Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
Can I ask you a question regarding trains. Let say you have a good needed at multiple far-flung places. EG I see you have multiple Gear Dropoff's and I'm assuming later on you'll have a ton of Green Circuit Dropoff's - how do you ensure trains with Gears or Circuits or whatever they're carrying go to the station that needs them the most, rather than repeatedly going to the same one which is closer but already full?

I've not experimented with this yet, I've only ever got trains going from A to B and back again. Got my first circular routes now which criss-cross each other. Got 3 trains on the Iron Ore to Iron Plate circuit so that one can be always moving while another loads or unloads. I'd like to be able to drop plates off at multiple places now though, my belt system is getting ludicrously big for me to extend now.
You can just have "Iron Plate Dropoff 1" and "Iron Plate Dropoff 2". In most games, I just manually set the train routes to each station on the map. All my sites usually have unique names because there aren't as many of them. I only use that same-station-name trick for multiple train slots at a single site, and I have belt balancers to keep the belts evenly fed when I do that, so it doesn't matter which station a train goes to.

The only reason I don't just do that in my game is that I am building way, way too many stations with my silly self-imposed rules. I don't want to manually manage the routes, it would be way too tedious. I can't make a train always go where I need it the most, but between using circuit networks to disable saturated locations, having a high train:station ratio, long station stops to prevent other trains from choosing that station, and the sheer bandwidth of a train-based infrastructure I can usually keep things going.