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So I tested this in a new map, connecting up an ore mine and coal mine with zero production to a steelworks with zero production. In this case the coal mine was right across the map from the steelworks.
It took a while, but the production at the coal and ore mine slowly ramped up and is now at a good level and using my lines to deliver to the steelworks. It’s been a total money sink though. The lines have run at a (large) loss for about four to five years and are only now looking like they might start to turn a profit.
I had one unintended consequence. I hooked up a rail line to a town from the steelworks to deliver the goods, but it decided that a nearer town by road was more attractive so if I want to capture that trade I’ll have to either run more trains on the line or put in a road route to that town (it’s too close and uphill for rail).
There’s a lot of depth here in working out how to hook things up for the maximum benefit, and with industry free to decide another option is more attractive there are few sure things.
I’ve just had something similar. I connected coal and ore mines to a steel works and the steelworks to a town, but when the steelworks started producing it decided that another nearby town was easier to get to than my line with one train, so it’s not using it yet.
“I deleted the road between my two towns and people couldn’t drive anymore and my train station got more people on it.”
It doesn’t work for long. I tried that and the game rebuilt it.
” but it will not subdivide the track into two blocks for the opposite direction.”
These aren’t block signals. They don’t create any blocks at all. Also, there is an implicit path signal on every exit from a station platform and depot.
I haven’t had a lot of luck getting an industry to start producing when it currently isn’t, even by hooking up the full chain to a demand sink. Is there a trick to this?
On the other hand, I have accidentally captured extra cargo because a further away station became attractive to an industry I wan’t expecting. Unlike TTD etc. you don’t have to build a station right next to every single producer – they will transport their goods along roads to it if it’s meeting their needs.
I can create it, but they don’t use it. A train always goes to the platform its line has been assigned to and never any other platform under any circumstances.
I’d love to see a video of someone building this from scratch and demonstrating it working.
I tried that, and on a single line with two trains it doesn’t work. The line got assigned to the left-hand platform and the first train entered it and stopped. The second train crossed the junction, also headed for the left-hand platform and stopped at the signal.
There’s no way to get it to the right-hand platform if both trains are assigned to the same line – you have to create a second line which will then assign to the free platform just fine.
“Take diagram 5 from the OP, but instead of signals on just 1 side of the track, add signals on BOTH sides of the track for both lines.”
That’s not making any difference for me, the second train just queues up behind the first one still. Could you post a diagram showing what you mean?
I can’t currently find a way to do this without deleting the station and re-adding a larger one. You can add another station and group them into one logical station, but this could give you a road connection issue.
I’ve just tested again and the behaviour is definitely that the line gets assigned to a platform when you add the station. If you have a two platform station and add it to two lines they will each get their own platform, assuming they’re both equally reachable and not one-way etc.
I guess this is working as intended from a dev perspective. We won’t get to pick which platform is used until we get waypoints. I see the advantages over TTD behaviour for preventing bunching with this approach, so it’s interesting. I wanted a TTD-like game, not TTD in 3D so I’m personally happy to have something new. Others will have other opinions.
What I would like eventually is a way of overriding this behaviour, even temporarily. Occasionally on my commute I have to move platforms because some issue is causing the controller to move trains to another line to keep things moving. We may need that too.
I also wonder if this is why we don’t have pre-signals. If the line paths are all pre-determined a train will always pick the same pathway through a complex branching of junctions – there’s never a choice. I guess the one thing I really don’t like about this is that I like setting up the network and watching how it unfolds when the trains have to make these choices, and it looks like we don’t have that mechanic here.
Azrael and co, just because you don’t personally suffer from a particular issue does not mean there is no issue.
I have steam on a 240GB ssd because I’d rather actively manage my library and have blazing fast read speed. My c drive is a smaller ssd because it shouldn’t need to be any bigger. I have a 500gb drive, but I use it for sorting raw video and I don’t want it fragmented to hell. These are fairly common setups these days.
In no way can it be reasonable for a game to work this way and the answer be to have to buy a bigger hard drive if you want to play. Tens of gigabytes of save files for a single play through are just totally unacceptable, as is expecting players to know how to symlink the save directory properly.
No evidence of harm is not evidence of no harm. If the devs don’t get on top of these very public issues quickly it will hurt game sales. How many patches and updates do you think we’ll get if the game fails to sell well?
“maybe you use too many very short pieces of track?”
No, I tend to use as few pieces as possible and make them quite long. If you’re editing parts then invariably you will end up with some short pieces, but the game should be able to cope with this.
When you’re adding track and junctions you don’t get any visible indication of track joins, so if that’s what’s preventing some of these things working then that needs to be changed. From a player’s perspective once I’ve laid out a whole section of track it shouldn’t matter if it’s stored as a set of different length splines (or whatever) – track is track and I want to be able to work with any part of it the same way as any other part.
“For some reason the blue train just absolutely refuses to pick track B”
It looks like the line picks a fixed route that includes the track it wants to use in a multi-track station, rather than treating the station as a special case where it could pick from the accessible platforms. If you open the routes dialogue and look at the track highlighting through a multi-track station you’ll notice that the line goes through one of the tracks only. I haven’t been able to get a train to use another free platform at the station no matter what I do.
This is a huge issue when you have more than one line sharing the station, because they will both pick the shortest path through and will invariably want to share the same platform. The only way I’ve found around this is to create multiple stations and explicitly have one line assigned to one specific station.
I haven’t tested whether this is the case for multi-lane passing points. If it is then they won’t work either.
It looks like this is a basic pathfinding problem due to the the route for the line being fixed at route level. Trains don’t seem to be able to deviate from this route in the way that you’d expect them to around stations.
@mikael I have an open ticket with them. I’ll update this thread if I get a response.
