I generally really dislike the freight modifier, just like I dislike too high capacity wagons. Mainly because if you try to balance trains to accelerate ~reasonably~ when full, if you have a freight weight multiplier or high capacity wagons, the train will probably be totally silly when accelerating empty [silly even for my terms].Bad_Brett wrote: ↑01 Jul 2021 17:43Thank you, those are really good suggestions.V453000 :) wrote: ↑01 Jul 2021 13:17 If you want an advice for engine stats & progression, try to define a few groups/classes of engines.
If you want it simple, make the newer generations in a class better in all aspects, and they will always feel welcome and powerful.
If the classes are distinct enough, it will be interesting as the player has a choice which engine to use.
NUTS goes to extreme lengths with this, but anything like "more TE&power but low speed" vs. "high speed but poor acceleration" is already good.
If you want passenger trains for short/long distance, the most important aspect is loading speed and capacity.
Do you have any opinions on the freight modifier? Should I take it to account or try to get the right balance without it?
I'm also unsure about the air drag coefficient. Does it affect max speed or acceleration... or both?
Finally, how can I best simulate speed loss in curves due to the lack of a leading truck? Should I use a callback that automatically decreases the speed when the engine enters a curve, or are there better ways to achieve this?
I have air drag coefficient on a SUPER WTF value of air_drag_coefficient: 0.004; in NML, which disables air drag (0.004*255 ~= 1). I absolutely dislike that a tunnel slows the train down - and it can be quite significant, at least at higher speeds - Also, I prefer to balance just power for when the train reaches max speed, this is an extra value that's not helping.
Causing curve speed loss if a vehicle just enters a curve sounds very harsh and it would probably be quite weird in terms of how it calculates the curves. There is probably no reasonable way to do this, as the lowest curve speed is the one normal rail vehicles use. However, if this pull request gets merged, you will be able to reduce the curve speed down to -95%, so if you build short curves, the train just goes 2km/h through it. I'll be using this feature very extensively for future NUTS versions.