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One thing I’d like to see is passenger stations also able to accept Goods… right now, there’s only one reason for having a industrial station in a city and that’s to accept goods. If we could combine the two, it’d eliminate one of the bulky stations and allow us to either streamline our networks or build stations dedicated to the direction of travel a lot easier.
I seem to remember mixed trains being a thing here in the UK and also scenes of crates being offloaded at normal stations, particularly on branch lines for small towns or villages where two stations and lines just didn’t make financial sense. might it not make sense to do so in game for goods arriving in our towns and cities?
I’m happy for industries outside the towns – such large industries would be inaccessible else and wouldn’t need you to haul cargo to the town they’re in.
You often found such businesses outside the towns, it’s just that the towns often grew to enclose them… which is going to happen if you start at 1850 and work forwards and keep growing the towns…
The one thing I want to see is variable load levels (25%, 50%, 75%) in the line instructions, so you can keep the goods flowing, while not having empty wagons moving back and forth.
I can confirm that the under-10-minutes trains still happily haul cargo, although mainly for raw materials, it seems less happy doing so with goods – the amount (and hence the production of the factory) tends to fall off when you swap to trains…
One thing to remember, though – in the 1800’s, the trains are much faster than the road alternative, so despite being more expensive, they can still be highly useful. Another thing to remember, they DO like more frequent hauls when possible, so rather than double-headering trains, it might be better to swap to 2 trains instead. I found myself triple-headering an iron ore train early on and suddenly found myself wondering why the heck I was doing so when I could be running 3 smaller trains instead, so ensuring a much smoother income and supply.
Having grown up in one, it does make me shudder to think of, but yeah – might be fun in TF2 or in a later patch… Â maybe have proximity to water along the line allow a small boost to income (increased demand?) too – a train line that goes along the coast or the banks of a river or lake would be a good tourist attraction, after all.
Yeah, keep it simple and assign each coach a rating and add them all up and store the total when you add or remove coaches to the train… use that for the increment when loading or unloading until you hit maximum or zero, depending on which way you’re going. You’d only need to change the number when at the depot, so it’s not like it’d add any more maths to the situation, after all… you’d just need to include checks at either end to prevent weirdness.
I think we’d all be happy with a simplified, abstract system – after all, passengers getting off will, if the doors are fully filled, move to the next car if theirs are not, so it does make sense.
If industries are close enough, just like people with cars, they transport their own goods/materials… if you cut a road, they stop.
If they’re supplying their own oil, good – it’ll give you a head start when you try to move it – get your rail line set up (road MAY not work, but you can try) and cut the road to the nearest oil supply (you might try grouping two cargo stations together and trying to put the oil one as far away as possible so the refinery cannot use it for getting supplies). With 25/25 already, you should see an initial dropoff, as usual, but it’ll soon build up again, hopefully. If not, just reattach the road.
Or, if there’s no nearby oil, it could be a bug, as you say. 🙂
I agree with Neldot – we’re already talking about an abstract system as it is – you don’t really think it takes days to travel by train to the next town, do you? 🙂
I would, however, like a default-on option “Space Evenly” where the game works out, given the average interval, how long it should hold each vehicle in order to get even spacing throughout the fleet of vehicles operating on that line.
This is where a raised rail system would be nice – we could recreate the London Dockland Light Railway or similar then… it could take the strain off our tram and bus services when they get too high-density…
Douglas: I remember thinking: “You can tell the game was made by Germans… look how neatly they wait! If this game was British, there’d practically be a rugby scrum outside those bus doors by now…” 🙂
People think us Brits are so good at queuing… they’ve obviously never seen the school run… 😀
DJ: Or, as I suggested in another thread, a % of full load, so you can slowly ramp up the % as the supply increases (eg you could set a truck or train to 25% when the supply is 100, but when it hits 400, you’d likely want it to wait until the supply tick, even if it’s 25% full so you’d up that to 75% or even 100%. It would also be one way to avoid the whole “replace the truck or wagon and suffer a loss in supply or demand” issue we’re seeing.
mats: while I agree for wagons, goods trains would stop and be (un)loaded, I think, possibly with forklifts.
Would be very cool to have hopper loading and unloading in Train Fever 2, but I think it may be a bit hard to do with this version. You would certainly need to leave enough room to allow the train not to hit any signals while doing so.
Perhaps this was considered the easier option, given that the alternative would probably end up with a longer “station” to cover the full length of the train as it passed under the loading hopper, while still allowing the pathing to function correctly?
Don’t forget also, at least in the UK, they also had hopper wagons which would either tip to one side or have a hatch in the bottom that opened for the open wagons…
Possible solution: Give each wagon/carriage a “load/unload speed”, default value of 1, which is the steps the loading and unloading ticker jumps up or down by per “tick”. In addition, for passengers, you further multiply that by the number of passenger carriages in the train… since those passengers would be getting in and out by multiple doors at a time.
You could, even, limit the number of carriages allowed at any one station by giving each length of platform a maximum value, so the short 160m platform would only allow (for example) 6 carriages, so only 6 would be counted towards helping the ticker speed, any more would be “lost” during that stop for that purpose.
The carriage speed would probably be averaged when you add/remove rolling stock in the depot and the number of carriages would be updated then too, so it wouldn’t require much maths during the actual loading phase, so wouldn’t impact too heavily on the game. A similar system could be used for buses and trams but, obviously, you wouldn’t need a number of carriages, so the number of doors would be the only factor there (the larger articulated buses would be treated as one unit).
Comments?
One way they could do this would be to add a “Half Load” (and possibly “25% Load” and “75% Load”) option(s) so that your buses don’t all hurtle off to the next town with 0 passengers on board, but wait for full loads (or whatever you decide is an appropriate amount). I suggest this as one possible solution, since it would be easiest to implement and might also solve some of the cargo issues we’re seeing (namely vehicles running empty since Full is holding them too long for the industries to grow).
It’s not just a case of “roleplaying wise”, Yeol, but usually a case of track speed too – that high speed track is very sensitive to sharp turns, to the point of being no better than the basic track if you turn too sharply…
So, given that you likely built that old track when you had no money to spare and speed wasn’t an issue so much as not bankrupting yourself, there is a strong technical case to be made for relaying HS track rather than a straight replacement.
I’m not saying that I’d not like to see a straight “upgrade this line” option, just as I’d like to see upgrading a loco or rolling stock not zero the passenger/cargo count, but it does make more sense to lay a new line for high speed traffic.
Unless you’re playing on Hard, in which case… how are you making money with trains?? 😛
