I am playing around with ideas of how to provide more incentives to use trains.
In the current state, my experience is that there are not enough incentives to use trains, especially considering how expensive they are to setup and research. Furthermore, all the nice advanced controls with signals are rarely needed, unless you specifically design your rail network so it requires them.
Of course, you can set resources to be more sparse during map creation, but that will also make the game harder - what I am looking for is a way to incentivize building larger, train-connected expansions.
There are two mods that I have discovered that may help with that:
- Resource Spawner Overhaul It shares the same motivation, but is not working for 11+ and you will most likely not need that many expansions to finish the game
- Endless Resources It basically makes all resources work like oil. While this does not increase the need for expansions, it provided some ideas (see below)
- Generally increase the size of resource fields
- Reduce the richness of resources to result in a significantly reduced total yield per resource field if resources were to deplete
- Like in Endless Resources, do not let resources deplete completely
- Increase the distance between individual resources (of the same kind) by a lot
- (maybe) size of resource fields increases by distance from starting point
- It should be multiplayer-compatible
The biter spawning/evolving speed probably needs to be adjusted as well
Other ideas that I have, but probably need even more changes: Have biters/spitters guard the resource fields
What I'd to know from this dedicated community:
- Are there any mods out there which do this already? Or any other related mods I may have overlooked?
- What do you generally think of this idea?
- Are there requirements/considerations that I have overlooked? Or any other ideas which may work towards the initial goal even better?
- I have not created any mods yet, but I am a Computer Scientist and quite willing to work on this. If any of you want to contribute to this mod, let me know, I like working in teams
- What would I have to take into account to achieve interoperability with resource-introducing mods (e.g., DyTech etc.)?