About 90° turns: I don't like them because of some station designs I do, forcing the trains to go a certain way or to enter a depot. I found that 90° turns can mess up these kinds of design, specially when the station gets more complex.
About teraforming: I don't really care, its just that making it more expensive could prevent some players from a massive use.
About industries: I usualy play on quick goal servers, and I find it quite easy to stick to a large group of industries on one side of the map and then lay a track to the other side to deliver them. I mean that industries of the same kind may be too close to one another. By the way this reinforces the "first comes first served" implicit rule, as there are no large usable groups of industries for everyone.
My main point is about bringing a more strategical aproach to the game. I'll try to explain it differently:
# Engine choice: actually I always take the fastest engine in all cases: runing costs are so low, very little power is needed to move cargo, and hills doesn't even matter.
Lets check the parameters that have an influence on strategical choices:
- Reliability (actually used)
- Needed power (actually pointless): a higher weight multiplier would make the decision tougher as more power is needed: sometimes it could be better to choose a slower but more powerfull engine, or decide to make smaller trains with a faster engine.
- Runing costs (actually pointless): higher runing costs would make the player think before systematically buying the best engine. Actually the difference is so low between an engine and the other that it does not influence the choice.
# Route choice and design (actually pointless): with a significant hills steepness the choice of what road to open will be greatly influenced by the geography, making the game less simple than the usual "grab a bunch of industries and lay a super long track". The mountainous tracks would have to be more realistic, with turns.
I suggest you to test with x5 and 5% or 6%.
You are absolutly right about the competition which makes the game intersting. Its just that more tactical options would make it less mechanical.
By the way another request: using a newgrf train set would be awesome: 2cc, nars or ukrs...