Hello everyone! Yang from Yang's Transport Tycoon mod here, our development team is having a debate about whether to keep "short" (4x4) rail track pieces, or only offer longer (6x6 and above) track types, and we wanted to know the community's thoughts on this.

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Our options are:

1. Keep both track types, but offer a separate mod for "hardcore" players that disables the short turn recipe and adds new longer variant models of certain locomotives (with stat buffs). This sub-mod could also potentially add even longer turns too (8x8, 10x10), and include other changes such as higher water consumption and further de-buffing sharp slope inclines.
2. Skip making a separate mod and just get rid of the track type in the core mod. Everyone shares one experience, simple as.

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Argument for keeping short turns: More accessible building for the every-player. Longer turns would require more terraforming work, which is hard to do (and to get it to look good) in the mountainous and jagged terrain of VS. For hardcore players, they can always disable the shorter turns via a sub-mod without taking away accessibility from everyone else.

Argument against keeping short turns: It becomes possible to have longer (10 blocks and above) locomotives as the default in the mod, which look very nice. This will also force players to really think bout their route, as it'll make planning mistakes costly to fix.

The "standard" engine listed above has two sizes. XL would be if we remove short turns (either directly, or via a sub-mod), and the "small" 10-block length one would be if we keep the short turns (Do keep the size of the trader in mind as reference. Consider how large a 4x4 turn already is).

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TL;DR: Shorter track variants make it more accessible for building railway networks, but also limit how long a locomotive can get before we get visual issues when turning on them. We want to know whether the removal of shorter rails and inclusion of longer locomotives should be a separate sub-mod, or an out of the box inclusion.

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Please, do share your thoughts on this!

^(PS from Yang: We've made a lot of progress, adding) *^(automation)*^(. Can't wait to aura-farm and hype post about that soon...)

To correct some misconceptions and provide more context:

1. We already have a separate "minecart" gauge which is 1x1, for tight mines. These rails in the image above are for larger trains primarily meant for connecting towns in large servers. All the locomotives shown above in the image are part of this "standard gauge" which uses wider rails.
2. There already is a heavy speed penalty applied to sharp turns. This isn't a "turn vs turn but better" kind of debate.
3. The engines are NOT meant to be late game content! That's why we have tiers of locomotive, as well as rail (there's a wooden rail variant). Veteran players could very well get a railway up and running before the first winter (just a very shitty railway).

This post will be deleted after today, to avoid spamming this community with frequent posts.
^(For the record, we're also primarily gathering community feedback, this isn't a popularity content of vote. The ultimate decision will be made by the dev team, based on testing data too, but we want to know what people think and expect. We want to know what the community thinks so we may discuss it.)