[RR] Routing Problems

[Smellincoffee]

I've played five games of Railroads now, and in most of them I've run into an odd and sometimes infuriating problem: with no explanation, the game will refuse to let me create routes that should be possible. In my first game, for instance, Las Vegas had a demand for grapes. A vineyard lay north of the city, but when I hooked them up -- and both had depots -- the game wouldn't allow me to send grapes from that vineyard to Vegas. Vegas stars in another example:

There are oil fields at Yuma, so I created an entirely new rail line purely to ship oil to the power plant in Vegas. This was expensive; $90,000 for the plant, $25,000 for the annex, and a few hundred thousand for the lines and bridge. And yet --! The game won't allow me to add it. Why is this?

Today I noticed a different problem: for the first time, a train going in the wrong direction.

After I completed the Phoenix-Flagstaff-Vegas connection, Bullhead requested I deliver ore. Fine; there's an ore mine north of it, so I ran a line from the ore into Bullhead, bought the refinery, and then ran the line west to Los Angeles, the only city with a Demand for gold. But instead of taking this short run, the train decided to head for Vegas! And then south, down to Flagstaff and Phoenix, before FINALLY meandering west. In addition to this taking up entirely too much time and costing money, that train forced me to double-track several spots on the route so it wouldn't stall traffic. Why did it not take the shorter route, saving me money and getting enough gold to LA in time to meet the goal?

I even tried changing its route so that it would originate in Los Angeles and take passengers and mail to Bullhead, then return with gold...and even so, the silly train wanted to wander back toward Phoenix. This is utterly silly pathfinding. And it kept happening in this game! I tried to ship goods to Vegas on that Yuma line I established earlier, and instead of taking the short route up the middle of the map the train AGAIN wanted to go through Phoenix and Flagstaff!

 

[germanicus12]

Just played the map, never had any routing problems, though a passenger train chose a more congested track with 2 stops at a mine and cattle farm over a dedicated passenger line connecting both cities. So routing seems to be a problem for some trains. Overall through the game, on any map I seem to have little problems with routing trains.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I suspect the reason may lie in that I had the rails running on the wrong side of the station. While I can't be sure, I made that mistake in the Midwest scenario -- I wanted to send steel from Pittsburg to Toronto, but it wasn't letting me set up the route. I realized (after panicking) that the line I had going between the two cities didn't connect to Pittsburg's station.

Even so, that isn't always the case...in that same scenario, I couldn't run oil to a refinery on a line I built JUST to do so. The line ran straight by the station, in front of it, so I don't know what the hold-up was.

At the moment I'm playing the Northwest scenario and trying to get a couple of villages to turn into metropolises. I don't think they're going to make it. And without Boise growing bigger, I can't buy a newspaper like the scenario wants me to..