How does the Base Service Priority work when making a service in a scenario or timetable? I want to be able to define if the dispatcher would give a particular service priority over another one when it comes to who gets the green lights. For now I'm using a stop at and ensuring no dispatch beyond. But I tried setting the number of the base service priority to higher than 0, for the one I wanted to have signal priority. This didn't seem to work. So, I'd like to understand what Base Service Priority is and what it's intended for. I guess a question to come from the gameplay team DTG Matt or DTG Alex ? Thanks so much in advance.
I am also curious for an official answer. My experience with reservations is that if the track is unreserved, it's first-come-first-served and a train cannot cancel another train's reservation. Perhaps the priority is when three trains are involved, and two trains are waiting for the first to clear the line. But that's purely a guess on my part. In my East Coastway timetable, I also use the "dispatch beyond" checkbox to avoid reserving junctions long in advance. Since we're on the subject, I found a neat trick which you may find useful. Normally I untick "Dispatch beyond" on the travel instruction and tick it on the Load/Unload instruction, so that the signal clears only 30 seconds or a minute before departure. But if the timetable has a long station stop for some reason, this would cause issues. You could untick "Dispatch beyond" on the Load/Unload instruction to avoid reserving until you close the doors and are ready to depart, but in the UK, I understand that closing doors with a red starting signal is against the rules. To avoid this, untick "Lock doors to complete" checkbox on the load/unload instruction. This will complete automatically at the scheduled completion time, then move on to a one-second Load/Unload instruction with both unload and load unchecked, making it just a Wait instruction. Because the Wait has "Lock doors to complete" and "Dispatch Beyond" ticks, it makes a reservation to clear the signal and prompts the player to close the doors.
pretty sure base service priority is for like the priority at a base level that service has. Train A have 0 and train B has 1.0, when their is conflict between the two with dispatcher I think it'll look at what has higher priority so essentially Train B would get the road. Thats how I'm been using it so
That's what I expected it would be, but I don't seem to see that occur, unless it's because I'm using it wrong and using numbers over 1? This is an interesting trick and one to consider. Although it's been more stopping AI services so my player service has the priority whilst in motion. You're right too, closing doors on a Red is not permitted in the UK if I recall correctly.
So I've never gone over 1 normally do .5 for stopping services, 1 for express and 0 for freight and then unique ones put in right place between.
I don't think you should limit the base service priority to 1. I use 100 for express services, 50 for other passenger services, 25 for freight and lower for shunting services. This allows me to use a slightly different value if I want to give priority to one of two 'equal' services. As I understand it: if a block is occupied and two (or more) other services want to enter that block, the dispatcher chooses the one with the highest base service priority to go first once the block is clear. Once a block is reserved for a path, the dispatcher will not release that block for a higher priority service. If I want to make sure that a service definitely goes first on my MSB timetable (e.g. to prevent lockup further down the line), I use dependencies. If it doesn't matter so much and only causes a delay if a service is already delayed, I use base service priority. E.g. for the return journeys of the banking locomotives from Heigenbrücken to Laufach, I use a service priority of 40 for the banking locomotive so that it gets priority of any freight service (prio 25) that wants to occupy the same block but doesn't prevent passenger services (prio 50 to 100) from keeping priority and staying on time. This is necessary because the banking locomotive has to cross the opposing main track to join the main track towards Laufach. I use an extra 'goto' without dispatch beyond for services in both directions, so the blocks in Heigenbrücken don't get reserved from three blocks away. In practice this means that a service passing through will only rarely have to stop at Heigenbrücken.
For what it's worth, I've never touched service priorities so far. I've got a few depenencies set up, but mostly I'm just using Dispatch Beyond settings to get my trains in the right order.
