Rail head vs Rail station

[Jarkhan]

Just bought the game recently and play for a couple hours, what is the difference b/w rail head & rail station?

Also I read some tips and people mentioned about rail/logistic pts got refocused when you place rail station/rail head wrong, what does that mean?

[Pain]

The station creates transport points. The rail head does not.

The rail head is meant for a drop off point, that is inexpensive to build in comparison to a full station. If you build rail between cities, I recommend you build stations everywhere and not rail heads.

Rail heads I use mostly for front depots, to get supplies to a frontline for example. No need to have transportpoints going back.

[Jarkhan]

Thanks @Pain. So on the rail head, the transport pts are not going back but does they game transport exactly as needed or does it just dump all my transport pts pool at the rail head ends?

For example, 1000 pts from rail station, ending at rail head far away. 1 unit require says 100 food there. Will the game just transport 100 pts there or will it dump the whole 1000 pts at the end?

[nemezis]

Game will only transfer what is requested. You can watch this video there is a chapter about rails:
https://youtu.be/e80YZgnK_wg

[FourGreenFields]

Originally posted by Pain:

The rail head is meant for a drop off point, that is inexpensive to build in comparison to a full station. If you build rail between cities, I recommend you build stations everywhere and not rail heads.

That would cause a refocussing penalty. Often one you could easily avoid.

Originally posted by Jarkhan:

Also I read some tips and people mentioned about rail/logistic pts got refocused when you place rail station/rail head wrong, what does that mean?

Imagine you have a setup like S-S-S-S-S (S being a city with a rail station). Each time the logistics points from one S encounter another station, they get the refocussing penalty (see manual), reducing LP (lowering max throughput) but refreshing AP (going further).

Usually rails have enough AP to go much further than to the next city, and in that case a setup like S-C-S-C-S might be better (C being a city with no rail assets), or S-C-C-S-H (H being a city with a railhead). Also consider that two level 1 rail stations do not have the same performance as one level 2 station - iIrc the latter is more efficient.

Also consider S-H-S-H-S. If a city gets captured leaving you with S-C-S-C-, the right-most C would not get full logistics points, but with S-H-S-H-S it would still receive full LP (but consider mothballing unneeded railheads if you want to improve efficiency a tiny bit).

[Pain]

I guess my recommendation was a bit overly generalized, you're right.

But you can't just say that you have to skip every odd city or so. It depends how far the cities are apart really.

Let's put it an other way, have long distance be rail stations and mix in a railhead here and there.

I found that having stations in a city to be good for my play style, especially when the cities are spaced out quite a bit and not crammed together. So it depends on planet generation, how you set up your rail system at the end.

[Jarkhan]

Oh i see the purpose of the rail head now. It's for avoiding refocus penalty , also it's cheaper. Thanks a lot you guys, really appreciate it.