Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

The big one is being able to ctrl-select multiple cargoes for automatic consists instead of just anything, any freight, any express, or any one specific cargo. I frequently don't want my trains to haul milk or grain away from a station where I have a dairy processor or a brewery, for example, but several other things are okay. And using custom consists to try to do this is just annoying, since you don't know without watching carefully exactly what you'll have to haul usually, and I'm trying to avoid micromanaging (games that take 6-8 hours are more enjoyable than games that take 20-30 hours, I've concluded.)

Another one on occasion is to be able to tell custom consists where you set a minimum load greater than zero whether or not to fill the cars in the order of the consist (from left to right.) When I first started playing I assumed the game would do this, but discovered that it does not.

So, thanks for 1.06. Anybody talking about 1.07? I'm sure there are others out there who think maybe just a few features got left out...

And also the ability to undo building placements! I pretty much always save before placing a building in uneven terrain just in case it screws up the track grade.

And not a feature but a small bug I suppose, sometimes when doubling track trains stopping moving thinking they can't get to the next station, so now I always check my train list after doubling track. Just selecting one of the affected trains clears up the confusion for all trains immediately, but still I don't think this is supposed to happen.

I think, only the graphics refresh freezes when you double tracks. I never run into the situation, that a train didn't find anymore the target station(s) after doing so!

Ah, and it would be nice to be able to set train priorities separately for each leg of a route.

More futuristic locomotives. I'm not much of a fan of the two there are currently.
Better AI players... I really hate it when the AI player plans a train through cities that only I connect, not only does he make less profit (thus, driving stock down), it also increases the track congestion (I also had an AI player that had 200-250 trains going... that slowed down my computer a lot.)

un1 wrote:More futuristic locomotives. I'm not much of a fan of the two there are currently.

Learn how to Mod!
This is an achievable goal...

A really good beginner project would be the MotivePower MP40... :)

http://www.gotransit.com/PUBLIC/en/news ... ewMP40.htm

http://www.motivepower-wabtec.com/locom ... xpress.php

nedfumpkin wrote:A really good beginner project would be the MotivePower MP40... :)

http://www.gotransit.com/PUBLIC/en/news ... ewMP40.htm

http://www.motivepower-wabtec.com/locom ... xpress.php

That seems like an interesting project. I guess I could try it, I have some modding experience for SMR and SC4.
Now I need to learn to mod RRT3..

I was just kidding, but if you want to try, then I think that the HST 125 might be a good starting point since you'd basically only need to reshape the front and a bit on the roof.

nedfumpkin wrote:I was just kidding, but if you want to try, then I think that the HST 125 might be a good starting point since you'd basically only need to reshape the front and a bit on the roof.

Yeah I know. I am just going to learn pretty much everything I can before I even change one thing...

Maybe, next Christmas this all will happen ...

Sugus wrote:Maybe, next Christmas this all will happen ...

Okay, so there's your deadline! Seven months to learn how to mod and make it happen...

WPandP wrote:

Sugus wrote:Maybe, next Christmas this all will happen ...

Okay, so there's your deadline! Seven months to learn how to mod and make it happen...

Nah, that is too much work, anyways, I did that last year. (I would advertise what I made last Christmas but I wont)

low_grade wrote:And not a feature but a small bug I suppose, sometimes when doubling track trains stopping moving thinking they can't get to the next station, so now I always check my train list after doubling track. Just selecting one of the affected trains clears up the confusion for all trains immediately, but still I don't think this is supposed to happen.

Yes its a small bug. Either do not double-track when there is a train on the track, or pause the game first and then double track. That will allow the train to keep moving normally when you un-pause.

Just thought of another one, perhaps appropriate for mr nedfumpkin and his trainmaster project. I thought it would be nice to add a rebuild button to the train panel, to go along with replace and retire. Trains get less reliable with age, and this would be an option to eliminate that penalty, for perhaps 25% cost of a new train. The idea is also that older trains would get a bonus to passenger revenue, perhaps 10% for every 10 years starting with year 15, and rebuilding would incorporate technology advances to improve reliability and performance, adding maybe 5% to top speed for every 10 years that have gone by since a model was first made available, and improving a level in reliability and acceleration for every 25 years, though the old trains still shouldn't really be able to compete with modern designs.

Of course this would only come into play on a few very long term scenarios, like playing from 1875 to 1975. but I never said it was a practical idea, just one I found appealing!

I would really like to see support for more than one platform and also perhaps quadruple track. Another feature I would also like is the ability to choose which tracks go one way, which go the other, and tracks that run both ways.

A good idea, but probably difficult to implement in the RT3.EXE code. These things are probably easily done with events if the scenario author so desires.

One other notion which until now has been just a little outside of my ability to articulate, I'd like to see the ability to set a minimum value for trains to run, ideally with fuel costs already factored out. So from one station to another, you could tell a train not to run unless it has $25K or $50K profit coming out of it. Maybe this could be a player preference setting of some kind, which would apply to all trains equally. Or it could be a minimum per car load.

Now that I'm working on scenarios, I can say that I'd also like to see more variables available for testing and calculations. I know it doesn't sound very practical, but I was thinking I'd like to be able to calculate train revenue per mile times average miles per hour to get revenue per hour as a way to check for productive efficiency. The status page gives you all kinds of nice statistics, including both of those, but unfortunately most of them are unavailable for event scripting.

I've thought that this would be a good idea also. The problem is, a train loads the mosts profitable cargo as soon as it's available. If you set a minimum value for total cargo, and a maximum number of cars, the cars may populate the train, hit the maximum number, but be below the minimum shipping value. The train would then just sit there. The logical thing would be to "unhitch" cars and reload when more profitable cargo became available, or wait to load the train until the minimum value was met, but this would probably require extensive code hacking, even if one knew how the game decides what to load.

low_grade wrote:The status page gives you all kinds of nice statistics, including both of those, but unfortunately most of them are unavailable for event scripting.

I agree - if all of these statistics are in there somewhere, there must be a way to use them, mustn't there?