Railway Empire 2 – Medium Level Hints and Tips

• Title: Railway Empire 2
• Release Date:
• Developer:
• Publisher:

View All Guides

Information about Railway Empire 2 is still incomplete. Please help us fill the details of the game using this contact form.

After many hours in both this game and the first one, I’ve decided to provide some mid-level hints and tips for players who have already learned the basics but want to improve on the campaign.

Mid-level hints and tips

• Express lines are for cash flow and freight lines are for city growth. Even well optimized freight lines are never as profitable as average express lines.
• Use separate stations for express and freight to maximize express bonuses. Express is more profitable than the first game. I spend all my initial capital, including any available loans, on express at the beginning, connecting all cities with at least one express train. Once the money starts rolling in, I move on to freight. It’s all about return on investment.
• Warehouses work best in two or three city clusters (beer-meat-cloth trading partners) with low city demand. They are useful for growing three cities up to 100k each. Once over 100k, things get difficult due to higher demand. A network redesign with direct supply lines is often necessary.
• Deliver high demand goods directly to a city/industry on a dedicated line and platform if possible. These goods don’t work well through a warehouse unless city demand is low. The most common high-demand goods are: grain, lumber, corn, beer, and meat. The raw goods like wool and cattle are also best on separate lines, not in a warehouse.
• Build a brewery near grain, a meat industry near cattle, and cloth near wool. Think about which cities will trade with each other as part of organized city clusters. This seems basic, but the AI often builds city industries in stupid places. Buy it, destroy it, then build the right industry for that location and cluster. This will often solve potential network problems later. You don’t want to have to transport high demand goods halfway across the map because an industry is in the wrong place to begin with. This usually applies more to the second and third industry slots in each city, but check it anyway.
• As above, build a second tier industry next to the 1st tier industry. Example: Build a fashion industry next to a cloth industry in the same city. If possible, build the wood/timber industries in the same city. This will reduce congestion on your network.
• Don’t connect warehouses to many cities in a larger network. The way that good demand and good prioritization works will overwhelm the warehouse and the network.
• Higher demand cities and industries will tie up your trains, requiring many more trains to get the other goods moving again. If you see a warehouse filling up to a high level, you either don’t have enough trains or you need a separate direct line.
• Good train priority can be frustrating. Trains may continue to pick up some goods until the demand is completely satisfied before picking up the next priority good. This becomes ridiculous when there’s a large city/industry stockpile that needs to be filled before the next priority is addressed. A very large number of trains can eventually solve this, but it’s not efficient. Create a separate line for this good (wood and grain are the worst).
• Rural trains going directly to town or warehouse are best set to full load and on their own platform. Let them sit idle at the rural shop until they are needed again. You don’t want these trains running around with partial or empty loads. Look for ways to reduce network congestion whenever possible.
• Warehouses don’t work well when a good is moved away from its destination and then back to it in a V-shaped line. You want to move it in a more direct line, and if a warehouse doesn’t make sense, then deliver it directly. This is an important rule to understand.
• Warehouses are effective for the lower demand goods like vegetables, fruit, milk, sugar, etc. to get cities growing quickly. Once a city has a higher demand, such as from a dairy factory, the milk is better delivered on a separate line directly to the city industry. A warehouse supply line that worked well at low demand will fail completely at higher demand, and the increased number of trains needed to fix it will often break the network.

Building blocks

The basic game mechanics and principles are the building blocks for developing intermediate and advanced strategies. I’ve spent hours in Sandbox mode just learning the basic mechanics. This is a good tycoon puzzle game, but not a great railroad simulation. Building an elaborate and complex railroad network seems cool, and I’ve tried it, but this game rewards simple play. A to B lines work best.

Direct, separate tracks with separate platforms work best. Point-to-point connections keep things simple. The more complex you make your network, the greater the chance that something will break because of the way the game engine is programmed. Many decisions I make are focused on reducing network congestion.