Advice on how to improve my score please.

I'd say 87% is very respectable playing solo on the 91 timetable.

Don't think there can be much advice you could be given, perhaps read the TTs more, then you can plan a little more ahead, and don't be afraid to slow things down when too much is going off at the same time.

I think the other thing to consider is what difficulty settings (failures) did you have in place? Your score and the minutes lost won’t take into account if matters were totally out of your control - if you have a stack of trains behind a nasty TCF then those delay minutes rack up quickly & it is effectively impossible to get 100%. Even a delayed train coming into the sim could delay other trains if it clashes with the timetable of another service.

My advice is to not focus on it to be honest. Minutes lost and gained doesn't allow for any delays (a delayed train coming in that loses more time being held for other trains still costs minutes lost for isntance) and sometimes doing the right thing doesn't score the most points.

The main things to focus on are 0 ACOAs, 0 wrong routes, 0 trains removed etc and other obvious no no's like a train passing over an open crossing.

jc92 in post 139143 said:

My advice is to not focus on it to be honest. Minutes lost and gained doesn't allow for any delays (a delayed train coming in that loses more time being held for other trains still costs minutes lost for isntance) and sometimes doing the right thing doesn't score the most points.

The main things to focus on are 0 ACOAs, 0 wrong routes, 0 trains removed etc and other obvious no no's like a train passing over an open crossing.

When I play any sim, the score is totally irrelevant to me. Real life signallers aren't scored on whether a train is loses two minutes while passing through their patch, so I don't lose much sleep over it either.

I can't remember the last time I press F5 when playing Simsig ...

Just finished playing my first game of the 1991 timetable with crossings off (as advised) and have a question regarding my score.

The "Total minutes lost" was a massive 3651. and the "Total minutes recovered" was only 193. What would be the best way to improve on this?

Just for your information, my final Total score was 15333 out of 17651 (87%), which didn't seem too bad though, or am I kidding myself?

Any helpful advice would be really appreciated as I'm about to start a second game because I enjoyed the first one so much.

Thanks

One thing which I've always wondered, on some of the sims (including King's Cross) one seems to accrue occasional "other points lost". I've no idea what causes these.

DavidSplett in post 139157 said:

One thing which I've always wondered, on some of the sims (including King's Cross) one seems to accrue occasional "other points lost". I've no idea what causes these.

I was wondering what those points were for too. I only had 13 of those anyway so wasn't really concerned.

I'd have said 87% is pretty respectable for a first run-through.

In real life, a bobby has to make the best of what's thrown at them. And even ARS spends quite a bit of its time working out which is the lesser of two evils. Remember, too, that there's more than one signalman's position in virtually all sims, and that in real life even a novice bobby is doing a job they've learned intensively for (at least) a week on each shift for each position they cover. Once they've been doing the job for a while they have more & more of a feel for what's likely to be critical and what can look after itself.

For instance, a train taking the left-most route at a diverging flat junction can have the route set through the junction as soon as it's the next one over, whereas a train taking any other route will take a conflicting route and it's better to wait until you have a clear idea how things will be as the train approaches the junction. With experience a bobby can tell where potentially conflicting trains are likely to be when it matters and sometimes set routes a bit earlier, or at least see in advance that today that particular train needs more careful monitoring than usual.