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.

[wild_dog]

I kinda disagree about the obsolete bit, there are 2 things that LTN is still almost uniquely suited for, IMHO.

If you just want simple point to point trains, or even only want 1-to-many delivery trains, then yea, I agree, vanilla can handle that stuff now just as well.

If you want to have a depot somewhere storing all your trains and them being dynamically assigned to do certain deliveries based on demand? That is possible with Vanilla (I've built a version of that myself), but I would call it cumbersome, and you tend to run into scaling issues. Having more than 1 depot and doing that is a pain.

When you start to delve into precise quantity or mixed item loading of trains, then LTN is almost indispensable IMHO. Especially if you want to combine it with 'on demand dispatching'.

I'd made a system in vanilla that could do that as well, but the circuit networks required to make the one multi-item loader station work was very complex, needed some fancy wiring with the radar wireless signals, and was essentially still a 1-to-manny setup. The only reason it worked so well was because I only needed the 1 multi station at my mall. If you want more sources for multi-item loading stations, you're still gonna have a bad time. And don't get me started on cross surface deliveries if you are using something like space exploration.