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Hell yeah they're great, a helicopter construction yard is super useful to have, really allows you to project capability across huge areas of the map if you can pay the fuel costs.
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May 4, 2022 02:51
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Thanks for all your help yesterday. I can now say the game has successfully got its hooks in me once I realised that the main thing pulling me away was FOMO from Fortnite and Destiny I managed to get into the zone and my little republic of "First Real Go" did its first export of some clothes. Now we're ramping up gravel production to stop relying on external sources hooray. Well we were until my lunch break ended and I have to return to managing actual humans. LeFishy fucked around with this message at 14:05 on May 4, 2022 |
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May 4, 2022 14:01
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LeFishy posted:Thanks for all your help yesterday. I can now say the game has successfully got its hooks in me once I realised that the main thing pulling me away was FOMO from Fortnite and Destiny I managed to get into the zone and my little republic of "First Real Go" did its first export of some clothes. Keep posting. It's fun to see what other people are doing, whether they're new or more experienced. Also, don't be afraid to mod the game if you feel like it. There's a lot of high quality stuff on the workshop, and while some of it is a little unbalanced, "unbalanced" in the context of this game means "more services in a smaller area" or "production for fewer/no inputs." It can feel cheaty if overused but it can also be a lifesaver in niche circumstances to give some variety to your game or as a capstone project, especially because a lot of modders think balance is achieved by massive build costs. It can also be a fun additional way to represent technological progress beyond just time based vehicle unlocks or the barely used research system.
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May 4, 2022 14:14
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Might as well share what I've got going on: Here's the main town I've been branching from and most of the basic construction material factories. Working on a prefab panels factory now in the mountains right next to the gravel.  Over here is my Oil production area/helipad where I'm also making Asphalt and slowly working on rebuilding the nearby town for workers. Also got an oil power plant in the works because I have so much spare oil in reserve.  I don't know why these screenshots came out so drat crunchy
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May 4, 2022 14:22
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those residential buildings are looking prettttyyy close to that toxic gas factory
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May 4, 2022 14:26
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punishedkissinger posted:those residential buildings are looking prettttyyy close to that toxic gas factory it's fine they're fine
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May 4, 2022 14:26
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Their sacrifice will lay the foundation for a glorious republic.
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May 4, 2022 14:43
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Dumb question, which way do rivers flow/is there a way to see that
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May 4, 2022 16:17
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Does anyone have any good tips or set ups for a windfarm? Im trying out needing power for the first time and id like to set it up but apparently its one windmill per power station.
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May 4, 2022 19:17
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Trying to get helicopters working with the fire station and it doesn't seem to be working. I have a cargo helicopter with a high water capacity and huge swaths of water for them to pick up from but they don't seem to be doing anything. Is there a range limit for what they can respond to?
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May 4, 2022 19:33
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Benagain posted:Dumb question, which way do rivers flow/is there a way to see that I don't think they do? I think they're just static bodies of water, pollution seems to spread uniformly from the poo poo hose. Hihohe posted:Does anyone have any good tips or set ups for a windfarm? Im trying out needing power for the first time and id like to set it up but apparently its one windmill per power station. Wind turbines output low voltage power, using the small power lines, so you can feed those backwards through a transformer to connect six windmills to a single HV line, and then use switches to glue those HV lines together, but this does mean your wind farm is going to be like 50% switching gear by volume lol. Generally my suggestion for making a wind farm is "don't" because it is much, much easier to just slap a wind turbine down near a thing that uses power, and the built in substation will magically beam power from the windmill to nearby buildings. They're very good for things that don't need a lot of power but are remote, like a highway petrol station, or things that do need a lot of power and you don't mind banging some turbines in nearby, like a steel mill. But as for actual dedicated wind farms, wind turbines just do not output a lot of power and it is very fiddly to set up all the wiring and connect all the switching gear to a road so it doesn't burn down. They're certainly worth using but I would generally limit their use to things that can just utilize their built in power generation. I especially find them useful for powering oilfields, because you can't put anything else useful in between the jacks and oil wells also do not need staffing, so powering them remotely can sometimes be useful. There is nothing stopping you from slapping them in cities either afaik, other than looks. But if you're going to do that I would suggest using a solar array instead, as it needs workers and outputs a lot more power, which can offset your consumption during the day or be sold for profit. So yeah, there's nothing stopping you from building a wind farm, but they're just generally more fiddly to set up than I think they're worth, unless you got some modded transformers that can connect a whole pile of them. At least with the underground cables it should look a bit tidier. explosivo posted:Trying to get helicopters working with the fire station and it doesn't seem to be working. I have a cargo helicopter with a high water capacity and huge swaths of water for them to pick up from but they don't seem to be doing anything. Is there a range limit for what they can respond to? There is a range limit yes, I think about 4 or 5 kilometers from the station? It's unfortunate because I would like them to operate at greater ranges. It's the same for the construction depot too, but at least there you can manually assign them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:37 on May 4, 2022 |
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May 4, 2022 19:49
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Yeah the helicopter has a range for water and firefighting that’s nice because it’s a radius and not following roads, but it still isn’t map wide. There’s a few mods that are specifically wind turbine switches to help you kind of hide the weirdness of them. I haven’t toyed with them yet so I’m not sure how effective they are at making the switches not bizarre mazes of electric wires (or underground wires.)
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May 4, 2022 22:07
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I mean presumably someone does have to do that with wind turbines in real life, but also in real life that isn't me, the supreme economy overlord, and also presumably in real life they have invented electrical substations that you can plug more than four things into.
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May 4, 2022 22:34
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This thread is inspiring me to give the game another try. Is there a recommended industry/production chain for newbies that's the easiest to get a sense of the basics from?
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May 5, 2022 01:15
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Log082 posted:Want to know why my population is at an average >90% happiness? It's because I provide all of their needs, ensure they have good quality housing, and also the average citizen does actual work for approximately a single hour per week unless they're randomly assigned to a construction crew when showing up at the train station to get the day's work order. I thought unemployment caused unhappiness or crime or something? explosivo posted:Trying to get helicopters working with the fire station and it doesn't seem to be working. I have a cargo helicopter with a high water capacity and huge swaths of water for them to pick up from but they don't seem to be doing anything. Is there a range limit for what they can respond to? The helipad is connected to the fire station, and has fuel, right? It's definitely possible to place it a little too far and not realize. The fire could also be out of range. Selecting the fire station should show a range. OwlFancier posted:I mean presumably someone does have to do that with wind turbines in real life, but also in real life that isn't me, the supreme economy overlord, and also presumably in real life they have invented electrical substations that you can plug more than four things into. In real life there's also the concept of power storage for times when the wind does not blow. The power system is such a pain, there's no concepts like "do not actually export power if there isn't enough" or "ensure there are enough people present for shift changes so that your republic does not grind to a halt when it's quitting time and everyone just fucks off" A lot of the systems in the game have slack built into them, and this is not one of them.
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May 5, 2022 01:24
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JosefStalinator posted:This thread is inspiring me to give the game another try. Is there a recommended industry/production chain for newbies that's the easiest to get a sense of the basics from? Build a Construction Office and work your way through the basic building materials like bricks and gravel, asphalt, etc. The production chains aren't too intense and as you get more built and running you can start supplying your own materials for jobs and save money on imports. Once you have most of those you should have a pretty good understanding of the mechanics.
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May 5, 2022 01:25
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Volmarias posted:I thought unemployment caused unhappiness or crime or something? It does, but going to a job but doing nothing because the storage is full of coal/brick/steel/whatever is just fine.
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May 5, 2022 01:52
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JosefStalinator posted:This thread is inspiring me to give the game another try. Is there a recommended industry/production chain for newbies that's the easiest to get a sense of the basics from? Probably the simplest one is forestry, you plop down a woodcutter, put logging vehicles in, connect it to a sawmill, connect the sawmill to an open storage (because it doesn't store much product inside) and fill the whole thing with workers from a bus stop and then voila, you have a thing that produces boards, and you can set it up anywhere with trees (even if you plant the trees yourself (also you have to replant them yourself occasionally, which is unfortunate)) But boards aren't particularly valuable or useful, they are used in construction but less so than stuff like concrete, it does give you the basic "connect two factories together, assign vehicles and workers" however. Another good option early on is gravel, but that is a little fiddly because you collect raw stone from quarries and need to move it basically five feet with a dump truck into the gravel plant, ideally you build the gravel plant next to the stone deposit and then drop a quarry next to it, because the gravel plant for some idiotic reason has virtually no storage for raw stone, you literally have to give it a constant feed of trucks and it's basically what the 25 tonne dump truck is for. Gravel, while being fiddly to set up, is very useful as it is used in almost all construction and in many construction materials. However the thing about it is that is very bulky so transporting it anywhere is awkward, it is often easier to build a new gravel plant rather than cart it across the map, but that also makes it a good thing to build as a springboard into self sufficient construction because buying it in anywhere other than at the border means you pay a lot in shipping costs on a largely worthless item. That concept of high bulk, low value resources comes up a lot, it is a big reason to do as much processing near the extraction location as possible, you almost always want to do your first refining step next to the mines for example, coal ore should be refined into coal at the coal mine, bauxite at the bauxite mine etc, because that dramatically cuts the volume of the goods and increases their value, making them much better for export and general transport. There is nothing saying you have to do it like that, but you will need to pay for the train wagons to haul mostly worthless spoil around the place just so you can get some valuable bits out of it at the refining plant. Much easier to do that with a conveyor belt over a short distance. For revenue I think probably the best is oil/fuel. Plop some wells on an oil field, connect them via pipes and 3>1 pumps into a tank, connect the tank to a loader/unloader and you have a fully automatic machine that makes oil for you to sell via train or truck, but oil isn't super valuable. Pump it into a refinery however and connect up the outputs to filter-locked tanks for bitumen and fuel, and those are both much more valuable and also you can distribute the fuel to all your petrol stations and other buildings that refuel vehicles, and get free fuel for your republic. You can also run a power plant off oil too if you like. The refinery needs a lot of workers though to output at max capacity, and also consumes a lot of oil to be fair, so another option you can do is buy oil in and refine it, this is probably easiest to do coastally, as oil can be tanked in in huge quantities, but affording the tankers might be tricky. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:17 on May 5, 2022 |
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May 5, 2022 02:04
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The best/easiest export produce early on is crude oil. It's valuable enough to make your cash reserves go up even as you import everything else into your young republic, and that was very important for me when starting out. Not worrying about the money removed a lot of stress about not having everything planned out or even understanding everything. Enough time to learn heating, happiness, and then loyalty (and now water and sewage for me). Raw Oil is just the pumps, electricity, the piping, a firestation, and then something to take it over the border
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May 5, 2022 02:25
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what is the rationale behind gravel factories not having conveyor inputs anyway?
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May 5, 2022 02:50
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Don't think there is one, since all the modded gravel factories I have got's at least one input+output conveyor pair
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May 5, 2022 02:59
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punishedkissinger posted:what is the rationale behind gravel factories not having conveyor inputs anyway?
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May 5, 2022 03:51
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It’s likely game reasons rather than realism reasons which is fine
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May 5, 2022 04:30
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Normally I’d be pissed and download a mod I’m okay with any reason to use giant rear end quarry trucks. I promised a year ago I would invest myself in a comprehensive guide that’s actually relatively updated for newbies and new-ish but “how does this weird complex system work” level players…. It’s just so hard to sit down and write it, but it might be a good time considering it doesn’t seem like we have too many “brand spanking new” mechanics on the horizon since I assume something like the metro will mostly follow existing rules.
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May 5, 2022 04:52
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euphronius posted:It’s likely game reasons rather than realism reasons which is fine The game itself is incredibly flexible in what it allows as evidenced by the modded gravel processors with belt inputs among other things like how heliports work in vanilla or the ability to download a 1930s set of mod that appropriately constrains options for the era.
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May 5, 2022 14:05
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Requiring dump trucks for the quarry sort of seems reasonable enough, insofar as you have to involve dump trucks for the thing in reality since you're not going to be staying in the same place doing the extraction, and it's usually not underground. The lack of connectors for the gravel processing plant is a super obnoxious oversight(?) though.
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May 5, 2022 15:24
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Personally I would have modeled it more like the forestry, where the excavators drive around digging up rocks and then the trucks collect them, and then you can truck it out of the hub building. But the main issue with the gravel plant IMO is that it has no input storage, it would probably be fine if it had more docking spaces and more storage, rather than needing a queue of trucks. Also give me gravel as a byproduct from ore refinement! You could totally make waste product management a thing, the steelworks near where I live built massive concrete piers out into the sea to stabilize and expand the river mouth using slag from the works.
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May 5, 2022 15:29
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If we're talking about technical limitations frustrating gravel processing, it's the entry/exitway limitations. If they could continuously enter and exit you could get closer to entitlement. I thought they were fixing them at some point to be more continuous? It may be in the traffic update currently in testing. Anyway I think you can mod it too sinc I think it's a slot number aspect on the building if you're willing to live with graphical glitches. I'm not, those trucks better be smooth and not clipping.
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May 5, 2022 15:49
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I am really not a fan of the gravel industry implementation. You end up being massively throughput limited simply because you can not physically shove trucks into the plant fast enough to actually keep production up near maximum values and are thus having a plant that is idle about 1/3rd of the time. Also sometimes the bus carrying the workers gets stuck in the traffic jam of the trucks waiting to be unloaded because there are no workers and that's always awkward. Also I will bat for fabric --> clothes as a good starting industry. You don't need research, you turn a tidy profit even with all imported base resources, backfilling to grow your own crops is also simple, clothes fill a need of your population and fetch a good price. And over time you can build up a chemical industry to reduce input costs there (although frankly the vanilla chemicals plant is far too weak to actually be able to meet demands given how much chemicals you need everywhere).
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May 5, 2022 18:00
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Not that it's a very satisfying system, but unless you're getting hosed by a lack of accessible rock faces on your map (Morgenrot is annoying for this) you've basically got 400m of walking distance to fit the quarry and plant in, then have a bus stop further down the road and the loops only intersect when the dumpers need gas.
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May 5, 2022 18:14
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ArchangeI posted:I am really not a fan of the gravel industry implementation. You end up being massively throughput limited simply because you can not physically shove trucks into the plant fast enough to actually keep production up near maximum values and are thus having a plant that is idle about 1/3rd of the time. Also sometimes the bus carrying the workers gets stuck in the traffic jam of the trucks waiting to be unloaded because there are no workers and that's always awkward. I think that’s a great part of the game . It’s just like real life
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May 5, 2022 18:15
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Mandoric posted:Not that it's a very satisfying system, but unless you're getting hosed by a lack of accessible rock faces on your map (Morgenrot is annoying for this) you've basically got 400m of walking distance to fit the quarry and plant in, then have a bus stop further down the road and the loops only intersect when the dumpers need gas.
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May 5, 2022 18:30
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ArchangeI posted:Also sometimes the bus carrying the workers gets stuck in the traffic jam of the trucks waiting to be unloaded because there are no workers and that's always awkward. Do Never send a bus to the plant itself, always to a bus stop nearby. ArchangeI posted:Also I will bat for fabric --> clothes as a good starting industry. You don't need research, you turn a tidy profit even with all imported base resources, backfilling to grow your own crops is also simple, clothes fill a need of your population and fetch a good price. And over time you can build up a chemical industry to reduce input costs there (although frankly the vanilla chemicals plant is far too weak to actually be able to meet demands given how much chemicals you need everywhere). Yeah, the important thing to remember is that you will probably be bottlenecked by vehicles entering and leaving customs, so what you want to do is get the highest throughput per ton going to the border to queue up. Don't export crops, refine it as far as you can go (crops -> fabric -> clothes) and export that. Get your aggregate industries up and running as fast as you can; fetching gravel from the border or paying for it with auto build will ruin you over time since the price is the price per ton PLUS a somewhat steep ton/mile surcharge. Import the cement and bitumen to make your own asphalt and concrete. Power is effectively unlimited in the beginning, but the coal for power isn't.
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May 5, 2022 18:55
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Volmarias posted:Do Never send a bus to the plant itself, always to a bus stop nearby. A general rule, in fact. If you want to prioritize a specific industry then select the platform and manually assign where workers should go, then set the percentage for your desired industry really high, any delivered workers will then go to those buildings first and then the low percentage ones if they cannot get a job elsewhere.
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May 5, 2022 21:30
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Now that I think of it, do you really even need workers for stone in a standard start? I'd never thought of skipping out on them, but giving it a try now excavators do the same job in quarries as they do in bauxite mines. Which also makes it a lot more simple to have a remote outpost and conveyor poo poo down, if you're only thinking about getting a tanker every couple weeks up that hill rather than hikers every shift.
Mandoric fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 5, 2022 |
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May 5, 2022 22:47
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Mandoric posted:Now that I think of it, do you really even need workers for stone in a standard start? I'd never thought of skipping out on them, but giving it a try now excavators do the same job in quarries as they do in bauxite mines. Which also makes it a lot more simple to have a remote outpost and conveyor poo poo down, if you're only thinking about getting a tanker every couple weeks up that hill rather than hikers every shift. No you can just use excavators, and I think they also made it so the quarry can store fuel for the digger too, much better than using bodies.
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May 5, 2022 22:57
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Yeah excavators are one of the types of "free" labor through mechanisms, similar to how farms don't need labor if you have a tractor to sow, harvester, and trucks to move the grain, or how the right combination of vehicles lets (non-sidewalk) roads build themselves.
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May 5, 2022 23:02
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The big gotcha with the gravel excavator is that it periodically DOES need to leave to refuel. And it is So loving Slow So unless you've built a gas station right next to the gravel pit, your raw gravel train is going to grind to an immediate and painful halt as trucks either wait for a full load that won't come, or meander back and forth without any cargo.
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May 6, 2022 03:21
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Re: gravel, you are usually not limited by your quarry, so you don’t need a high percentage of rock for those. I always use a modded gravel processor with a turnaround and it’s pretty easy to keep it fed with two quarries at 30% or less with enough trucks to keep the frequency high.
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May 6, 2022 04:09
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| # ? May 28, 2024 13:41 |
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Volmarias posted:The big gotcha with the gravel excavator is that it periodically DOES need to leave to refuel. And it is Use a distro office to send fuel to the quarry my dude!
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May 6, 2022 04:09
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