How to time a Rail Nation comp with engines of different speeds
Rail Nation competitions (comps) can make up hours of time getting the money, licenses and research points you need to compete with high-level players. But if you don’t time them, you’ll lose out on those resources.
Timing a comp is easy enough if your engines are all the same — age, upgrades, routes run. But if you have a bonus engine or a career engine, or if one of your regular engines is much older or younger than others, their times to complete a route will differ — sometimes by only seconds, but often by minutes. Timing them to hit as soon as possible after the comp starts is the difference between winning and not even coming close.
Here’s how to time them:
- Make sure you’re timing during the recalc period in question. Being a few seconds early is death, especially if the facility’s wait time is high (more than about four minutes). Wait time can be such a factor that missing one send can mean you run out of time and thus can’t finish the comp.
- Set a train to run the route (but don’t hit the final send button). Then, assuming you have a plus account (a must for most players), look at how long all of your trains take. This includes trains of the same type, since — for example — on a two-track course, a rhino running at 78 percent repair will be several seconds slower than a rhino running at 98 percent repair.
In this example, the career engine is about 36 seconds slower than most of rhinos, so for it to hit early in the comp, it needs to be sent 36 seconds earlier than the other trains.
3. Write those times down. I put them in a Google email draft, like this:
p427 c337 k316 r301 r232
P is the pollux, c is the career engine, k is the red kite and r are the slower and fast rhinos.
4. Park your trains at least two minutes early. In most cases, you’d rather be sitting in town too long than not getting to park at all, since the comp resources will be more lucrative than the regular hauling resources. (If they’re not, why are you running the comp?)
5. With about four seconds to go before your slowest train should be sent — for example, at 1:41 when your slowest runs the course in 1:37 — click new schedule, then click to complete the course, then hit send.
6. Immediately click to copy the schedule, then get your next train(s) ready to go. Again, you’ll want to send about four seconds late to account for the delay between the start and when you can start the comp.
Crucially, don’t do new schedules with these engines. Copy the original train’s schedule. Why? Because when you copy, you can see the comp timer:
But when you do a new schedule, the timer isn’t visible. This difference is especially helpful when your next send involves several trains. Clicking you don’t have to do frantically is clicking you can do carefully, ensuring that your send is that much safer.
7. You might have to do this several times. It’s irritating, and you have to focus a lot, but when you’re trying to win something like a bonus engine or a pile of rp, it can be the difference between getting a fantastic prize and getting nothing:
That last guy probably didn’t time. Or if he did, he might not have had a bonus engine, which was necessary to do the comp in two sends.
8. Watch your trains go, click to start the comp, and enjoy your success.
Good luck <3