Train speed and capacity rebalance suggestion; A lesson from WR:SR

I found Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic had great balancing when it comes to trains. They like taking a realistic approach in general: the heaviest dumper can carry 25t of loose material at 30km/h at most, while the lightest hopper wagon can carry 29t with the heaviest being 92t. The average is somewhere in the 60-70 ton range. Going by that game the average hopper cart can carry over twice and almost 3x as much as the truck based on the MAZ-525 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAZ-525) which seems very much alike the mega trucks found in this game.

Singular coal mines (as simply as they are implemented they are just mineshaft operations with workers) can produce almost 3000t in a day. There is no reason to build trains for raw aggregate material, unless transporting it several kilometres, because conveyors while prohibitively expensive can move up to 600t in a day. However conveyors are not even an option for completed materials, like steel coils, and even with the ridiculous throughput of trains, you generally have to make trains of up to 150 meters long, and they still struggle. (150m comes from how trains are dynamically assembled in a depot. You can make arbitrarily long trains if you specialise them and only run them back and forth)

Even with heavy trains such as these single locomotives with engines that produce upwards of 5000kW of power move them quite swiftly, up to 120km/h in fact, with acceleration similar to this game while carrying much, much heavier loads.

Compare this to the 80km/h upper speed limit, an anaemic wagon size that won't even exceed 2/3s of the biggest truck in the game, and extremely slow acceleration (let me correct myself from before) of about 3.5 fields length to reach top speed with a 1-2-1 (two locomotive train)

See image attached for acceleration distance visualised.

Conclusions in next message.

Now, I understand that the scope of the game being played on an island made the vision of trains being quite a bit smaller than real life trains (not by much by model size, about half the size by the feel of the models.)

But it seems we're at an impasse. Trains should be smaller than life, but by being such they need to be quite long for the limited space that we have to work with. Also the limited space really makes conveyors look like a better deal. However, if we want to balance this, we need to adjust numbers a bit, so conveyors aren't faster while even being more space efficient than a train network.

Obvious things I'm asking for:

1. Faster max speed, and better acceleration to trains (unless of course you want to implement electric trains which will be the upgrade path to the current diesel)
2. Larger wagon capacity or multiple wagon tiers. At the very least have them be 180 capacity, so they match the big dumpers, perhaps even more.

Other things that arise from current implementation:
Train stations are large. That's not a problem, they can stay the same size, but take an ore sorter for example. Usually it mines rock, dirt, and whatever the main product is. Right now I have to make this setup (ignore 4th station)

This once again is space that's being taken up. The reason I had to make it this way and not for example 2 bigger stations is the fact that trains cannot be dynamically dispatched, or don't currently have skip conditions other than the refuel one.

If I had such a condition, I could combine my rock, dirt and coal train, and have it stop and pick up the correct material from a more reasonably sized station, pick up the rock and dirt, and continue being a coal train. I could somewhat do this right now, just not the final combination of final product.

So please give us skip conditions based on the same factors as the current train limit conditions!

The conclusion:
Larger wagon capacity and faster max speed won't ruin trains, it just makes sure the painstaking process of setting up logistics pays off, and makes the next bottleneck be whatever comes naturally after: workers, excavators, machinery, product shortages, etc.

Conveyors will still have their place in factories, of course.

Trucks will still have their place in building projects, mining and dumping operations, and any band aid fixes to factory logistics that inevitably arise when playing the game or as stopgaps that are necessary while (re)building for more permanent solutions.

good post
i also find trains in a pretty bad state considering how much time do you need to spend to make them work

If you want to browse the constants currently used for trains,
have a look at this extaction/conversion to Lua I performed,
the constants should be pretty descriptive on their own: https://discord.com/channels/803508556325584926/1260716327015022764/1379057382776242236

6 more things that I should clarify:

• Percent is a type that is used for storing percentages (where 100% would be stored as 1.0 in this type) & has a resoulution of1/1000;
• Fix32 is a fixed-point type made up of 10 fractional bits, 21 integer bits & 1 sign bit, therefore they have a resolution of only 1/1024;
• due to the used type's resolution, the game (and so does this snippet) is storing the rolling resistance pre-multiplied by 1000;
• Tiles reffer to the smallest/finest grid (there are 16 Tiles inside of a mining/dumping/leveling designation);
• there are 2 Tiles in a Meter each Tile is 2 meters long;
• 1 Tile per tick (which is the unit of speed used, when speed is represented in "Tiles") is 72kph.

To me the trains in CoI look like narrow gauge, so naturally cars and locomotives are smaller. Allowing the possible tight turning radius and steep slopes.
Comparing them with the capacity of regular or even broad gauge systems does not feel right.
However, for acceleration, the game's warped time system and player experience is more relevant than track size.

Expanding on why the time scale justifies increased train capacity:

I suspect that the idea originally was that the current size scale vs time scale works out for trucks and so it could just be copied to trains. I think there's one key problem with that: trucks can clip through each other and trains can't. What does that have to do with time scales? Just this: it's quite one thing if a truck or train takes a year to cross the map; but it's quite another for a train to block a station for a week pulling out of it! Specifically the former primarily affects latency while the latter affects throughput. Clipping is the solution to truck throughput: there are way too many trucks zipping around and through each other given the island size, but that's okay because they're fun and responsive. If trucks couldn't clip then they wouldn't be scaled right. So, for trains, the scale will have to be different. It's probably harder to make them faster so they'll have to be unrealistically high-capacity compared to trucks.
Because of their differences (clipping and maybe other differences), trucks and trains can't both have realistic capacity on a single scale and realistic speed on a single scale.