Advantages of LTN?

[Estelyen]

Hello everyone! I'm a long time Factorio player (over 3600h on Steam) although I haven't posted on the forums a lot yet. What's probably weird about the amount of hours I already played is that I almost haven't used trains at all yet. I've never liked the idea of having to hunt for resource patches, so I've always had mods active that let me place them wherever I want and my bases have basically all been main-bus-based. Please, no hate for that, everyone can play like they want

Now with 2.1 around the corner, I plan to try something else for my next new game and I'm envisioning my first city block design. Some people seem to suggest that LTN is the best way to do that. Having read that train logistics have gotten a huge upgrade with 2.0, but not being familiar with them, I'd like to ask here, is that still the case? What can LTN offer me that the native train system cannot? I definitely don't mean to diss LTN by asking this or something, it's a genuine question of open curiosity, posted openly so that others who might think the same thing can read the answers here as well.

Thanks a lot people and have a fine day!

[Tertius]

If you haven't used trains before, you should not use a mod like LTN that changes train behavior before you learnt how vanilla trains work. In my opinion, you should see how vanilla trains work, how they can be managed, and if there is any feature you're missing. If there is some feature missing you're unable to implement with vanilla trains, and LTN is able to provide these, then you can try it.

However, LTN is kind of obsolete. It was conceived for Factorio before 1.0 to solve station reservation issues (black hole effect) that was solved with the addition of train limits with Factorio 1.1. As of Factorio 1.1 LTN is kind of obsolete, even more with the interrupt system and with wildcards for generic trains as of Factorio 2.0.

City blocks is another problematic concept. It's nice for small setups, but gets increasingly more difficult to handle with bigger bases because it will congest. And you spend more time and production on placing rails than real production buildings. LTN is able to work around some of this congestion issue by deploying trains on a demand basis because it's hardcoded in, while with vanilla trains you need to take care of this yourself by properly setting train limits. Vanilla trains need one more level of understanding. But one way or the other, you need to take care of item flow very much.