Factorio Forums

Hi,

i suggest to dispatch new orders for rolling trains, if it has finished it's delivery and would return to it's depot.
This keeps the train on rolling and saves some time.

Downside: The fuel must be checked, if trains are only refueled at depots.

Greetings, steinio.

The idea is really interesting, but I don't think it's feasible to accomplish that without adding a lot of overhead.
Below are some drawbacks I can think off the top of my hat that will come from this.

Like you said fuel would have to be checked and trains low on fuel sent to their depot regardless. Currently LTN does not care about fuel so adding any logic will result in lower performance. It'd also mean players are no longer free to refuel trains however and wherever they want.

Marking a train as available the moment it leaves the requester could result in stuck trains in networks that are not designed to allow going anywhere from any point.
At least it would grind a train to a sudden stop when it receives it's new schedule. Murphy's law says that will be right when blocking one of the most heavily used junctions inducing traffic jams.

With the current system I can cache depot-provider distance to find the closest train to a provider. If a train is currently somewhere on the network I'd always have to calculate Train-Provider distance.

With trains only dispatching from depots you can easily optimize networks so trains can reach any provider fast.
I'm using linear distance between depot and provider. A change to a random point to provider would make any network optimization next to impossible. In the worst case the closest train is actually on the far side of a large lake and any train in a depot built where the lines merge would be twice as fast.

Overall I don't see the benefits of possible reduced travel distances outweighing the drawbacks and game limitations.

I love LTN, however, recently I've started to use only vanilla train schedules, mainly because of one reason - half of the train time is wasted on visits to the depot stations. This not only time-consuming but also jams train intersections too much. So I propose the following setting:

Go to the depot station after Nth delivery only.

This could only be triggered if: the train is empty and is about to leave a requester station. If the train is not empty or there are no deliveries or if it was Nth delivery, a schedule to the depot should be generated and from there it should go as usual.

I'm not familiar with the internals of LTN, but it should be easy to implement, except maybe for "is about to leave requester station" part. It could be mitigated by increasing "wait for inactivity" to 10s (for example), so the train would stay for 10s at the requester station for the new orders.

merged into existing rejected request

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