New contracts only from a home station

[dinth1906]

Hi. I started playing on a London, Tilbury and Southend map. My home station was Woodgrange Park - so its a (badly connected) branch station from the mainline. Since the start i have expanded my network a lot, unlocking everything between Fenchurch Street (mainline terminus) and Upminster and built a conductor office on every station. Unfortunately all the contract offers im getting still start on Woodgrange Park which is over capacity now and i cannot do much except of running local trains between Woodgrange Park and Barking. What am i doing wrong, what can i do to start getting contracts for a mainline or at least different branches?

[Hoshi]

Contracts have to start at sink station, it's those where at the end of the platform there is a small arrow pointing toward a vertical line.
Since I don't know which London map you are playing on it's hard to say which stations have this but try looking for stations that have that and unlock and connect those and you should get different contracts.

[Zorro]

Please also keep this info in mind when using commuter trains:
Although it is possible to build a conductor office at every station, not every station will accept commuter trains. To check this, please hover your mouse pointer over a station and press v (or as an alternative, press the middle mouse button). There are five different symbols in a row. The leftmost (one arrow up) is used for commuter trains and must be green. If you are playing custom maps from the workshop, some map creators forgot to add this option and so these maps are pretty useless.

[Tech 52]

Zorro lähetti viestin:

If you are playing custom maps from the workshop, some map creators forgot to add this option and so these maps are pretty useless.

I agree.
I wish there was a automated checker to check that all is correct on the workshop files before they are published. It's annoying to search for and download a map, only to find it's incomplete or it doesn't work properly.

[Arnstein86]

Zorro lähetti viestin:

Please also keep this info in mind when using commuter trains:
Although it is possible to build a conductor office at every station, not every station will accept commuter trains. To check this, please hover your mouse pointer over a station and press v (or as an alternative, press the middle mouse button). There are five different symbols in a row. The leftmost (one arrow up) is used for commuter trains and must be green. If you are playing custom maps from the workshop, some map creators forgot to add this option and so these maps are pretty useless.

All stations accept commuter trains and can be used as stops. The symbol is just the stations which can be included in the contract generation.

Map makers often use this to set up how they want the contract generation to behave. Specially on longer corridor tracks etc. So you don't get a lot of contracts needing to turn around in the middle of the corridor f.ex.

So; all stations can be part of a commuter and urban contract, but is not necessarily part of the contract generation as mandatory contract. Just a fyi :)

[Zorro]

Your explanation is more precise than mine. I try to sum it up:
- If a new commuter contract should be created with a conductor office, it is mandatory that this feature was enabled for this specific station by the map creator.
- If a map creator does deny this feature for every station, no new commuter contracts will be created at all. I have come across maps from the workshop with this setting.
- If a creator of a map only enables very few stations for commuter trains, it will be very very difficult to generate the necessary green points per hour to go up a tier level. This renders some maps useless.
- If there are only a few stations with this feature enabled, getting new commuter contracts is a pain in the ass. You have to manually adjust the stops. And there is a huge problem with this: Adding addional stops do not raise the payment !
An example:
Station A, B and C are connected by a single line from left to right. The distance between A and B is 10, the distance between B and C is 20. If a map creator enables station A and B to create commuter contracts, you will only get contracts with these two stations. If I take one of these contracts and add station C, my train has to travel 66% more distance. But there will be no raise in payment, the contract is still only worth the distance from A to B !!! A lot of map creators are never aware of this problem. This results in maps that are hardly playable.
- I dont know how the new office (custom contract) will handle this setting.

Some map creators also miss to add any sinks to their maps. Some of these maps are flagged as 'endless' but of course it does not make any sense to play such maps. No contracts for any train type will ever be created.

[Mišo]

Zorro lähetti viestin:

Please also keep this info in mind when using commuter trains:
Although it is possible to build a conductor office at every station, not every station will accept commuter trains. To check this, please hover your mouse pointer over a station and press v (or as an alternative, press the middle mouse button). There are five different symbols in a row. The leftmost (one arrow up) is used for commuter trains and must be green. If you are playing custom maps from the workshop, some map creators forgot to add this option and so these maps are pretty useless.

In Update 2 (just released) we made this info shown each time you hover the station sign to reduce player confusion.