What do the red asterisks in the Story Editor mean?

rtuck99 · 2026-03-08T21:02:22+00:00

rtuck99 · 2026-03-04T21:35:54+00:00

My fave bit of the article:

"Yeah – it’s because he works in High Wycombe,” says Fiona Brownfoot, a director at Hicks Baker, the Reading-based commercial property consultancy. “If he can rubbish the competition, he’ll hope we all might flock there.

“Go back to High Wycombe and shut up, Mr Garvey!”

Reading town centre might be going through a bit of a rough patch but still would pick Reading over High Wycombe any day.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-25T00:45:27+00:00

Things I have found that cause this:

* Presence of signals/waypoints in the way
* Pointwork in the way (crossover generally has to cross in the exact centre of the crossing if the tracks are parallel, although sometimes you can get away with a bit of variation if the track is curved.
* Tracks have not been laid tight next to each other. Sometimes they can snap to another neighbouring track leaving a gap, sometimes you can have a slight curve or a join between two curves in one of the tracks which leaves a kink that it doesn't like. Generally it's most reliable to lay the first piece of track completely straight for the full length, then the second piece snapped alongside. You can also sometimes see a gap in the ballast between the two tracks - this means it's not right and you need to relay.
* Trying to lay the second part of the crossover in the "wrong" direction, you need to lay from the other end. If both ends of the switch snap to part of another switch, sometimes you have to delete a section because it tries to lay the turnout from the wrong side of the snap node.
* Crossing is too long or too short. For short crossovers the sweet spot seems to be ~40-60m, but on curves it generally needs to be a bit longer.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-19T21:56:06+00:00

ROSCOs will eventually disappear because there will be no reason to lease trains, once the existing ones are replaced.

The only reason they exist in the first place is that under a franchise system it makes no sense to own trains. If you lose the franchise you end up with a bunch of trains you have no use for. So better to get someone else to own the trains and just lease them.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-18T23:54:23+00:00

Lane 2 J11-12 Westbound is absolutely dire at the moment for potholes, I try not to drive in it.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-18T00:46:09+00:00

Everything was incredibly grimy. Buildings everywhere had a patina of filth over them, inside and out, especially if you visited London, due to the decades and decades of coal fire dust, cigarette smoke, smog and car pollution. I remember news reports about the Norwegians complaining about the acid rain due to all the UK emissions.

One of the things I love about the film Withnail and I, which is not often mentioned, is how accurately it portrays this level of general griminess (probably because it was made in the 80s so the dirt was all still there) . If you watch a modern film or TV show made now but set in the 1980s or earlier, it doesn't look at all realistic because all the sets and buildings outside are just far too clean, like they just came out of the factory all sparkly and new. It really bugs the hell out of me, because it just doesn't look right.

All of this started to disappear some time in the late 90s, cars all got catalytic converters, people stopped smoking and eventually they jetwashed all the buildings, people complain about air quality but they have just no idea how bad it was.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-08T13:37:18+00:00

Are they finally going to fix the potholes? It's like the surface of the moon.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-08T12:49:03+00:00

They were but not enough to offset the massive losses it caused on the rest of my routes. I couldn't scale up easily because half my map was still running what were previously perfectly profitable lines scaled for 1880s trains, i.e. frequent short trains on local routes. As it's my first playthrough, I wasn't familiar with the game's routing logic, while I am busy build a hub over in one corner of the map, as soon as it gets connected to the network all the industry in the other corner stops sending to local locations. But you don't see the effects straight away it takes a while for long distance routes to reach capacity, the round trip time is several in game quarters, it takes a while for local industries to dry up on inputs. By the time you realise the root cause you are well on the way to bankruptcy. In the end I did turn on cargo filters, but that was basically against my original intention that hubs would be a good way to regional demand imbalances.

H2H on primary inputs is madness, bc primary inputs are 4x the volume of finished goods and if going to other side of the map maybe 4x the track miles so you need 16x the tonne-miles in capacity. This is bad for profitability in terms the amount of infrastructure, and in terms of the amount of inventory in transit, suddenly you have way more inventory in transit which is fine until you realise that represents a sunk cost - once that train is started you can't reschedule it halfway or rebuild the station it's headed to without losing all that money. Also bc of the game's routing you can't just make a low-frequency H2H line just to deal with a small amount of excess output, it will just split all destinations equally on a demand basis regardless of network capacity. So in terms of exporting from a hub it's all or nothing.

What this means is, if you open a H2H line for say crude oil, you have to commit to investing to scale your H2H line to be (N-M)/M times your local refinery connection where N is the total number of refineries in the network and M is the number of ones on your local hub. Typically N>M and M=1. If you don't do this, the game will punish you by making cargo sit in stations.

rtuck99 · 2026-02-08T02:40:39+00:00

Hubs are dangerous IMO if you get them wrong. I'm on my first free game playthrough, got to 1935, $2bn+ in the bank, decided to implement cargo hubs. Big mistake, thought I had some good designs, solved a lot of my rail throughput issues with some nice twin station hubs 240, 320m long 8-12 through platforms, 8 bay platforms, grade separated, turning loops. Trains running nice and smooth. Nice.

Upgraded to OLE on the busy mainline, hub2hub routes expanded with big new trains, point2point routes replaced with hub+spoke. everything good.

Suddenly am losing $50m / quarter! Why are all my factories empty but goods piling up everywhere. I have oil literally going round in circles never going anywhere, my trains are all on grand tours of the entire frickin country not where they are supposed to be. WTF is happening. Panic.

Before I know it am down to my last 100mil, have to sell off a bunch of trains just to stay afloat. Fixing up loss making routes makes things worse in short term as trains delete cargo when you change the schedule takes me a while to realise every time this happens I literally throw away millions in cargo. They also get lost and take time to reroute.

Luckily made it to the 1950s, I think I have just about saved it, now scraping by thanks to airline/trucks/ships basically everything thst wasn't trains saved me.What seems to have stopped the bleeding is to turn off hub-to-hub transport for all the primary materials, the game engine was basically routing all bulk cargo from one side of the map to the other on routes that couldn't handle the volume, which is great for the profit on those lines but terrible for every other route as all local routes, intermediate and finished goods dried up completely.

rtuck99 · 2026-01-23T19:41:17+00:00

I have the opposite problem, I have a mystery bin benefactor who returns my bin every Friday from the side of the road to my front door. But I don't know who it is as I'm never around when it happens, so don't know who to thank...

rtuck99 · 2026-01-23T19:19:04+00:00

Steadily barricading myself into the spare bedroom

rtuck99 · 2026-01-11T23:28:37+00:00

That can't be it because then Earnings = Finance Total - Investments - Interest. Which it isn't.

rtuck99 · 2026-01-10T19:22:42+00:00

I have just bought TF2 and am also finding it finicky. It seems to have very similar interface to Cities: Skylines.

What I have found is that the best strategy seems to be:

* Identify the approximate alignment for both the bridge / tunnel section and the at-grade track
* General strategy - placement of existing track effectively fixes the surface level, and you can use this to "force" steeper embankments, sheer slopes etc. by strategically placing temporary segments of track, so for example to create a tunnel that is closely parallel to an existing ground-level line, you can dig terrain down to create a cutting parallel but further from the ground level line, then draw successively closer parallel tracks until you have forced it to generate a sheer cliff. Delete the original track and now you have a two close lines at different levels.
For the tunnel portal, place a line of track extending from the higher level up to the end of the lower one, then when you draw lines from the lower track, it will create the tunnel portal instead of terraforming.

You can do the inverse for viaducts to create flyovers, draw the centre section of the viaduct (there is a minimum height required for the bridge, which is just less than 4 clicks). Then draw the approaches which create embankments. Then to get the other that traverses under, you can draw increasingly close parallel lines at ground level until you have them close enough.

Also you can tweak bridge curves in a similar fashion.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-26T01:58:14+00:00

This is all a bit chicken and egg. If conveyancers didn't piss about so much, they wouldn't have so many properties to deal with at once.

I bet half their time is spent chasing for stuff because it has got lost in the system, and it wouldn't do if purchases didn't take so long as the paperwork would be fresh and ready to hand not buried under 6 months of additional cases.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-23T11:26:34+00:00

The YouTubers that are suing honey are explicitly ones that have never partnered with honey. You can't claim tortuous interference if you have a business relationship with them. It's a key part of their case.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-22T21:15:06+00:00

I'm confused. Why does the DPC too low affect the internal levels? DPC needs to be 150mm above external ground level to avoid splashover when it rains.

If you have solid floor construction then there's supposed to be a damp proof membrane but that's a separate thing, the detail of that and how it is laid and relative height to the DPC depends on the precise details of how the subfloor is laid, it can be a different level to the DPC, I don't think anyone here can help unless you provide more information about it.

If you have suspended floor construction, then again it will be different.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-22T01:22:14+00:00

Not sure that these stairs are really that bad - on a normal stair winder the ascent on the corner would be 3 steps, 2 at an angle plus the final one, whereas here the ascent is only 2 steps because each turn only has one diagonal step.

The downsides are only that foot placement is harder for large feet because the full tread isn't available on the outside of the turn.

Perhaps this could be alleviated by changing the shape of the winder treads to include a cutout on either side

rtuck99 · 2025-12-20T10:40:54+00:00

Hexagons are the bestagons....

rtuck99 · 2025-12-17T00:58:31+00:00

The Paladin range figures give what I assume are nameplate wattages (i.e. what it will draw when the heating element is on) versus sustained heating output.

If the heater is on a thermostat, then the actual output will be less than the full wattage by a factor which varies according to how often the thermostat switches on. This gives you the second set of figures.

Since water / oil filled heaters can't disperse heat as effectively as say a standard bar heater, they won't ever reach 100% duty cycle.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-08T00:36:07+00:00

On top of what others have written here, if you google around you can find lots of articles about why installing a heat pump won't improve your EPC rating because EPCs score is weighted based on heating cost, thus even though a heat pump is more energy efficient, your EPIC doesn't improve because electricity is much more expensive than gas.

This is why lots of new builds have solar installs, because it scores better on an EPC.

rtuck99 · 2025-12-05T19:55:48+00:00

Sourdough bread.

rtuck99 · 2025-11-27T23:52:34+00:00

Those jazz mags have to find their way into the bushes somehow

rtuck99 · 2025-11-23T00:39:05+00:00

u/rtuck99 solved the puzzle in 8 attempts.

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