On standard scenarios, the sim will occasionally fail to recognize station stops and won’t register a successful completion of the scenario. What can I do to avoid this? I’m playing exclusively German routes with vR locos, if that helps.
In my experience it's because there are two clocks in the game, one that is visible and one that matters. Ignore the big clock and just look at the ETA on the HUD. If it shows the same minute as the objective, you should be good. In a few cases (mostly with decade-old scenarios), there is a long window, and/or stop duration. Sometimes there is something more complicated but I only remember two weird scenarios and neither are about passenger stops.
This can't be answered in general. But there's one big difference between Standard and Career scenarios: When being late, you only get a score deduction on Career - a feature that can fortunately be disabled in the game settings - but a Standard scenario will fail completely if you're arriving too late at one stop. So Standard mode is much stricter. I've come across (badly designed) scenarios that have "Go via" instructions with a minimum speed greater than 1 mph to pass the marker - invisible for the player - which will also lead to scenario failure if you're traveling too slowly over that marker. Please name a specific scenario - there is no such thing as an "arbitrary failure".
Wouldn't blame the system. It's fairly common to have a mission complete only if all tasks are fulfilled. And the task is to make it to the stop in time. Other than the system, it's up to the scenario author to use it well. That means an achievable timetable, and correctly set instructions.
If I complete a scenario in career mode but do badly and get negative points, I still get a check mark showing completion. If I do exactly the same thing but in standard mode, I don’t get the check mark. That doesn’t make intuitive sense.
That's why they introduced Career scenarios a decade ago. Standard punishes with failure, Career with point deductions. How to use it is the scenario authors' freedom. Sometimes it's intended to be a tough challenge, sometimes it's not designed well. Those markers I was referring to - for testing the scenario in the editor preview you can set these minimum speeds. In some cases the author forgot to reset them to 1 for the player loco after testing. That's why I asked you to name a specific scenario which "arbitrarily" failed.
The objective itself is intuitive enough, in my opinion - stop at Place at Time1 or between Time1 and Time2. The fancy stuff begins when you stop before Time1 and it doesn't register. Because the ETA is already 2 minutes ahead. For it feels equally silly to keep leaving stops 2 minutes early. So (back in 2016) I did drive slow enough to match the clock. The problem itself is persistent, depends on a bunch of things but two minutes per hour deviation is pretty normal. (It can also be faster.) Case in point, that's what players really have to figure out. Being late is sort of a gotcha. You have to be on time to succeed, doh.
