Thursday, February 17, 2005

Feature Request - Train overspeed + damage

How about the realistic acceleration providing a large speed boost to trains as they come downhill (as gravity would) but that actually goes past the trains max speed. But if they go too fast for the train, the reliability drops fast?

Maybe to counteract this effect, the player would have to apportion speed limits to certain parts of the track (indicated by some sign by the side of the track). This speed limit could be configurable or (probably easier and more sensible) a restriction to the trains maximum speed.

Then players could "take a chance" on the overspeed... if it's only a few mph for a few tiles they pretty much get away with it because it's only temporary but on long downhill runs, the train could go way too fast for the tracks (i.e. have a crash/derailment), defined by the type of track it's running on (e.g. maglev would be okay up to several hundred mph but rickety old normal track lines would send the trains off the rails at that speed) or will need to be restricted to it's max speed.

You could even have it so the more heavily loaded the train, the faster it accelerates downhill, so that nice two-carriage run down from the slopes crashes and burns when you try to cash in on its popularity by adding more carriages because, whoops, you forgot about the speed limit...

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