I plan to pick up wasatch grade, though before i do i want to know How 'bad' are the wasatch grade challanger and big boy vs smokeboxes? While i like his work, smokeboxes stuff is too complicated for me (believe me, it was a nightmare to operate the fef 3 lol), so i want to know what are the pros and cons of the wasatch grade steam engines vs smokeboxes. Also if there are any patches for the wasatch steam engines please let me know.
There are several upgrades and fixes floating about for the BigBoy and Challenger that are supplied with the route. Several are available at Railworks America and other sources. Most agree that Smokebox's are so much better. I have replaced all the supplied units in all scenarios using TS_Tools. Be advised you need to have a good system but not especially a high end system to run the BigBoys especially if you have replaced all of the supplied units with ones by Smokebox in all scenarios. The BigBoys come in both standard definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) so this may help if you have issues. As a side note there are upgrades also for the UP F7s and freeware UP passenger rolling stock on various websites. The Smokebox units have an auto engineer and auto fireman options simply by clicking on the appropriate seat.
I just bought Wasatch Grade and the Smokebox Big Boy in the sale. The route is very good, can't speak for the stock Big Boy but the Smokebox one is most excellent. About the only issue I've had so far is that the brakes can be a bit difficult to apply with the keyboard, HUD doesn't really show the detents so I ended up in emergency without realising, then overcharging on release. By choosing to make the scenarios "Career" they are a bit fussy about stopping points so even though I finished the first one successfully, it registered as incomplete/failed because I overshot the water column at the start and got a "x" instead of a tick, even though I backed up and got the water okay.
AFAIK, the included Challenger and Big Boy with Wasatch are just modified versions of the older RSC Challenger and Bigboy models, so they are pretty much the same as those old pieces of stock, with maybe some slight modifications to the physics.
Smokebox Challenger and Bigboy do have a simple mode to drive them and all that you have to do is use the throttle and reverser.
