Factorio Forums

What kind of things you can do to balance trains between stations?.. I want to rebuild my base for 1k SPM, from my current 300, and even now I have problems with balance, which I solved just by having A LOT outposts and big stackers everywhere. Also I have a really simple circuit that disables station if it's not enough ore for train to pickup, but because of that, when outpost shrinks, many trains are constantly in the move, often returning without ore because while they were on their ride no outposts were opened... And now I'm only doing trains only for ores...

I want to solve this problem for this time modlessly. I'm considering to somehow make a thing that will only pass trains from providers when they are needed, and send it to the biggest priority consumer(with lesser amount buffered trains?..)... but I'm somewhat afraid to start as that will require some circuits, and also connecting everything to everyone and additional difficulties for creating outposts... And I wander if there are other simpler methods?..

I would need to ask what exactly you want to achieve. What exactly do you mean by "balancing"? If you want to know others opinions how to balance your setup, you need to describe your setup exactly first.

When you write, that you disable pickup stations, then I assume they are all named the same. And next, I am thinking: 'oh no, not that again!' Because as far as I know, sending an arbitrary number of trains (t) to an arbitrary number of stations (s) with the same name, can not be controlled - at all -, because a train does not have knowledge of where another train goes. That is the basic problem with this, yet people keep going down that road again and again. (Remark: It works in cases where a train is already very close to _all_ possible destinations - like in the stacker and waiting for an unlaoding station to be freed - and the access to those destinations can be controlled, like it is in the usual setup with a rail chain signal segment in front of the unloading station(s) and ALL trains having to go through that controlled area. But that can not be done on an open track network that spans the entire map). You need a train management system then, but which is very complex and not achievable with vanilla circuitry for a reasonable investment of time and brainpower. Then you need a mod like LTN. I never used it, but of what I read it is exactly that: a train manager.

You next best alternative would be to have individual names for all your pickup stations, which solves that problem entirely. The price you have to pay for this is to setup the name of one station and the schedule for one train each time you build a new mine.

On a very basic level that imo is everything there is to say regarding that topic.

"biggest priority consumer" ...

I forgot about that. This is the problem of having m suppliers and n consumers. The simplest solution is to use a turnover "station" (TOS) (it is not one single station, it is a turnover area with several unloading and loading stations and a balancing mechanism for the resource) for each resource with the m/n situation. All suppliers deliver to the TOS, all consumers draw from the TOS. The price for that hughe simplifaction of a complex problem is the TOS itself. It is an additional facility. And depending on the rate of throughput, a TOS can be a big sucker. But no circuitry needed - at all.

Trains, when doing One->One, it is simple.

When doing One->Many, or Many->One, it is almost as simple. I say “almost” because you always leave the “One” station open, and turn the “Many” stations on depending upon supply or demand (depending upon which side the “Many” is on). Many Iron Mines feeding One Iron/Steel Smelter, for example, works rather well. One Green Circuit maker feeding Many places that need them (Module making, Red Circuit Making, Blue Circuit Making, Green science, etc.) also works well. Ideally, however, you would have as many trains as there are stations on the “Many” side. It is not required, but it can help.

What is problematic, however, are the Many->Many setups. Many Iron Mines feeding Many Iron/Steel Smelting areas. When you get to that point, it is often best to break one (or both) of the Many’s up into smaller groups. These Iron Mines feed this Iron Plate smelter, those feed that Iron Plate smelter, and these other Iron Mines feed the Steel Plate smelter.

What you never want to do, however, is turn off ALL of the stations. You want at least ONE station to remain enabled on each train’s schedule.

You can also turn the many-many into many-one-many with a big buffering and packaging station in the middle. That central one of course has to be appropriately huge dimensioned.