Is now a good time to start building a large map?

[lentille]

Hi,
This is a question that only the developers or people close to them might be able to answer, although I'm open to hearing the opinion of any player:

Would now (v1.8) be a good time to begin building a somewhat ambitious rail network from scratch? Meaning between 300 and 1500 stations, meant to replicate Paris, its 15 subway lines and perhaps some of its suburban train lines) Or can I expect enhancements or disruptions in the next, say 6 months, that might make a better strategy for me to begin with a less ambitious project for the time being, before moving on to a more complex realization?

Or perhaps a better question is: has an approximate date been set for the general release?

Cheers and admiration for this passionate piece of software.

[MineRickStar]

Since the game is still in the Beta version you can expect gamechanging things to happen, that is what beta is all about.
If the game is in the alpha versions than you could say it is save to build large maps.
But a true nimby player is not scared away by minor changes like, rebuilding all double tracks which are normally single track, or rewriting all timetables for all the 800 trainlines.

[TKR]

I think construction and timetabling wise you are safe. I don't see a lot changing for those fields in the future. One thing that could change is the flow of passengers entering/leaving the train being restricted by the amount of doors.

One thing I can talk about with confidence: I have made a lot of mods for the European continent, and thus also trains that run in France/Paris. If you do end up using my mods, some things will change. I am still in the process of updating the acceleration and braking values for my trains. So their performance will change. Give it up to 2 months for me to finish that.

Someone else made a bunch of Paris metros. Not sure how far along he got updating these mods. :)

[adlet]

I think you can build a large map safely. I think most changes in the future will be nuance of operations or timetable changes that you could either live without, are items of convenience, or would need to tweak for anyway, Building a large map properly also takes a long time and gives a lot of experience on best practices that would be invaluable.

[MirkoC407]

Originally posted by TKR:

If you do end up using my mods, some things will change. I am still in the process of updating the acceleration and braking values for my trains. So their performance will change. Give it up to 2 months for me to finish that.

Off-topic and somehow not in this case, especially as your MI2N ist also part of the bunch. Still thinking what is the best way to do private changes to mods. Mainly non-real liveries, sometimes passenger numbers when a suburban train holds just 40 people per car because some modder counted just the sparse seats and forgot there are so few to create standing space.
I could subscribe and edit them in the workshop folder. So basically I'd get the author updates and just need to copy in my livery section after an update again. Or make a copy into the mod folder (most helpful for being able to rename them and not find out which number is which mod) and be safe of unwanted changes but also in the risk of missing an official change that is useful.

[adlet]

I think most mod authors do not update their mods or do it very irregularly. I am also afraid their change may disrupt my operation. For this reason I prefer making a copy into Saved Games that I can then customize.

[djplong]

I've been playing this for about 2 years now. I started out replicating Boston's subways, then some of the commuter rail network (to connect to where I live) and then worked on making the Northeast Corridor to go to New York City (where I lived in the 1970s) and replicate the subway there.

I made about every mistake that could be made. And, to this day, I'm still fixing flaws in my NYC model that have the trains eventually bunching up leaving stations with no service for an hour and then 7 trains in 10 minutes (all of them saying they're anywhere from 2-40 hours late depending on how long I've let the sim run).

I'm getting better at fixing the problems but, I won't lie, it gets tedious sometimes when you reconstruct and "intervene" on the same line several times.

I could always go deeper into timetables, but I'd like a "service hours" option where the trains automatically go to bed (depot) at a certain hour and wake up fresh at 5am (or whenever) to start their runs. If that exists, I haven't found it - and it wouldn't be the first time there's been an option I wanted that has escaped my notice.

[david_neibig]

Originally posted by djplong:

I could always go deeper into timetables, but I'd like a "service hours" option where the trains automatically go to bed (depot) at a certain hour and wake up fresh at 5am (or whenever) to start their runs. If that exists, I haven't found it - and it wouldn't be the first time there's been an option I wanted that has escaped my notice.

Closest I can get you is this:
1. Buy one train for a line, Set up one train as 'Manual Orders' with your service line operating your desired service hours (eg: 5am-midnight).
My preferred set up is to set the passenger line to' depart at exactly' and the depot line set up as 'arrive no later than'
2) While paused buy another train with it's orders set to copy manual orders and copying your manually scheduled train
3) In the group tab (on the main panel of the train with the manual orders, set the interval period for the trains to be evenly spaced across the duration passenger service line. (If you set the shift mode to all orders trains will exit service sequentially after the manually scheduled train, if you set it to 'pax service orders only' all trains will go to the depot no later than the manually scheduled train)
4) Then buy enough trains (as clones of your auto copied train to get the intervals to the desired level
NB: All trains in this set up will use the same depot and enter/exit in the same place (if you want to have trains starting in different directions/locations. You'd need a new manually scheduled train for each, each with it's own group of copiers
Always make sure you have easy and short access from your depot to the station where a train enters service and to your depot from the station where your train exits service to the depot (so that the train doesn't end up doing large amounts of travelling to get to the depot.

[MirkoC407]

Yes, if you take it that way there is never the right moment to start a large network. I had up to 4 projects in parallel but condensed it down to two right now:

1. a country I invented for several strategy, battle, and political games in my teenage days, partly played against my younger brother later. Takes up roughly the north and east of Spain and the Occitan part of France. It always sat somewhere in my mind and with NIMBY as a possibility to build large train networks I gave it a go to build its rail network with European trains and a completely independent high speed network using Shinkansen.
This network has seen everything. Started in the last days of 1.1 lines were reduced to single track where appropriate in 1.2. The whole thing got distorted on the rescale in 1.4 and needed realignment. In the same moment curved platforms were built and scissor crossings removed from stations where appropriate. This was half a rebuild. 1.5 saw the new timetables and a complete overhaul of what existed until then trainwise. Then 1.7 turned all timetables upside down again with train braking. Basically until now I only have a high speed network spanning the whole coutry and some suburban trains in the capital city of Barcelona. And probably if I had started with 1.5 I'd roughly have the same today...

2. another fictitious country on the British Islands. This uses British and Japanese trains and dense schedule. Started in 1.2 or 1.3 it saw the realignment of 1.4 and the real schedules in 1.5. Braking made basically every single schedule null and void (I admit they were tight) and this is now frozen indefinitely.

3. Metro Seattle for my love of American Trains. Started with 1.5 luckily, so the worst was through. Slim availability of suitable mod trains for the West Coast has given it a bad start and one line is also to be completely rescheduled with Braking. Not to say it is as deep frozen as 2, but not too keen on building on it for some time now. It is more the "one too much" project that has to pause.

4. Northern Germany. I always liked to draw train networks on paper when I was sitting on a train and had nothing to do. And when going from a day trip to Kiel back to your bed and breakfast in Husum with not much landscape around this is a good moment. So Kiel got its Regio-Stadtbahn (tram-train) in the 70es, which today still has to make the jump from paper into the real world. Originally started in Jan Bochamm's JBSS Bahn I carried over tracks under 1.4 or 1.5 but left it without a single train running. Has seen some progress in the last weeks and will at some point in the far distance contain the whole state of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg City plus some lines leaving. With not train ever running before 1.7 probably a smooth start.

So my conclusion from this is: you never know what will come and you might end up with disruption or a desired feature that you made a workaround before and now calls for implementation. You are never safe from this in pre-release. But from what I can say from where we are now and where JBSS Bahn ended up after more than 30 years, we are pretty much there.
Joining and splitting of trains will probably be another large thing for some players. But basically the stuff that will turn a network upside down (scaling and scheduling) are done.
Playing sandbox I of course cannot say anything about the business model. I know that some players struggled when 1.3 brought real population data and their passenger numbers went upside down...