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Comment by pragmatick | Hacker News Reader

I tried it because I loved the original and remember playing it for hours (and keeping the low difficulty game run over night to get a lot of money).

I think the controls haven't aged very well. Compared to modern games laying tracks is so damn complicated. I get that you can build complex layouts without the "helping game" get in your way but I just couldn't get into it anymore.

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On the one hand that is true, but on the other OpenTTD _has_ made improvements to the controls. They are subtle, and very much in the spirit of the original game, but they are there.

The autorail tool (A, or the fifth button with the cross icon) is the one you want for a click and drag experience, and the most popular modpack, jgrpp, adds a "polyline" patch which lets the autorail tool also add in bends as needed. I suspect that patch will get merged eventually

Considering OpenTTD has already made a change to hid the classic rail signals by default in favor of path signals (I'm really not on board with this change, but regardless), I think it would probably be justified for them to hide the non-auto tools by default as well. Autorail is really the one most people should be using by default, but the game UI makes it too easy for new players to use the manual rail tools instead.

I like the 2.5D RTS-like TTD rail laying, I find the newer Locomotion "RollerCoaster Tycoon" style track laying disturbing.

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