Rather than limit the number of locomotive engines you can put on a train, I would raise their weight. With the right power to weight ratio, your low-tech steam engine will get a diminishing return on speed as you add more engines to the train, and you'll never get a fast train. Make the high tech train a similar weight but simply more powerful and more fuel-efficient.
As an alternative to solve your problem, try getting a truck in the early game. The mod
LJD Vehicles by AcryInShame (maintained by steinio) offers a truck at the same tech level as the car, but with 160 inventory slots. If you're not yet prepared to setup a train to the next coal vein and you're running out on the starter vein, you can just build a road out and do a bit of drive back and forth to bring coal up until you're ready to build the train. That mod also changes car to have 10 inventory slots (down from 80) but you can change it in mod settings.
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Deadlock989 wrote:OMG. This is suggested almost every day.
There is even a thread about steam trains (and how there will never, ever be more types of locos or track in the vanilla game) not even halfway down the same page.
I hear bad arguments like this almost every day. If people keep suggesting similar things, it indicates a lot of people want it. Also, there is quite a bit of variation between these suggestions, this isn't a case of people just not checking to see if it has already been suggested (though that is probably also part of it). I think you should encourage people to check for similar current topics before posting a new suggestion when they could instead comment on an existing one. But the argument that it's a bad suggestion because it's a popular one--I can only argue to the opposite. Finally, there is a trend in a lot of modding communities in which users are told they can't suggest anything that has been suggested several times before, even when all of the times it was suggested before are too old to be valid suggestions anymore. This attitude is stifling to people's creativity.
Hedning1390 wrote:On rail world the starting resources will be greater. You can get trains within 1h if you aim for it. There really doesn't need to be something that's going to be obsolete almost immediately.
That argument doesn't quite hold up even for a narrow range of assumed gameplay, and completely ignores other styles. Maybe I play in such a way that I don't get trains for a month, and wind up with an expansive city of stone brick roads, with run-highways connecting to distant outposts on rail worlds. The details of a suggestion should be balanced to the parts of the game it connects with and should not uphold an arbitrary standard of gameplay. If the suggestion is potentially too powerful, this should be addressed, however keep in mind that rules of overpoweredness are different and very much more relaxed in single player games. But if something seems underpowered to you, you should concede that perhaps it isn't underpowered to someone else. You can try to address this further with criticism, but it's not a valid reason to shoot down the suggestion entirely.
Deadlock989 wrote:Rjskeet wrote:Well if its suggested every day then why hasn't something been done?
Because the devs aren't making the game you want made, they're making the game they want made, and IMHO they're very very good at it.
Basically this, but more importantly just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good. The Factorio dev team must determine which suggestions go into the base game and the vast majority are going to fall by the wayside. But sometimes that's what the modding community is for.