, many gameplay options just aren't worth using. Castles are the only decent revenue source, so you just build them whenever possible, and then your economic concerns become a lot simpler. I never saw any point in levying taxes, searching for gold mines, or borrowing from the merchant or rivals. I also never felt it necessary to explore diplomatic options beyond "pay/marry off rivals who you don't want to fight yet" (though admittedly these options - including some subterfuge strategies, might be underexplored on my part). And for all the stats on your generals, none mattered nearly as much as the two loyalty stats, which are trivial to maximize.

But Romance of the Three Kingdoms' biggest fault is an incredibly tedious endgame, where you know you're going to win, but you still have to manage 30-50 states and make decisions for them every single turn. For the most part, these were extremely trivial decisions too, especially in winter when the game's already slow pace comes to a halt. I'd estimate it took me at least nine hours to get through the final twelve months.

The game is aware of this and gives you the option to authorize a state to make decisions for you, but the implementation is so flawed that I didn't want to do that.

• For one, only the master can automate (and de-automate) states, so you still have to wait for his turn before the option is available. And you might want the master to do something else, since there are options only available to him.
• Second, there's no way to know what an authorized governor is actually doing, so the option might as well be an auto-skip function. That's bad on a newly conquered territory, or one held by a general with even the slightest hint of disloyalty, because mutiny and rebellion are ugly things. Toward the end, that described most of my territories and generals, because I needed the loyal ones for war.
• Third, if an army moves through an automated state, that army ain't going anywhere else until you de-automate it.

The game was somewhat enjoyable at the start, but never all that satisfying. Building up a state isn't much of an accomplishment; only conquest actually feels like a major progress event, and even that part takes forever.