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tldr
i just wanted to share with you my ~1k spm base. It was just a prove of concept, nothing more. I used LTN because of the sheer benefit for the playstyle, but it could be done with simple train network.In all my playstyles with multiple train lanes i suffered from not having tunnels like in Transport Tycoon. The bad acceleration of trains just kills every network i have build up. I don't like the ratios used with trains in factorio. i want it to be more realistic (1 loco : 10 trains maybe). So i abandoned every game until a certain point. But there was one thing that i wanted to build: 1-1 train network because of the sheer bustling involved and the nice acceleration of trains. But i wanted to reduce train "stop and go" traffic even with good acceleration involved with 1-1 trains, so i thought if the pathfinder could not be my friend? The main problem in my opinion with stop and go traffic are mainlines where trains have to cross lanes (well you might come by with a loop train network but i don't like the idea that a train has to drive all over the world to reach a station nearby).
So i came up with the "drive everywhere" base idea. The idea behind it (i know the idea is good but in reality i lags a bit) is, to trick the pathfinder with: Every possible route should have the same amount of (non scheduled) stations on it's way. The only hurdle was, to not build shortcuts, these ended up as bottlenecks (because there were no stations on this shortcuts and were "great routes" in the opinion of the pathfinder). So i ended up with a solution that was not "reduce crossing of lanes" but "cross other lanes all the time".
So there are horizontal lines (equidistant to each other), alternating W -> E, E -> W and all sites/stations act as switches for these lines.
Pros:
- Great expandability (until some point)
- Nearly no matter where you place additional sites
- Fire and forget build up of new production sites (that is the main reason for LTN), no fiddle in connecting the site to a mainline
- huge "wusel factor" / bustling
- Not as much as i wished, but the pathfinder sometimes sends a train one step further to not halt on a red signal if a shorter route would be used
Cons:
- You have to avoid agglomerations of high quantity production sites, because this jams part of the base
- The pathfinder is not optimal for this buildup, the expandability comes to a halt if too many trains drive through the center of the base, it should be easier if the pathfinder would pick "not so optimal pathes" from time to time or would drive around agglomerations of trains
overview
a train pathing through the base
some parts of the base
