Hi all, TSW currently offers quite a bit of different approaches to what the player has to do to start up the locos. From incredibly detailed "cold start" sequences to the engine being already fully prepared and only awaiting reverser and throttle input. Where the system falls noticably short in my opinion is that all of this is currently pre-set by the scenario designers, which means that I haven't encountered a single service which wasn't running yet. So all those cold-start instructions are essentially wasted because there's no services to use them on. What should vastly improve this would be to allow the user to choose their preferred loco startup type, maybe globally in the game options or "on the fly" during gameplay. For those that select "cold start", some extra time should probably be added before the trains have to get to their first destination so that there's sufficient time for completing the setup. Conversely, what this could then also allow is that users could skip all of the required loco setup steps before they can get moving. Which I would find particularly useful in timetable mode, where I'm usually 5 minutes or more late to the first stop because I needed to figure out where all the buttons are and which of them I need to activate (yes, I only run this game every now and then and don't know the trains that well).
i remember asking this on one of the Q&A streams or at least one of them and matt said why they weren't able to and for the life of me i can't remember the reason
I believe it was something like "AI trains can't handle starting procedures". There have been suggestions like this before, and I totally agree, it would be nice to have a choice, like setting the weather, whether we want a cold start (like it is the first train of the day) or just take over a train from a colleague (i.e. everything is set and running).
Irrelevant to TSW but back in MS Flight SIM when starting out on a flight the plane was always running, the fix for this was to shut it down, save the game & set as default flight, then everytime you started a flight the plane was shut down the cockpit was dark/off.
