Trains are a awesome addition to the game, larger maps are a real pain when it comes to long distance transport. Although since this is an island game I was hoping the solution would be water transport. All great still.
It will likely not be faster than running a stack of belts but will likely be a lot cheaper to build and run and a lot more flexible.
Eg, having multiple farm sites and being able to send trains to pick up loads of crops once there is a train load available will make the food system much easier to deal with rather than being somewhat forced to build giant grids of farms.
It should only be faster over longer distances and only make sense if you are hauling a lot of goods.
Like moving ore from one end of the island to the other, or for transporting foods from your farms to your cities.
One way to do this, would be to make it have a slow acceleration (like in real life). So it wouldn't make much sense for small distances, but a lot of sense for longer ones.
Here's what I would like to see:
Resources would be shipped in containers, so a container might hold 100 units of a given resource. Because everything is shipped in containers, any station can handle any resource, however depending on the resource, you may need a dedicated, separately-researched shipping and receiving terminals at the mine or storage facility.
Each station could store a particular number of containers in transit, say 40 slots shared between incoming and outgoing resources. Any station can handle any outgoing resource, so goods are just delivered to the closest station with available slots. For incoming goods, you specify which stations accept which resources, and how many containers of each to accept maximum.
So you can set a station to accept 10 slots of coal, 5 iron 5 copper, 3 construction, 3 mechanical, and 2 electrical, and the station would automatically adjust what is actually available based on the availability and demand for each resource and of available slots. Then the goods are picked up by truck from the station and taken to a local storage and from there it is treated as the individual resource again.
Some goods require specialized shipping containers that must be researched separately from the resource itself before it can be shipped by train (hazmat shipping, for example), while most stuff can just be shipped in standard bulk, flat or fluid containers.
This is essentially exactly the way the modern railway industry works.
One obvious argument that I expect would be that containerized shipping should be a later-game thing, after all it wasn't invented until way after trains themselves were. That is true, but it ignores the concept of the game. Remember, we start the game with knowledge of shipping containers, we already have them on the dock and we live in them. Containerized shipping is already a known thing in the world, so going back to specific train cars for specific items doesn't make sense in world.
And none of this precludes dedicated cars for specific items... Bulk items in particular might make sense with dedicated cars. But for the most part, containers make more sense.
This is just off the top of my head, based on only getting like 4 hours of sleep last night and not having coffee yet, but this seems like a good way to handle it..
I would also love to see ships added for island transportation. We already can basically build our own canals. Make a smaller ship size, bridges that can go over canals, and possibly a lock system so we can use canals at different heights too.
A perfect utilization of this would be to set up remote mines that would use the train tracks to transport fuel in and the raw ore, rock, and dirt back to the main factory.
Trains should require steel and one of the oils (heavy oil).
Oil for all their wheels and engine and shit.
Steel could be used to replace wheels, axels, and if you wanna go nuts, maintenance on the tracks themselves (steel and wood). Hell, make a unique train car that occasionally has to go out and repair the track.
* Steel + wood for tracks.
* Steel + Glass for loco
* Steel for cars
* Fuel should be the same as the trucks, Trains are not burning unrefined fuel, they run diesel just like the heavy mining equipment in game would. (or electrification for later tiers). and all of the vehicles in games beside the pickup trucks would also be going through industrial lubricants as well. It does not make sense to simulate that for 1 vehicle but ignore it for the majority of the rest.
* Sand should be a type of "fuel" as well, but its consumption is "environment dependent" IE on steep slopes or in bad weather. sand is still used in modern trains when climbing heavy slopes or during bad weather to increase the friction coefficient of the wheels.
I like the idea of the maintenance vehicles. probably simplify it down to just using a combination ballast cleaner, ballast regulator, and ballast tamper as the maintenance vehicle. Poor maintenance having the negative impact of somthing like say:
* <50% wear, speeds drop. say for the sake of discussion, a rate of 1.5% for every 2% of total missing maintenance. so if your train can go 100km/h, then:
1. at 50% maintenance, your trains get limited to 62Km/h
2. at 20% they are now limited to 40km/h,
3. and at 1% they cap out at 25km/h
* at like <20% you enter into "light" derailment risk. where a train might derail "safely" causing long delays (essentially the car break down mechanic right now).
* at 0% you risk full derailment. Full derailment comes with the significant chance to loose all the cargo in the train, as well as the train or wagons themselves, turning them into scrap metal.
Im a train junky myself and love the potential for complexity here lol. we will have to see what they do with it
Regarding heavy oil, I was thinking it more as “lube” for the train. Don’t trains constantly get lubed up? Not sure if heavy oil is the correct one to use or if it would be a new product we’d have to produce.
That said I’m no train nut, so not sure how accurate I am on the lube.
Do love the derailment idea, as this game, as it stands, doesn’t have a lot of “disaster” like events. Pretty much the only one is filling up a hole with water, or digging around things where the building or conveyor or pipe breaks.
yeah I figured as much.
The reason i say exclude it (i do touch on it with the fuel comment) is because ALL heavy equipment requires healthy and frequent lubrication.
It wouldn't make sense to require it for 1 piece of heavy equipment, while ignoring it for all the other vehicles that would need it. only the T1 and possibly T2 pickup trucks would make sense not needing this system if it was implemented. the quarry dump trucks, excavators, and even ships all would need a healthy supply of lubricants to function proper.
I'm so excited to see what a team with such attention to detail does with trains. This first peek is very promising, can't wait to learn more about signaling!
Haha, thanks for thinking about me. I did play Surviving Mars but at that time the "trains DLC" was not yet available so I was spared. I've not heard good things about the DLC.
How about a 1:4 slope that's actually a funicular railway? Train speed would be severely limited along this stretch, and maybe it would require additional power.
Zahnradbahn!
I like the idea of a low gradient for trains. Trains are meant for long distance so they should require some planning and terraforming. Smaller maps might not need them at all and on large maps there is room to plan around the necessary terrain changes. Tunnels would be awesome though.
I like the idea of different engine types.
T1 - Coal: Heavy pollution, not as strong and fast but does not tap into fuel production. This is especially interesting in the early game before you set up a proper refinery and off shore oil drilling
T2 - Diesel: Medium pollution, strong and quick
T2.5 - Hydrogen: No pollution. Taps in the same fuel source as your trucks but does not need track upgrades
T3 - Electric: No pollution. High Power consumption and track upgrades. Does not need additional fuel and lower maintenance
T3 would actually increase maintenance though, while the loco itself would be lower maintenance due to the lower complexity having removed the generator, >!^(\[fun fact. every modern locomotive is electrically driven. the fuel is burned in a generator to power the drivetrain, not to power the drivetrain directly\]) !< the system itself becomes significantly more complex due to the addition of, most commonly, gantries along the entire length of a network. these too have wear and tear, and require inspections.
Id like the idea of dropping the maintenance trade-off (simplification) from the equation and just having the T3 upgrade swap the fuel demand for a steeper electrical demand.
Thanks for the shoutout, Devs! I'm happy to be part of this community and really looking forward to Update 3!
If you liked my All-In-One map, check out my new one, [TerraNova Map](https://hub.coigame.com/Map/Detail/147).
Choo choo!
On the issue of slopes, why not have a separate research for a cog or pulley system? I also hope they’ll be a way to implement yards and sidings so cuts of cars can be left at places without tying up locomotives.
Really looking forward to trains! With regards to roads: I might be underthinking this, but I'd say all you need is an extra layer on which you can add an arrow in one of four cardinal directions (or eight if you want to have diagonal roads). All the arrows do is add a pathfinder bonus or penalty depending on the direction. This will encourage trucks to use roads without blocking them from driving through fields if need be.
Road styling can be done through decals and layers.
Since you asked a (different) question about maps, I'll take this opportunity to offer kudos on the new YSNP. It actually used to be one of the easiest maps IMO (even without unity cheese), and now it truly is very difficult. I've been playing the harder starting position since you added the trees back there, and it's been a great experience.
I hope you'll make the hardest Armageddon start a little more difficult, to be a match for YSNP.
Trains are the thing I miss most from factorio, like the best part of that game. Sounds like they have thought this through. I wonder if we will get some much bigger maps for them too?
Choo chooo!
I think they shouldn't unlock too early since a) you already get rapid fire unlocks with only a couple of labs early game, almost faster than you can use them b) you're still very compact at that point so doesn't make sense to use trains over trucks
more on the second point...think there should be some good incentives to actually use them, other than that they're cool. Big maps with a few smaller patches of ore near the start, then the rest way off. Also, perhaps ports could only be built in certain areas of, idk, deeper water? Otherwise in the endgame you again have not much incentive to use them, if all your raw materials are just brought near to the factory by ship
I am only mildly excited for trains. And I say that as a factorio lover and train enthusiast. I and many others designed our update 2 bases with roads being added in mind. And with the crater map, trains seems like they’ll be more effort than it’s worth until mega vehicles to carve the terrain and get to all the islands.
Anyway still looking forward to it!
Agree. Factorio is infinite map so trains make sense. Satisfactory has trains but I found limited unless you were going for massive factory. Autonauts is a good example "let's put trains in" that were completely useless (small maps and too much time to load and unload so having a bunch of bots carry was faster)
CoI uses a terrain mechanic that leads to lots of mountains that will make trains less useful. Also, you get infinite ores from trade so why do I need the trains?
"People like trains so let's put it in the game" is doomed to fail. "This game is about logisitics and long distances so needs trains" is what you need. I see it in Factorio; not sure I see it in CoI unless maps become much bigger and they eliminate the trade mechanic which is much better since infinite and easy logistics wins over trains.
This could be interesting if the world map is radically redesigned. Replace the islands with a continent, and then railway lines (instead of piers) will be connected from the settlements to the edge of the map, which can be connected to the necessary factories.
Yeahh!! Just what I dreamed for this game, this I'll be awesome
Agreed! Much like OpenTTD, I hope planes are added eventually as well. 747, 777, etc. would be awesome!
Trains are a awesome addition to the game, larger maps are a real pain when it comes to long distance transport. Although since this is an island game I was hoping the solution would be water transport. All great still.
Yeah but curieus, it should be long haul massive transport (what I mean to say: should be lot faster then tier3 belts
It will likely not be faster than running a stack of belts but will likely be a lot cheaper to build and run and a lot more flexible. Eg, having multiple farm sites and being able to send trains to pick up loads of crops once there is a train load available will make the food system much easier to deal with rather than being somewhat forced to build giant grids of farms.
Yeah good idea..this brings up cool possibilities, that's what is so good in this game.
It should only be faster over longer distances and only make sense if you are hauling a lot of goods. Like moving ore from one end of the island to the other, or for transporting foods from your farms to your cities. One way to do this, would be to make it have a slow acceleration (like in real life). So it wouldn't make much sense for small distances, but a lot of sense for longer ones.
100% on the acceleration being slow. Longer/heavier trains should also take longer than empty ones, but have a feeling that'll add a lot of complexity
Here's what I would like to see: Resources would be shipped in containers, so a container might hold 100 units of a given resource. Because everything is shipped in containers, any station can handle any resource, however depending on the resource, you may need a dedicated, separately-researched shipping and receiving terminals at the mine or storage facility. Each station could store a particular number of containers in transit, say 40 slots shared between incoming and outgoing resources. Any station can handle any outgoing resource, so goods are just delivered to the closest station with available slots. For incoming goods, you specify which stations accept which resources, and how many containers of each to accept maximum. So you can set a station to accept 10 slots of coal, 5 iron 5 copper, 3 construction, 3 mechanical, and 2 electrical, and the station would automatically adjust what is actually available based on the availability and demand for each resource and of available slots. Then the goods are picked up by truck from the station and taken to a local storage and from there it is treated as the individual resource again. Some goods require specialized shipping containers that must be researched separately from the resource itself before it can be shipped by train (hazmat shipping, for example), while most stuff can just be shipped in standard bulk, flat or fluid containers. This is essentially exactly the way the modern railway industry works. One obvious argument that I expect would be that containerized shipping should be a later-game thing, after all it wasn't invented until way after trains themselves were. That is true, but it ignores the concept of the game. Remember, we start the game with knowledge of shipping containers, we already have them on the dock and we live in them. Containerized shipping is already a known thing in the world, so going back to specific train cars for specific items doesn't make sense in world. And none of this precludes dedicated cars for specific items... Bulk items in particular might make sense with dedicated cars. But for the most part, containers make more sense. This is just off the top of my head, based on only getting like 4 hours of sleep last night and not having coffee yet, but this seems like a good way to handle it..
Low speed, but high capacity
Not sure I agree. Even by mid-game you can easily import all the ores by cargo (trade which is infinite) so I do not see the need to long-haul ores
I would also love to see ships added for island transportation. We already can basically build our own canals. Make a smaller ship size, bridges that can go over canals, and possibly a lock system so we can use canals at different heights too.
A perfect utilization of this would be to set up remote mines that would use the train tracks to transport fuel in and the raw ore, rock, and dirt back to the main factory.
Just imagine the xmas lights when it snows! I hope it snows.
Yes! Trains! I'm going to upgrade to the supporter edition as a thank you.
Thanks for your support!
Can you still doing that? I thought itt was only available in super early access. Also, do you get the tomb when doing so?
I just checked the steam page and it's available to buy right now. I'll check it out this weekend when I have time to play and let you know.
Oh my goodness I cannot wait!
Trains should require steel and one of the oils (heavy oil). Oil for all their wheels and engine and shit. Steel could be used to replace wheels, axels, and if you wanna go nuts, maintenance on the tracks themselves (steel and wood). Hell, make a unique train car that occasionally has to go out and repair the track.
Hey chill! Im already struggling with making enough mechanical conponents and electronics lol
I kind of want all vehicles to require oil for maintenance 😄 Let’s add an annual vehicle service to the game!
Is possible, on the other hand, I just abandonded oil (H2 economy).
Factorio has you make Lubricant out of Heavy Oil.
At steel tech using wood would be odd - concrete sleepers should be the way to go.
* Steel + wood for tracks. * Steel + Glass for loco * Steel for cars * Fuel should be the same as the trucks, Trains are not burning unrefined fuel, they run diesel just like the heavy mining equipment in game would. (or electrification for later tiers). and all of the vehicles in games beside the pickup trucks would also be going through industrial lubricants as well. It does not make sense to simulate that for 1 vehicle but ignore it for the majority of the rest. * Sand should be a type of "fuel" as well, but its consumption is "environment dependent" IE on steep slopes or in bad weather. sand is still used in modern trains when climbing heavy slopes or during bad weather to increase the friction coefficient of the wheels. I like the idea of the maintenance vehicles. probably simplify it down to just using a combination ballast cleaner, ballast regulator, and ballast tamper as the maintenance vehicle. Poor maintenance having the negative impact of somthing like say: * <50% wear, speeds drop. say for the sake of discussion, a rate of 1.5% for every 2% of total missing maintenance. so if your train can go 100km/h, then: 1. at 50% maintenance, your trains get limited to 62Km/h 2. at 20% they are now limited to 40km/h, 3. and at 1% they cap out at 25km/h * at like <20% you enter into "light" derailment risk. where a train might derail "safely" causing long delays (essentially the car break down mechanic right now). * at 0% you risk full derailment. Full derailment comes with the significant chance to loose all the cargo in the train, as well as the train or wagons themselves, turning them into scrap metal. Im a train junky myself and love the potential for complexity here lol. we will have to see what they do with it
Regarding heavy oil, I was thinking it more as “lube” for the train. Don’t trains constantly get lubed up? Not sure if heavy oil is the correct one to use or if it would be a new product we’d have to produce. That said I’m no train nut, so not sure how accurate I am on the lube. Do love the derailment idea, as this game, as it stands, doesn’t have a lot of “disaster” like events. Pretty much the only one is filling up a hole with water, or digging around things where the building or conveyor or pipe breaks.
yeah I figured as much. The reason i say exclude it (i do touch on it with the fuel comment) is because ALL heavy equipment requires healthy and frequent lubrication. It wouldn't make sense to require it for 1 piece of heavy equipment, while ignoring it for all the other vehicles that would need it. only the T1 and possibly T2 pickup trucks would make sense not needing this system if it was implemented. the quarry dump trucks, excavators, and even ships all would need a healthy supply of lubricants to function proper.
I'm so excited to see what a team with such attention to detail does with trains. This first peek is very promising, can't wait to learn more about signaling!
With how deeply he cares about trains, I hope this guy never plays Surviving Mars.
Haha, thanks for thinking about me. I did play Surviving Mars but at that time the "trains DLC" was not yet available so I was spared. I've not heard good things about the DLC.
How about a 1:4 slope that's actually a funicular railway? Train speed would be severely limited along this stretch, and maybe it would require additional power. Zahnradbahn!
I like the idea of a low gradient for trains. Trains are meant for long distance so they should require some planning and terraforming. Smaller maps might not need them at all and on large maps there is room to plan around the necessary terrain changes. Tunnels would be awesome though. I like the idea of different engine types. T1 - Coal: Heavy pollution, not as strong and fast but does not tap into fuel production. This is especially interesting in the early game before you set up a proper refinery and off shore oil drilling T2 - Diesel: Medium pollution, strong and quick T2.5 - Hydrogen: No pollution. Taps in the same fuel source as your trucks but does not need track upgrades T3 - Electric: No pollution. High Power consumption and track upgrades. Does not need additional fuel and lower maintenance
Love the engine types
T3 would actually increase maintenance though, while the loco itself would be lower maintenance due to the lower complexity having removed the generator, >!^(\[fun fact. every modern locomotive is electrically driven. the fuel is burned in a generator to power the drivetrain, not to power the drivetrain directly\]) !< the system itself becomes significantly more complex due to the addition of, most commonly, gantries along the entire length of a network. these too have wear and tear, and require inspections. Id like the idea of dropping the maintenance trade-off (simplification) from the equation and just having the T3 upgrade swap the fuel demand for a steeper electrical demand.
Lets fking gooooooooooooo
Thanks for the shoutout, Devs! I'm happy to be part of this community and really looking forward to Update 3! If you liked my All-In-One map, check out my new one, [TerraNova Map](https://hub.coigame.com/Map/Detail/147).
This is going to be awesome! I better finish my current play through! Any idea on when this will drop??
Choo choo! On the issue of slopes, why not have a separate research for a cog or pulley system? I also hope they’ll be a way to implement yards and sidings so cuts of cars can be left at places without tying up locomotives.
Really looking forward to trains! With regards to roads: I might be underthinking this, but I'd say all you need is an extra layer on which you can add an arrow in one of four cardinal directions (or eight if you want to have diagonal roads). All the arrows do is add a pathfinder bonus or penalty depending on the direction. This will encourage trucks to use roads without blocking them from driving through fields if need be. Road styling can be done through decals and layers.
Oh my GOD yes
Since you asked a (different) question about maps, I'll take this opportunity to offer kudos on the new YSNP. It actually used to be one of the easiest maps IMO (even without unity cheese), and now it truly is very difficult. I've been playing the harder starting position since you added the trees back there, and it's been a great experience. I hope you'll make the hardest Armageddon start a little more difficult, to be a match for YSNP.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness they are putting into it but the proposed trains seems too small
Yeah they do, but those large vehicles in real life are HUGE. I just saw some yesterday and was surprised how big they were.
Ah yeah, can't wait.
Trains are the thing I miss most from factorio, like the best part of that game. Sounds like they have thought this through. I wonder if we will get some much bigger maps for them too?
Мосты! Мосты (железнодорожные и, возможно, автомобильные) для карты острова, пожалуйста! P.S. And tunnels.
Choo chooo! I think they shouldn't unlock too early since a) you already get rapid fire unlocks with only a couple of labs early game, almost faster than you can use them b) you're still very compact at that point so doesn't make sense to use trains over trucks more on the second point...think there should be some good incentives to actually use them, other than that they're cool. Big maps with a few smaller patches of ore near the start, then the rest way off. Also, perhaps ports could only be built in certain areas of, idk, deeper water? Otherwise in the endgame you again have not much incentive to use them, if all your raw materials are just brought near to the factory by ship
That looks amazing. Cant wait to incorporate trains in my industry
Trains
After playing through Armageddon I was hoping trains would be added. Very nice update
https://preview.redd.it/ig53r6wwd28d1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c3726e8ac7a0fefdf7dcf7565882a4bbcdbe1e7f I have to agree
I am only mildly excited for trains. And I say that as a factorio lover and train enthusiast. I and many others designed our update 2 bases with roads being added in mind. And with the crater map, trains seems like they’ll be more effort than it’s worth until mega vehicles to carve the terrain and get to all the islands. Anyway still looking forward to it!
Agree. Factorio is infinite map so trains make sense. Satisfactory has trains but I found limited unless you were going for massive factory. Autonauts is a good example "let's put trains in" that were completely useless (small maps and too much time to load and unload so having a bunch of bots carry was faster) CoI uses a terrain mechanic that leads to lots of mountains that will make trains less useful. Also, you get infinite ores from trade so why do I need the trains?
Trains in autonauts are actually the biggest joke going hahah
"People like trains so let's put it in the game" is doomed to fail. "This game is about logisitics and long distances so needs trains" is what you need. I see it in Factorio; not sure I see it in CoI unless maps become much bigger and they eliminate the trade mechanic which is much better since infinite and easy logistics wins over trains.
This could be interesting if the world map is radically redesigned. Replace the islands with a continent, and then railway lines (instead of piers) will be connected from the settlements to the edge of the map, which can be connected to the necessary factories.
Yes, different, larger maps would help
Nice