It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out I could put locomotives on both ends of the train instead of having to build loops to turn around…
Throughput is greater if everything flows one way into a station. Don’t have to go in and back out again to get a second train in. My more populous outposts have what looks like a train parking lot full of empties waitin’ for 'em.
I’m on my first playthrough of Space Age currently and while I’ve got something fairly complex on Nauvis with multiple stops and interconnects and loops and a half dozen or so trains… a lot of my needs on other planets are just point-to-point single train transfers. e.g. running a line out to a scrap patch on another island with millions of units of resources on Fulgora after exhausting the initial scrap I mined out. I don’t even need multiple cargo wagons let alone multiple trains to max out my factory’s input belt capacity there at the moment… Could the whole thing be more efficient? Oh yes – but sometimes simple is good enough, and not having to build loops before I got the deep elevated rail support and/or foundations helped tremendously!
I think I was probably supposed to figure out the double locomotive thing in the train tutorial – I don’t remember there being loops on the track there… – but I’m pretty sure I’d already built at least simple factories on everything but Aquilo before I realized it was even an option. :p
The creeping horror for other players is making them zoom in to realise the scale of the thing. Its a long time to traverse even with rocket trains and go fast legs.
Edit: I should have included a picture of one of the cells for scale
Occasionally I’d get jams. The jams would manifest with a train sat occupying the corner, so i put a circuit in each one that sets off an alarm after 60 seconds of being continuously blocked. Then I’d investigate.
Generally, given that my stations only became available if they had > 1.0wagonscapacity*stacksize the trains mostly sat in “parking” waiting or at “parking” nearer the raw resource in the far outposts.
It required a little tuning, some modules have a lead-in perimeter loop where 5-6 trains can be stacked waiting to unload.
that is cool! i like the loops but wondering - modern trains are diesel generators running electric motors. i wonder if we could find a mod to use trains to power your electric grid when they are idle at stations.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out I could put locomotives on both ends of the train instead of having to build loops to turn around…
Fuuuck
Throughput is greater if everything flows one way into a station. Don’t have to go in and back out again to get a second train in. My more populous outposts have what looks like a train parking lot full of empties waitin’ for 'em.
It’s like these folks never played OpenTTD.
I’m on my first playthrough of Space Age currently and while I’ve got something fairly complex on Nauvis with multiple stops and interconnects and loops and a half dozen or so trains… a lot of my needs on other planets are just point-to-point single train transfers. e.g. running a line out to a scrap patch on another island with millions of units of resources on Fulgora after exhausting the initial scrap I mined out. I don’t even need multiple cargo wagons let alone multiple trains to max out my factory’s input belt capacity there at the moment… Could the whole thing be more efficient? Oh yes – but sometimes simple is good enough, and not having to build loops before I got the deep elevated rail support and/or foundations helped tremendously!
I think I was probably supposed to figure out the double locomotive thing in the train tutorial – I don’t remember there being loops on the track there… – but I’m pretty sure I’d already built at least simple factories on everything but Aquilo before I realized it was even an option. :p
In 1.0 I played bobs+angels and ran on a 100 square cell structure
In 2.0 I’ve still only done vanilla, but I went with a 200 square cell this time for bigger trains.
My only regret is exploring south and not east or west
The creeping horror for other players is making them zoom in to realise the scale of the thing. Its a long time to traverse even with rocket trains and go fast legs.
Edit: I should have included a picture of one of the cells for scale
Isn’t a pure square grid inefficient, because trains get stuck? That happened to my square grid megabases, so I stopped doing them.
Occasionally I’d get jams. The jams would manifest with a train sat occupying the corner, so i put a circuit in each one that sets off an alarm after 60 seconds of being continuously blocked. Then I’d investigate.
Generally, given that my stations only became available if they had > 1.0wagonscapacity*stacksize the trains mostly sat in “parking” waiting or at “parking” nearer the raw resource in the far outposts.
It required a little tuning, some modules have a lead-in perimeter loop where 5-6 trains can be stacked waiting to unload.
TIL
that is cool! i like the loops but wondering - modern trains are diesel generators running electric motors. i wonder if we could find a mod to use trains to power your electric grid when they are idle at stations.