NekoMaster wrote:Too bad there wasn't a way to code Cogwheel locomotives to increase TE when climbing a steep hill (ie multiple rail tails on an incline with no flat spots to make the line less difficult for regular locomotives to climb)
Well Technically a cog locomotive will always have a high TE on any rack rail, even if flat. Usually engineers will not build significant lengths of flat rack rack though if the train has adhesion drive as well. You could simply give rack locomotives huge TE, then set slope steepness such that no regular locomotive can reliably climb a steep hill while cogwheels can. If you want a prettier means at arriving at same solution at the cost of a rail type, have a separate rack railtype that gives TE boost to rack locomotives, but not to regular. (You could also set regular to unpowered on rack or vis versa, but that is probably just annoying gameplay).
A patch solution would be to have a train calculate the average slope over a certain number of tiles (maybe realistic acceleration already does that?), so that you don't have regular trains struggling to climb a single height level. What you ultimately are trying to simulate is not that 'it's harder to climb a steep slope' but rather 'adhesion traction breaks down at steeper angles'. This patch would then need to reduce effective TE for each increment average slope increases. Almost certainly not worth the effort.