How trains choose a station.

[Burnrate]

Given my current understanding trains going for multiple stains that have one name will only check two blocks ahead to see if their route is blocked.

I would like to propose that a train going to station A would check all station A's and go to the nearest unoccupied one.

If they are waiting at a signal for x time they will check for open A's again and reroute if available.

[ssilk]

The pathfinder doesn't work like this. https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... th_finding

What problem will you try to solve?

[Burnrate]

The pathfinder doesn't work like this. https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... th_finding

What problem will you try to solve?

That does shed a little more light on it, thank you.

I guess the best way to put it is that I would like a flag with Station Occupied that would add to the path calculation. A value that is pretty high so that trains will travel to farther stations when closer ones are occupied. It would make this work (http://i.imgur.com/QVJBNHk.png).

[ssilk]

Well, without looking much into that pic I can say, that the complete train setup is not thought to work as that.
The naming is thought like: You have one point like "input" and there you have alternatives. But it is not thought to alter between the "mine" stations. It will always prefer to go to the nearest. Even with your rule you want to be implemented it prefers the nearest.
What you really want is an automatic alteration: It searches in the list of equal station names for the stops, that where targeted (targeted, not arrived) at the longest time and chooses that.

We hope for 0.13, where the devs promised to have much more control about departing (and I hope also schedule-control) over train via circuits.

off-topic: What I really want is a "global network" which enables an outpost to send a signal: I'm filled, I need a train to transport.
And such stuff. The problem with the signals as they are is, that they are "fixed". You have only a limited amount of available signals and the name "A" or "1" or "Iron Ore" for a signal can be anything. So we need named signals.

[Burnrate]

It does sound much better to have the trains iterate through a list of acceptable stations or target the least visited ones. Having a global network to request trains also sounds super awesome!

I think thought to add a very high path cost to an occupied station would be much simpler and still achieve the same effect. If I am naming stations the same name I don't need anywhere near perfect distribution of trains; would just like to ensure each one gets visited when there are available trains.