You bet your ass you do.

OpenTTD is a free and open source port of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It is similar in concept to the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and was originally made by the same person. The focus of OpenTTD is building a cargo transport empire. From trucks to planes to ships to trains, OpenTTD has many transport options. Chief among them though is rail transport where OpenTTD’s depth in train networking is unparalleled.

You can get everything you need to play here:

http://www.openttd.org

Today we’re playing with version 1.9.2.

Server name: “fun with anon”
Password: rage

When you attempt to join the server, be sure to click the button on the lower right that says “Find missing content online”. You will then be able to easily download the newGRFs that the server is using. NewGRFs are simple downloadable mods that you won’t be able to join without.

OpenTTD can feel overwhelming to learn at first, but once you get into it it's a load of fun to solve engineering problems and construct huge transportation networks.

There are many things you can do in the game Settings to make things more convenient. You should definitely turn on "quick creation of vehicle orders", it helps immensely. Another useful thing to turn on in Advanced Settings is "Link landscape toolbars to [other] toolbars", which basically makes your landscape toolbar always on.

You can learn a lot about how to play from the official wiki. Here are two of the most helpful links in particular:

http://wiki.openttd.org/Hotkeys
http://wiki.openttd.org/Hidden_features

And here are some essential hotkeys:
-A for Autorail tool
-S for railroad signal tool
-D for demolition tool
-R for remove tool (selectively removes certain things when you have their tools on [like just signals, instead of entire track])
-T for tunnel
-B for bridge
-Esc key exits out of any tool you're currently using

Ctrl-clicking is the real secret to becoming a transportation master. Try it on everything!

One extremely useful trick for managing large networks is sharing orders among vehicles. Ctrl-click a vehicle when selecting order locations or when cloning to share orders among them. This allows you to change/update orders for a whole bunch of vehicles at once.

Some more tips and tricks:

You can connect different types of stations to share their cargo and area of influence. You do so by pressing the Ctrl key while placing a station close to another one of the same or another type. You can for example make an airport, a train station, a dock, and a bus station all share their stuff as the same station entity.

How much you earn for transporting stuff is proportional to the distance traveled and the speed. It is usually much more profitable to haul stuff from two considerably distant points than between two neighboring cities. A more in-depth look at cargo income can be found here:

http://wiki.openttd.org/Cargo_income

Industries and cities don't care where you bring goods from. Let's say you have a farm right next to a factory, and another farm across the map. You can put a few trains bringing goods from the farthest farm to the factory, earning a huge profit, and the factory won't react to the fact that there's a farm right next to it.

City growth is mainly influenced by picking up passengers at a station within it, and by whether it's a city or a town (if you click the city's name it will tell you which type it is; cities grow twice as fast as normal towns).

Passengers, like other cargo, don't have a specific destination. They just hop on the train/bus/whatever that happens to stop at the station and get off at the next station stops at.

You usually want to tell vehicles to wait for full loads at their pickup stops. This ensures that you get the most profit off of your cargo, and it helps keep your station ratings up, which results in more cargo being moved from the industry to the station. The easiest way to set a vehicle to wait for a full load is to Ctrl-click the station when adding it to its orders list.

Transferring is also useful to drop cargo at stations which don't normally accept it. Imagine you have an oil platform, a dock nearby connected to a train station (you do that by pressing shift key while placing the stations), and a refinery far inland. Since there's no refinery next to the dock, it won't take oil; however, if you order your boats to transfer their cargo to the docks, you can then pick it up with trains and take it to the refinery.

When you blow up buildings and trees and terraform you piss off nearby towns. When a town is too mad at you, it won't let you build stuff near it. This usually happens a lot when building big stations, such as an airport. If you had some sort of transporting service at the city picking up passengers or mail you'll eventually gain their trust back, so it's advisable to set up a bus network in cities you're planning to expand to. Then if you piss them off you just have to wait a bit before you can continue building. Another trick to sooth angry towns is to plant trees near them.

Finally, the amount of stuff that primary industries produce is proportional to the ratings of the station you're using to pick up stuff from them. You can increase station ratings by increasing the frequency of cargo pickup. The more you have cargo sitting at a station doing nothing, the lower your rating. Industries themselves can also change production over time. These changes are random, but they will increase the most on average over time if you keep your monthly station rating above 80%. There is normally one exception to this rule found in Oil Wells in the Temperate climate, which can only ever decrease production until they dry up and close down.

Whoa, don't do this anon! Build bridges or tunnels for your trains to cross or you'll end up with really slow traffic.

Over the years your vehicles will get old and decrepit compared to new models that come out. You could try replacing all of them one-by-one manually, but there is a much easier way to do it. Go to one of your company's vehicle lists by clicking the train, truck, boat, or ship icons at the top. At the bottom of the new window you'll see a drop-down tab called "Manage list". Select the Replace vehicles options to bring up the vehicle replacement window. From here you can automate replacement of vehicles in a particular group or type. Once you select what to replace them with, click the "Start Replacing Vehicles" button. The way that this works is that whenever a vehicle of a certain type or grouping enters a depot (usually for servicing), it will automatically be replaced with whatever you chose, as long as you have the money required to do it.

>>11981
I'm thinking that this sort of single page artistic draw up on one page, of some video game's essential play path, is a new form of art.
Did you draw this? If so, nice work! Throw some water colors in next time.

>>11988
Naw, stolen from a very old SomethingAwful thread.

Here's the other two.

>>11986
It's buried deep in the game's options but I'm pretty sure you can actually set the default behaviour for all vehicles to be replace automatically. That way you just need to opt-out on the rare occasion you don't want it.

>>12003
Yeah, that's on by default too. But it only replaces an old thing with a new thing of the same model. To mass replace your vehicles of one type with a completely different type you need something else.

>>12004
Oh it wasn't on by default last time I played but that was a good few years ago and I don't know on what version

>>11989
>>11990

This is the autism we expect here