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I don't know that you can ignore them, but in my experience (which might be skewed because I'm comfortable with OpenTTD signals) the fact that they're "path-like" signals means that in most circumstances all you really need to do is drag a line of signals down a track in the direction you want trains to go on that track.

Thanks for the thorough response.

The problem I think I'm seeing is that they're reserving detours that just lead them back to the same blockage—it's as though they're going "oh boy, clear track!" without regard to the fact that the clear track in question is just a longer route to the same blocked track they're trying to route around. I hope I'm not missing what you meant—my sticking point is that it doesn't seem like there's any "past" or "future" planning required to see that both routes end up at the same bottleneck, and to then prefer the route that's shorter before the bottleneck.

This screenshot has a good example. If one train is in the station, the next will pause at the signal just before the station, then embark upon the much longer loop, even though the end result is that the train is stuck waiting for the same blockage to clear even farther from the station. Just after building this, I even saw the second train wait before the station, and when the train occupying the station left, going around the entire loop rather than just go into the soon-to-be-empty station. I think it's hard to avoid this behavior when I have multiple stations coming off a main line. I recognize that this is a nontrivial problem which you've thought about a lot more than I have, but isn't there any way the pathfinding can recognize when an alternate route doesn't actually help with a given obstacle?

I have a few more thoughts/suggestions:

- I'm noticing that the pathfinding sometimes does really weird things. I can figure out how to post screenshots or saves if helpful, but it's stuff like trains taking longer paths, I guess because the best path is blocked by another train, but in a way that's nonsensical because the longer path is basically just going in a big loop before proceeding along the original best path—that is, the new path is strictly worse, there's no apparent reason for the detour. This often makes trains clog up side stations and such, which were admittedly not perfectly designed but never had any reason for many trains to be going through them.

- Maybe this is something you want to leave to players to discover, but a tutorial that gives a little more detail about what different train types are best at and how combining them can be good might be nice. ('players' is me; I'm still figuring this out)

- This feels mean, but I liked the old icons better. Would an option to use them be possible?

Thanks. I think my issue was that I couldn't understand why I would avoid deforestation...

Maybe it's silly, but it's weird to have a unit of resource that doesn't clearly correspond to any of the units it's consumed in, so maybe there should be a way to see a train's consumption in MWh/cycle or something, just so that number has any frame of reference. Or maybe I'll just get used to it.

edit: another suggestion with logging camps... it would be cool if trains could automatically recognize a "moved" logging camp as the same one, so that I don't have to find each train that was going to the old location and update its orders.

And a question: are the rain/wind/sun indicators in the lower right meant to be the same scale, i.e. if rain is 4.0-6.2 and sun is 3.0 to 5.0, then generally dams are better on this map? I can't be sure but I just generated a few maps and it seems like sun is generally higher-valued and more consistent? Is the tradeoff that solar requires semiconductors, or maybe just is worse without upgrades? I'm kind of confused about how dams work in general; it's not clear what a kilowatt-hour is in the context of this game's timescale.

Oh, and a tooltip with production chains for resources so a newbie can see what e.g. a plastic plant will require before buying a card.

This is an awesome middle ground between OpenTTD's janky half-baked systems and Factorio's life-consuming complexity. I've been wanting to play exactly this game for a while. And I appreciate how quickly you implemented some of my suggestions on Steam.

If I could get away with a few more- It would be nice to have a tooltip (or just an explanation) of what exactly the tradeoff I'm making is when I set lumber camp tree preservation, and it would be nice to have a visual of the max range of farms and lumber camps when placing them. for optimization.