Controls - 
Left click: select
Right click: clear selection (on empty ground), move to this station (if train selected)
Camera: move cursor to edge of window [in v2, adjust scroll speed with mousewheel up/down]

You play as the red faction, your enemies appear in yellow.  You begin with a station (the house) that has black lines (railroads) nearby, one of which has a brown border on both sides - this is the station platform, where your trains will stop to load/unload goods and await new orders.  (Note that you won't be able to issue new commands to a train if it's currently on the move or if you don't have sufficient coal - see your on-hand resources  in the top right.)

You must first build a roundhouse adjacent to some tracks by selecting from the build menu at bottom-left and placing it with a left-click on the map.  Once you've also built a rail line to the nearby red coal mine, (indicated by what looks like a spoked wheel, and bearing in mind tracks must be build alongside & on land to connect,) build a miner train by selecting the roundhouse and clicking the button in the bottom-left build menu.  Select the miner, and right click near the platform at the mine to send it to start gathering coal.

Once your mining operation is set up, consider laying track towards the yellow points on the map under enemy control or blue points that are neutral.  You will see small red circles representing friendly infantry units and yellow cannons (enemy artillery) moving between these points, trying to capture and defend these strategic points.  If a unit is killed in combat, another may spawn at one of these points.

Your captured wartrain (which waits at your station as the game begins) can go on the offensive and eliminate these enemies and will capture an enemy position when no opposing forces remain nearby.  If you capture the enemy town/station, you can begin transporting cargo and passengers between it and your home station to earn money.

More gameplay is coming, but these are the core elements that are currently implemented to a workable degree.  The next major addition will be the ability to explore adjacent territory where you will encounter increasingly difficult enemies and find more towns to include in your increasingly-profitable rail network.  Following that, the Ferry and Laboratory buildings will be implemented, allowing your forces to go on missions that race against the clock - an island full of useful artifacts is sinking, and you must capture them from hostile defenders before the island is completely submerged!  Returning these artifacts to your laboratory allows for the research of upgrades to your trains, allowing you to customize them in interesting and specialized ways.

PS - as this is a pre-alpha build, a great deal of polish is planned, but not implemented.  For instance, I have some sounds and music selected, you can see some planned art for the isometric style that is intended to the right, and so forth. My reasoning for leaving out these 'bells and whistles' at this early stage is to keep you, the player/tester, un-distracted.  If the game is, at its core, fun to play, it should show (or not!) in this rudimentary form.  So, what I really want to know about is your experience - what feels fun or not, what parts of the interface are clunky or un-intuitive, what do you think about what is there, and what feels like it's missing?

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

continue to build this game. one thing i found annoying is that it is hard to get the trains to go where i want them to

(+1)

Yeah, I think UI that indicates where a train is moving (or why it won't) will be on my to-do list over the weekend.  I've been spinning my wheels on generating terrain in the next section of map for too long.