TL;DR
Add "wildcard" signals to allow you to choose train stops with circuit networks, exactly like the "any signal" wildcard but with more fine-tune control.What?
The "any signal" wildcard allows you to target stations using circuit networks, but I think it falls short in a couple of areas, specifically:1) It does not allow you to choose a specific signal when there are multiple signals on the circuit network
2) It does not allow for multiple different signals to be substituted into the train stop name
This prevents the player from being able to define more complex train stop names with circuit networks. For example, if there is a multi-item train stop named "iron+copper requester", you cannot substitute in "iron" and "copper" BOTH by using signals.
I propose that new wildcard signals are added that choose "signal at index 1", "signal at index 2", etc, or something along these lines. I think this would pair well with the indexing feature of the selector combinator to give the player fine-tune control or the train station targeted by an interrupt.
Why?
This would allow the player to create a true "many-to-many" train system with fully generic trains. Each train could be dynamically assigned a pickup and drop-off station by a circuit network, which substitutes the target stations in based on a certain index.This is currently almost possible with the "any signal" wildcard, but falls short in a couple of ways. The "any signal" runs into issues when considering multi-item stations which need to request one specific item; these multi-item stations might be named something like "copper+iron+steel requester", and while you can dynamically add in the "iron" icon with wildcards, there is no way to also add in "steel" or "copper" to construct the full station name.
I feel like this would be a reasonable addition, as substituting train station names with circuit networks is already implemented in the game. My request is just to have more fine-tune control over these "circuit substitutions" to be able to create a more dynamic train network using combinators.
Currently this "many-to-many" train network is technically possible to create if you have a train schedule with an exhaustive list of every single train stop, which could be thousands of entries long. I don't think this is a very user-friendly solution, which is what motivated me to make this suggestion.
I also feel like this is a very similar idea to the "any signal" wildcard and the parametric blueprints wildcards, in the sense that it removes a lot of potential busy work and allows for a more generalizable and scalable solution.
Thank you for your consideration!
