Factorio Forums

You should be able to use wildcards resp. the '*' in station's names of schedules somehow.

Purpose: artillery wagon/train on patrol. You may name stations "Outpost 1", "Outpost 2" and so on, and only set(edit) in the schedule "Outpost *". This way the train will "alphabetically" go to each station matching this pattern until it reaches the last matching one. If you name all stations the same, the train will only go to the nearest of them.

Naming the stations e.g. "Outpost *" as solution instead won't gurantee that the train travels the route, the player wants.

Maybe the add-station-dialogue should automatically detect similar named stations and offer the artifical station name with wildcard. Perhaps vast counts of similar named stations (10 or more "Outpost") should be hidden too in the interface.

Similarity means at least 5 identical chars at the beginning, and different chars following, except the name ends after that. (=> "iron" <-> "iron ore 6"), the difference-chars must not/wont contain space letters. In other words: similarity means random letters at the end until the last space, everything before, including it, has to be identical.

I'm trying to understand your use case and what this accomplishes that the current system doesn't already reasonably accomplish or can't be accomplished better already. If you really need a train to stop by each of 20 named stations in order, each of those stations should probably be an individual stop in that train's list. I feel like this may be a situation, however, where what you really want is stations that are named identically but turn themselves off once they've got the supplies they need.

Otherwise, the only immediate suggestion is to take a look at the mod Logistic Train Network. It's got the functionality at this point that most people who want complex train capabilities are really looking for and there are a lot of people who'd love to see it's capabilities become vanilla.

Name all stations "Artillery Outpost"
Wire up station to chest with artillery shells.
Set station enabled if "Shell < 5"
Train will arrive to any enabled station with route base > outpost > base > outpost > base > etc...
If noone enabled train will wait on base.

If you want to arrive to any station on your own train - place another station somewhere near...
That is very bad idea to arrive to regular station on special trains.