Slightly confused on this one as watching videos of this route there's trains and they say you need other routes so you get those. What routes are they? Or, what route combinations do you need to get them? Thanks for letting me know whoever does.
Like on the other german routes the layers lead to a significantly higher variety of services in timetable mode. With them it's possible to drive many of the other locos of the DLCs on the route as well which is far more realistic than only two different trains and offers new driving possibilities for the player. For example, if you have Main Spessart Bahn installed the 146 + Dosto cars and the 185 with freight services are added. However this is not possible on HMA for consoles yet since it would cause game crashes around Munich... so either a new way of implementing those trains or a massive optimization of memory usage needs to be considered in order to get that working.
For Hauptstrecke München - Augsburg, this one essentially has 4 layers. Each layer has a certain amount of services that it adds on top of the timetable (hence the term 'layer'). You do not need all of them for the route to work, but each one adds more traffic and variety. 1 - The base layer that comes when you purchase the route. This includes the DB BR 423 and the DB BR 403 'ICE3'. Just this alone has ~328 individual services. ~60 are ICE services (there's hidden ones too, that use double unit ICE's), while the rest of the services are solely S-Bahn. 2 - MSB / Main Spessart Bahn. This makes use of the DB BR 146/ Dostos and uses them on RE and RB services. This also uses the DB BR 185 for mixed freight services 3 - RRO / Rhein-Ruhr Osten. This provides the MRCE BR 185.5 just for container wagons services 4 - HHR / Hauptstrecke Rhein-Ruhr. Lastly, this uses the DB BR 425 for RB services On consoles the extra layers are not available as of the time of writing, however there is ongoing work being made to improve performance and the efficiency of this layering system. Theres no time frame for when this might happen, but it is on the roadmap. (You are free to use the scenario editor and make your own timetable with whatever trains you'd like. A higher amount of traffic will of course eventually lead to out-of-memory errors and cause the game to crash) There is also the DB BR 420 thats currently in production by TSG. It'll likely be used as a substitution for just the S-Bahn services on this route, without adding any additional services of its own. There is no release date yet for this addon either. With all the routes/layers installed, you can have access of upwards of 400+ services on this route, with around 7 or 8 (I think?) different trainsets to choose from.
Exactly right. We really want to activate the layers for Xbox players, but until optimisation improvements are done it would only lead to a situation where game performance was hurt. Optimisation is high on our agenda but we still have a long way to go.
When we work on a next generation version of the game we'll take advantage of the new console capabilities. Until then however we won't differentiate between last and next generation.