This work required a proper balancing and research onto historical reality of costs of various technologies and whatnot. I am greatly enjoying TF, but in all honesty, game balance is horridly wrong. So, I am currently working on a game balance mod for TF, and I found an interesting problem.

In short – how much does an unit of “cargo” weigh?

It seems that all cargo in the game is weightless, which in my opinion is odd as hell. Moreover, it makes the distinction between freight and passanger locomotives moot.

I am kind of working with an assumption that:

1 passanger = 100kg ( includes luggage ;))

1 unit of coal, oil, wood and ore – 5 tonnes

1 unit of goods – 2.5 tonnes.

However, I might be missing something.

Devs?

It seems that all cargo in the game is weightless, which in my opinion is odd as hell. Moreover, it makes the distinction between freight and passanger locomotives moot.

I know the weight of the carriages have an effect on the train, I have tested that with racing trains with various carriages 🙂 but not really thought to test laden vs unladen…although it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to test and gather usable results..

I would be interested in a reply from the dev’s just because I am curious now you brought it up.

Ill keep an eye out for your mod in the future 🙂

Simply split the vehicle what they can carry and the amount of loading capacity.

I agree. I have a train with 2 gp40-2s and 23 coal cars, 15 each load, and the train moves alone like there is nothing in it. Even tho I don’t mind that, it is very unrealistic for a train carrying that much to accelerate to full speed as if it’s empty. This game has NO realism what so ever that I can see. again I don’t mind. I don’t play for realism, I just like the game but it would be nice to have something to act like the real thing since this is a simulation supposedly.

It seems the power curve used for steam engines is wrong, initial acceleration is quite fast. A steam locomotive has good pulling power from a standstill, but poor acceleration. Rated effect is only available at maximum speed. This is why they are not fond of grades – they cannot shift gears.

For road vehicles it looks like the rolling resistance of carriage wheels on dirt roads is seriously underestimated, and even on cobblestones carriages move rather too easy.

Keeping at least the internal workings working rationally with SI units will avoid lots of misunderstandings and bugs. If users want to see something different, it can always be converted for display.

I have yet to play a game with a realistic acceleration for steam engines. Most realistic acceleration models appear to use a ‘constant power’ model, which is fine for diesel-electric, diesel-hydraulic and electric locomotives. But for steam locomotive a ‘constant force’ model, up to a certain speed, is required.

If devs wish, I can elaborate 🙂

HeighborKid: It appears that TF uses realistic acceleration/deacceleration model. This may result in a different speed curve when a train is running A->B then when train goes B->A, which may result in what you are observing.

Anyways. The goal of my mod is to introduce somewhat level playing field for trains and trucks. My goal is to assume:

Trucks and buses are capacity limited – loads and loads of them are needed to service a given route, but setting them up is easy.

Trains are infrastructure limited – they are cheap to build and run ( per unit of capacity ), but their infrastructure is expensive to build.

For what I have gathered so far, it seems that cargo is weightless ( shame 🙁 ). Morevoer, the acceleration model is way too restrictive – it takes alot of space to reach full speed. In my tests I have increased power of locomotives by a factor of 10, and then inter-city trains were able to reach their full speed. Anyhow, I am still researching.