Factorio Forums

Trains are too safe right now if you ask me.

I think it would be very interesting if some extra features were added to trains to make them slightly more realistic (in a loose sense, of course) and slightly more dangerous if they're used irresponsibly.

When players drive trains, they can push the speed past 1.0 into 1.2, presumably running the train's engines on overdrive to make it go faster. This is fine for the straight paths because the train doesn't have any sideways force applied to it. However, when going through turns, the train is not built to be stable at such speeds, so if the player is going too fast through a turn, the train may derail and slide across the terrain, damaging anything it plows through in the process and exploding after it had wasted all of its motion. Trains on automatic will slow down through turns automatically, so as to prevent crashes, but the player should be careful not to go above a certain speed, perhaps 1.0 or perhaps a different number depending on the condition of the train, like damage or something, so as not to crash the train.

Furthermore, if a train is going too fast at the end of a dead-end of track, it will blast through the safety barrier and shoot forward like a 400 ton railgun, destroying anything it hits in front of it for several chunks

Perhaps this idea has already been thought of for development, but I thought I'd throw my idea out there anyway, in case it hasn't. I'm not sure how the physics would work, if any, since the game doesn't have a "physics engine" per-se, but I'm sure there's a way to handle it.

Quick explanation of idea (tl;dr): Train derails if it goes too fast around corner (but automatic trains slow down to prevent it), Train derails if it hits a dead-end too fast, both derailments cause the train to destroy anything in the way of its path.

Wouldn't such realistic train be also easily derailed when running over stuff?

I'm pretty certain there's a derailment animation in progress, as evidenced by an error message that often occurs when being reckless with trains in .11.x

I think running over items or cars/enemies wouldn't be a problem for the trains, trains demolish cars all the time in real life, they're pretty sturdy, I guess it's up to the discretion of the devs and the forum debates to decide what's bad and good for trains.

IRL, hitting a vehicle with a train very often ends up at least partially derailing the train.

I suppose that depends on the car, and the train, look what happened to the time machine in back to the future 3, that looked like a fairly heavy duty freight engine, a lighter express passsenger engine might have been derailled..

And no, trains aren't THAT safe, even the devs acknowledge that biters can be an issue for trains, hence, the gates on railways, making it more difficult by having your train get derailled and hence blown up just because it ran into a big biter would be too hard, with the changes they've made to train physics in 0.11, it's likelyy that they'll already stop dead when they hit a biter, which is pretty much certain death for it.

For the sake of gameplay balance, no.

As much as I love to use trains, I realize I often would have saved time and effort if I had made an ultra long belt or pipe. Adding drawbacks like this will discourage train use, while I feel this should be encouraged instead.

Psycix wrote:I realize I often would have saved time and effort if I had made an ultra long belt or pipe.

or a chain of roboports, and logistic drones.

No, cause number of need robots rises by factor 2 and slighty expotentially with the distance.
Where waiting time on roboports depends on the number of the robots in a logistic network, and the longer they need to wait the longer they need to load and so this is a bit recursive and so it is slowly exponential.

What I wanted to say is, there is a point, where building a train is definitely cheaper, faster and has more capacity than robots and that depends on the length of transport.