Auto-replace trains to ones with refittable engines

[Jubilee]

Recently i auto-replaced all trains to ones with refittable engines (specifically to SH 125). All engines were replaced properly but now, i'm facing an issue. There are some trains which have a source station which is both near a city and also near an industry. Their orders are to full-load any cargo in the source station. The result is that the engine is almost immediately filled with mail from the city and there isn't enough time for the rest of the wagons to be fully-loaded with any other cargo. I'll of course go one-by-one and fix this issue, but it would be nice if the refitting process had a way to handle this issue. For instance, a setting or an on-screen flag to "automatically refit engine to the same product as the first wagon on auto-replace".

[Eddi]

a setting or an on-screen flag to "automatically refit engine to the same product as the first wagon on auto-replace".

the problem with this kind of setting is that it is tailored to one specific use case, and the developers will immediately be buried in slightly different use cases that need a slightly different setting, which leads to one or more of the following:

• a totally cluttered UI
• a lengthy discussion over which use case is more valid than the other
• a rejection of all use cases, to keep things fair

an example of this is the "remove wagons" setting in case trains get longer. which wagon do you remove? the last one? inbetween ones to keep the ratio of transported cargos the same? how about adding wagons in case the train gets shorter?

the only way you're going to cover all of this is if you switch to whole-consist replacement, which has its own complications.

[Jubilee]

Well, i see your point. Anyway, something's fishy here. After going through all of the trains one-by-one (thankfully they weren't that many, about 20), i discovered that almost all of them were as i wanted them. Only 3 of them were wrong, and i think that those had this type of engine since they were manually created, so...

It seems that while auto-replacing, the engine is already refitted to something else than the default, so that's nice.

[odisseus]

Yes, that's right. The engine is automatically refitted to match the cargo type of the wagons (if such refit is possible; for example, SH '125' cannot be refitted to oil). I wonder how it would behave if the train has wagons for multiple cargo types.

You can avoid this issue entirely if you don't refit your cargo trains to SH '125', which is rather underpowered for cargo services anyway. Alternatively, you can change the orders to "Full load" to make the train wait until all its cars are filled.

[Jubilee]

You can avoid this issue entirely if you don't refit your cargo trains to SH '125', which is rather underpowered for cargo services anyway.

Well, i started in yr 1950, so when this came up, i used it. It had reached 100% reliability, so it was the best option compared to others (70-73%).

[LaChupacabra]

Well, i started in yr 1950, so when this came up, i used it. It had reached 100% reliability, so it was the best option compared to others (70-73%).

This reliability indicator in case of reduced breakdowns doesn't work - it's a bug in this game that almost no one knows about. Any vehicle that reaches its maximum reliability, no matter what is this value, will break down just as often.

Below you have a screenshot of the test results for both settings and for trains with a reliability rate of 75% and 100%. In each case, I marked the moment of the first failure after leaving the depot (100 trains x4)

[+] Spoiler

For normal breakdowns it worked, for reduced ones, the result is practically the same. You can even see that in both cases vehicles tend to break down in the same time. The slight difference may be due to chance.

Yes, the best solution is to sell the current trains and buy new ones. This will also allow you to remove their excess when new ones are faster or more capacious. Or simply not using the SH 125, because it is indeed quite a problematic engine.