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Wow that clone tool really doesn't work at the scale you would want to clone stuff. I'm trying to clone my residential block because I don't want to fit all the services in again, but the game has glitched out. It will literally mark all the buildings as green, but then I click and suddenly a couple buildings go yellow. So I hold the mouse button and it levels it out and all green. Oops can't place. Rinse and repeat. Guess I shouldn't have taken the thread advice for a change. Time to spend the next half an hour leveling to center I guess. Edit: Lol, the loving clone tool just doesn't work on the scale where you would want to clone. I had to cut all water power and heat lines because they were blocking. They weren't actually showing as red, but still prevented you from placing. Why the gently caress is it even in the game? Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 18:19
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It was added before most (any?) of the underground utilities were even in the game and I don't know if they haven't done a dev pass since then. Pretty sure it had some problems with conveyors and oil pipelines back in the day too. Otherwise it works just fine on most large scale complexes and I frequently use it to plan out gravel & coal outposts.
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Jul 1, 2022 21:16
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 Tonight's discoveries: Rail construction vehicles are horrible at their jobs and should never be trusted. Building a rail network is an exercise in pain, and expanding an operational one even more so. Windmills remain complete and utter wastes of resources. Economic stability without the specific crutch of oil is a nightmare and I'll be revising my starting approach in the future to go back to that. Never trust a workshop map. Next time: averting electrical catastrophe and figuring out how to turn a profit since my multiple endeavors to do so have failed so far.
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Jul 2, 2022 04:56
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Windmills are best used with their built-in substation functionality. You can connect them into big farms and put them on the main grid, but it is a lot of setup. If you just slap them in and around your industrial plants however they will output what they can to nearby buildings and reduce the amount of baseload your republic will need to generate, saving you fuel for your power stations. Generally to make profit you need to process resources, raw extraction doesn't get you very much cash, but processing facilities, especially multiple steps, will generally add a lot of value.
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Jul 2, 2022 05:19
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OwlFancier posted:Generally to make profit you need to process resources, raw extraction doesn't get you very much cash, but processing facilities, especially multiple steps, will generally add a lot of value. Yep, limping along on a clothing industry in the foreground (along with a lot of loans), and I just got steel set up, though I still have to import the iron thanks to the map layout. I'll switch over to producing fabric instead of importing eventually, it's still a 100% profit margin off just imports. Just doesn't make up for the mountain of costs I have going. Steel mill will hopefully alleviate those for construction, and then it's just... figuring out everything else to turn around the costs from here.
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Jul 2, 2022 05:23
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I am sustaining a fairly efficient republic on very infrequent food and meat exports, but mostly gravel and coal via ship. You really have to export them in volume and keep your chain efficient, but you can do it. The roleplay in my head was that my republic, an island, was started as an outpost rich in coal, so it satisfies me in that way too.
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Jul 2, 2022 08:53
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Oh yeah you can make up for it with volume for sure, but that generally requires a lot of workforce and bulk transport which can be hard to set up. Fabric>clothes might be one of the best ones because you can do it from the start and it's a two step chain and the factories aren't particularly polluting or labour intensive so you can set them up anywhere, and the volumes are low enough you don't really need specialized transport. Electronics/mechanical parts are similar but you have to research them.
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Jul 2, 2022 09:01
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SkyeAuroline posted:
 My main issue is putting signals down before the track is done so the construction vehicles can't reverse out. Also realized I had my rail construction depot severely restricted for number of workers because we hadn't been doing any rail construction. One thing I do like is how the rail construction vehicles immediately increase construction speed when more workers are in the building instead of the workers needing to be in there when the vehicle leaves the depot.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:30
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Is there an easy way to see what the radius of pollution is for a factory? Or a decent explanation on what pollution actually is in this game?
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Jul 2, 2022 20:00
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Not before you place it, you can only visualize it with the pollution monitor and it depends on how much the factory is running, I think also putting more factories together will cause the pollution to spread further, it basically dumps it into the environment and it spreads out. What it does it makes people sick and kills them, it is generally quite bad to have near your residential areas, and as a rule all factories should be located more than walking distance away from residential areas, except possibly the very low pollution ones like electronics and clothes factories, even then though you want to keep them as far away as you can. Generally for heavy industry I would suggest building the complex an arbitrary distance away from your city (at least 1km, I would say) and then plop down a pollution monitor and see how much it spreads, you eventually get a feel for it, but it's hard to really describe other than don't build heavy industry less than 1km from the city, generally. You can build it closer, or build parts of the plant closer if they're not polluting parts, but 1km is probably a safe exclusion zone for dense industrial areas and also once you go out of walking distance, the actual distance kinda doesn't matter, as it will still need transport infrastructure. Your distance is then limited by which transport method you've used, buses can't go that far cos they're slow, cable cars have a hard limit of about 3.5km, trains can go a very long way if you have a clear line. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jul 2, 2022 20:10
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OwlFancier posted:Not before you place it, you can only visualize it with the pollution monitor and it depends on how much the factory is running, I think also putting more factories together will cause the pollution to spread further, it basically dumps it into the environment and it spreads out. Thank you so much for that! If you let the game keep running, will your factories eventually pollute the entire map? Is there a hard cap on how far it can spread in total?
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Jul 2, 2022 20:16
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Captain Melo posted:Thank you so much for that! If you let the game keep running, will your factories eventually pollute the entire map? Is there a hard cap on how far it can spread in total? The pollution dissipates over time, so yeah it won't spread everywhere, it's more just that I don't think you can game it by slapping all the polluting stuff in one place, the sums will all kinda add together and it will make a big red zone around the plant. It's not like each plant has a hard "do not live [x] meters from this" limit it's more like each one pours a certain amount of water into the environment which will gradually be soaked by the ground, but if you increase the throughput it will spread further before it does. I don't know if there is a hard cap, I suppose it would depend how much heavy industry you concentrate in one place and how densely you can pack the buildings in. I would say that about a kilometer is probably the effective soft cap for most things you're likely to build? I've never built like, gigantic parallel coal plants or whatever. Eventually you start to run into difficulty getting enough workforce into an area, generally one steel mill or aluminium plant is enough for a facility, and then however many supporting buildings it needs to operate at full capacity. Coal is generally bottlenecked by how much your mine outputs etc. Industries tend to be kind of self limiting in that regard. There is usually one very labour hungry building that sets the pace for the rest of the facility and usually they also are somewhat limited by the extraction capacity of the local raw resource, because generally you want to build the processing facilities near the extraction facilities to save you shipping the intermediate products around. So you would generally build to that capacity if nothing else. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jul 2, 2022 20:19
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There's also winds which change over time but have a prevailing pattern. Start with your city and your factory separated, put monitors where you'd expect to want to build residential closer, then work to close the gap after understanding the prevailing pollution pattern. You can get pretty close when upwind knowing you may just have a few emergency hospital calls when the winds shift uncharacteristically for a month.
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Jul 2, 2022 20:27
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Does wind change pollution spread? I can't say I'd ever noticed it.
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Jul 2, 2022 20:28
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Yes, very dramatically sometimes. A very common freakout is when you spend 3 months deciding this spot is perfect, then as soon as you move people in the winds shift and they're smogged but it clears up in a month.
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Jul 2, 2022 20:38
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I have sometimes caught instances where two separate complexes spread in the same direction and temporarily poo poo up my town that was safe normally.
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Jul 2, 2022 21:50
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https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-54 Tunnel boring machines!
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Jul 5, 2022 08:41
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OwlFancier posted:https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-54 Looks promising. Hopefully rail construction in general gets improved at the same time. Republic status: my economy is in shambles at all times, but I managed to gently caress with refinancing the loans to make my per month payments lower (not quite enough to be tolerable). Also finally have passenger rail, revealing the inexplicable design choice that trains can't have line spacing, so I can't make them run on time.
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Jul 5, 2022 13:18
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Rail construction can be fairly good but it would be better if the yards would send out extra trains that could stack up in sidings near the railhead, the biggest issue I have is that construction rate falls off the further away you get, because they will only send out one train at a time, which is fine for a start but if I am doing big construction I would build dedicated sidings for the construction trains along the way.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:39
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The main issue is just how rail construction handles signals. Near impossible to get a two-way rail line built on an active service line, since you have to remove all the signals in between for the construction trains to path properly, which fucks up any regular trains going along connected routes. I'm not sure what the best way to program construction trains to deal with signals is that wouldn't gently caress up regular trains in the process, but there has to be a better way, and it's sufficiently bad currently that I've just suspended any rail expansion until I'm financially stable enough to buy the rails outright and not have to deal with it. (So much cheaper if I could use the materials I already have stockpiled... but that requires the rail construction trains to path correctly, too.)
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Jul 5, 2022 15:50
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SkyeAuroline posted:The main issue is just how rail construction handles signals. Near impossible to get a two-way rail line built on an active service line, since you have to remove all the signals in between for the construction trains to path properly, which fucks up any regular trains going along connected routes. I'm not sure what the best way to program construction trains to deal with signals is that wouldn't gently caress up regular trains in the process, but there has to be a better way, and it's sufficiently bad currently that I've just suspended any rail expansion until I'm financially stable enough to buy the rails outright and not have to deal with it. (So much cheaper if I could use the materials I already have stockpiled... but that requires the rail construction trains to path correctly, too.) The second part of that is the permanent signals aren't going to be exactly like your construction signals, and that's ok because signals are a cypher for a router. 75% of my gut reaction of rail building being bad was self trainable by creating rail networks that loop for detour-ability (fuel benefits from similar already) and not trying to tie junction knots as tight as I possibly can as encouraged by every other train game. I think the other 25% gets solved by staging, which would be awesome if they could do because it also encourages building cool rail yards periodically. But also if you don't clear the bar above about understanding resilient networks vs efficient networks staging is just going to make things worse. I'm not totally smoking my own supply here yet. I think the last thing stopping me from turning on fuel regularly is understanding rail fuel. Are there any best practices? I fully expect my trains to run out of fuel and drive 16 months off route to a fuel station because I'm an idiot, because this is what happens to trucks when I turn on fuel.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:57
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SkyeAuroline posted:The main issue is just how rail construction handles signals. Near impossible to get a two-way rail line built on an active service line, since you have to remove all the signals in between for the construction trains to path properly, which fucks up any regular trains going along connected routes. I'm not sure what the best way to program construction trains to deal with signals is that wouldn't gently caress up regular trains in the process, but there has to be a better way, and it's sufficiently bad currently that I've just suspended any rail expansion until I'm financially stable enough to buy the rails outright and not have to deal with it. (So much cheaper if I could use the materials I already have stockpiled... but that requires the rail construction trains to path correctly, too.) I mean... yes you can't build on a line that is being used, but you can build a parallel bypass line quite easily so you can gently caress around with bits of track, you do have to deal with some disruption while the initial branch off the existing track is built though, yes. After that though it's fairly easy. Also it does encourage you to overbuild your main lines for resiliency. If you go with a three or four track trunk line you can shut one of them to handle any new branches and still have enough tracks to actually run the network. It is, as you say, much much easier to build out a line that is not in use. Also consider adding sidings for any areas you think you are likely to expand into, as you can split junctions off those very easily without disrupting the main line. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 16:19
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I wish I could draw up an example but I'm at work at the moment. What I mean is, for example: let's say you built a T junction with one end left empty to prepare for future expansion, and you want to build that out now. Right hand "drive", two lanes. The construction train will be happy to go up to the right hand lane and start to build it... and promptly get stuck, because it can't reverse past any signals to get back to the construction office unless you remove every signal in between the construction area and the office, because even one signal existing will prevent it from reversing. It'll never build the left lane at all, because you'd have to either remove all of the signals or reverse all of their directions to let it through, the latter putting you in the same position of it getting stuck anyway. If you aren't building a dedicated rail construction office every time you need to expand your network (a huge waste of resources), then that's going to shut down continually expanding parts of your rail line entirely, in a way that especially fledgling networks can't handle at all. It's not like building a highway where you can just cross over with a mud road, or signal a stretch where the one way roads turn into two-way at an intersection and let trucks travel normally until they reach the construction site; a sanely designed two-lane rail network should effectively never produce opportunities to let a train go the wrong way down a rail (intentionally or otherwise), and jury rigging crossovers fucks up the game's node-based treatment of rails even after you strip them back out, takes up a lot of space, and wastes resources you won't get back, all so a construction train can reach its 20 meter long arm 2 meters to the left of where it's sitting at to build the other direction. I normally fall strongly into "train good, car bad" but man this game pushes hard towards lovely truck based logistics for any sort of cosmonaut infrastructure that's not single-lane rails. Buying the rails outright eliminates the problem at a significant cost, but if you don't want to quick buy... you're kind of hosed, unless you want to shut down your whole railroad for a while. Hope you're not running anything critical on it if so. (Owl replied while I was already typing but I think the issues still speak for themselves - it's not an issue of trains getting around the construction zones, it's an issue of the construction trains themselves not being able to navigate back from job sites.)
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Jul 5, 2022 16:26
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SkyeAuroline posted:I wish I could draw up an example but I'm at work at the moment. What I mean is, for example: let's say you built a T junction with one end left empty to prepare for future expansion, and you want to build that out now. Right hand "drive", two lanes. The construction train will be happy to go up to the right hand lane and start to build it... and promptly get stuck, because it can't reverse past any signals to get back to the construction office unless you remove every signal in between the construction area and the office, because even one signal existing will prevent it from reversing. It'll never build the left lane at all, because you'd have to either remove all of the signals or reverse all of their directions to let it through, the latter putting you in the same position of it getting stuck anyway. So, the way to do this is to build occasional crossovers. Yes you won't need them a lot of the time and you may even choose to demolish them to stop them interfering with the block system, but while you are expanding the rail network in an area they are very good to have because you can just make the signals between construction and the nearest crossover two way for a while. Once the junction is built, you can switch it back to normal operation, although depending on how you have built the junction you might need half the crossover anyway, as that allows single track branches to access the two track main line in both directions. I will agree that it would be nice if construction trains could figure out how to reverse to build things, but an option is to just build a temporary loop for them to turn around on, you can build it out of wood if you want and demolish it later. But again this is sort of just part of the cost of construction, you do kinda have to accept, if you're gonna do things cosmonaut style, that you will need to build things that will not be useful later in the game, it's very different from how most games of this type work, but temporary construction to facilitate other construction is a thing, and having to do that adds a lot of character to how you lay out your development in the game. Because yeah you might be left with weird stubs of road or rail that aren't really useful but which you set up to do some other bit of construction and now they're just there. It's rare that games actually produce defunct infrastructure but this is one of the few games that do. You can either demolish it, try and figure out a way to repurpose it, or leave it there for fun.
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Jul 5, 2022 16:35
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In a traditional city builder you'd upgrade a road or tie together a rail line and with "complex construction turned on" you would get a little animation on the route and the traffic would transit 50% slower simulating some civic planner having deduced a detour for the traffic to take while construction is going. In W&R you are that civic planner and you better have the whole traffic plan laid out for the normal traffic and the construction equipment. Now is also a good reminder that bidirectional rail with right hand drive enforced is kind of a thing train games overrepresent. Adding crossovers is not only helpful for construction, it makes your tracks look more realistic because these sorts of double (or triple or quadruple) rail stretches can have co-direction traffic if the router decides that's needed today. Anyway crossovers bookending your junction is what I mean about resilient vs efficient. Alternately you get the same route map mathematically speaking if you also create a loop of the new direction back to the existing track. Then you can construct it in the expected travel. A resilient train network let's any train get from anywhere now to anywhere later and hopefully without doing a grand tour. And sometimes without doing signal reconfiguring. Signals are also something entirely gamified and they probably collide the most with train game business as usual vs W&R trains. We see signals as physical infrastructure on the line in these games. But they are more like standing orders for the router. Consider the router isn't going to understand your detour plan. And also sometimes the router just gets themselves into trouble on a normal day. As the lead civic planner now it's your job to fix the snarl or set up standing orders that work during construction. Your standing orders will change when construction is complete or the snarl is resolved.
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Jul 5, 2022 17:13
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This is why the "just ignore the next signal" button in TTD is nice. If we need to play this way, it would be nice if there was a way for the train to know how to use switchbacks (the ones that don't involve turning, just reversing), though I expect that might be a bit of a bear. Being able to at least say "construction office X may ignore directionality for these specific signals" would be good. But, yes, things like this or the fun "this road is hooked up to many driveways, and roadworks will happen for every. Single. Intervening. Segment. Individually." or replacing / adding a power line that isn't directly attached to a node with a driveway, these are all things where I'm willing to just say "gently caress it" and mash that "buy now" button. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 20:41
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There is a button to send rail constructors home It’s not a great system tho. They could add an abstraction layer to it as the game can’t deal with multi tracks and signals with constructors
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Jul 5, 2022 23:03
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I think rail is just a system that needs some slight abstraction that the game refuses to provide, like Euphronius said. I say “refuses” not in that they’re indignant about it, but it’s clear the games strength and uniqueness lies in their uncompromising lack of abstraction at their chosen layer of simulation. It would play better with some little “cheat” abstraction for rail construction because drat does it ever suck, but I don’t doubt that it would feel sort of mechanically at odds with the rest of the game. if we were all used to that, we might be apt to say “I don’t know, it feels a little cheaty,” until someone with the appropriate foresight could describe the weird hell we occupy today. (I hope that makes sense.)
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Jul 6, 2022 06:58
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I have started playing again and trying the water stuff for the first time. Cripes is sewage a pain, especially if you're not near the water. It would also help to know how much sewage is actually flowing instead of just guessing. 10 people per m3 daily? 50? 100? Also frustrating, there doesn't appear to be a way to add capacity or splits beyond treatment plants. How in the heck am I supposed to upgrade in place?
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Jul 6, 2022 23:17
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Yeah, that's why I turned water back off. Interesting idea to manage but the mechanics for sewage, specifically are such a pain.
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Jul 6, 2022 23:33
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Pretty sure my current run of ~30 hours is done and ready to start fresh with a whole lot of lessons learned. Did a pretty decent job of placing coal, iron, and oil extractors on the nodes when I was first getting setup, and built toward those. First time setting up iron, first time setting up rail, and first time doing remote helicopter building of a semi-nearby oil field that got a rail connection. Definitely need to be on the ASA method of setting up highways (or at least leaving room for them) in the future. Also planning to setup pre-cast panel production in my beginning construction resource area to have those easier for concrete rail lines. Need to break myself of the habit of making things too close together. Gravel paths and some bus planning really do cover more area than I ever think they will. Also learned a TON about railroads and troubleshooting signals. Proud of how it went, though! Went into debt with 4 or 5 loans being repaid at once, but when oil and iron were getting steady outputs exported I ended up being able to pay off loans and build out coal simultaneously. I think the only setting I'll change at startup will be fires off. Built a few, but was done with it pretty quick. Whenever something burned that didn't have a fire station nearby, I just paid to rebuild it as soon as it was gone.
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Jul 7, 2022 00:54
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My plan of building Steel before coal and iron and just buying raw materials is not going well. Even with two distribution centers focused on shipping coal I can't keep the steel mill running for more then a fraction of a second. Time to get a coal mine running I guess.
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Jul 7, 2022 15:47
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Demon_Corsair posted:My plan of building Steel before coal and iron and just buying raw materials is not going well. Even with two distribution centers focused on shipping coal I can't keep the steel mill running for more then a fraction of a second. I have two coal mines and two ore processing plants, and it's still nowhere near enough. Part of the problem is probably staffing though, any staffing method that includes a transfer is a nightmare and that was unavoidable given the location of coal deposits in my map (and my lack of desire to give miners black lung). Train connections instead of truck distribution, plus aggregate storages for a buffer, will help.
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Jul 7, 2022 16:15
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SkyeAuroline posted:I have two coal mines and two ore processing plants, and it's still nowhere near enough. Part of the problem is probably staffing though, any staffing method that includes a transfer is a nightmare and that was unavoidable given the location of coal deposits in my map (and my lack of desire to give miners black lung). I wanted the home grown steel so I could build rail without going horribly bankrupt. So we will see what happens when I get coal online. I may just disconnect the steel right now so I can turn my coal power plant back online. Can't deoent on it at all right now since the steel pant immediately hoovers up any coal that gets dropped off
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Jul 7, 2022 16:32
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Getting utilization numbers you feel good about in a steel plant is like a good mid game goal, with or without imports. Trains feel pretty mandatory for that. The good news is a low utilization steel plant is still useful. Truck in coal and ore, truck out steel. Balances itself out. Just don't overstaff it. Or do, it's usually easier to have too many people instead of too much iron ore.
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Jul 7, 2022 17:48
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Yeah, the good news is that as long as you have all the staff you need elsewhere (i.e. you're not overstaffed in one area to the detriment of another) there's literally no downside to having a bunch of guys come to work and stand around doing nothing because there's no raw materials.
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Jul 8, 2022 08:43
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SkyeAuroline posted:Looks promising. Hopefully rail construction in general gets improved at the same time. The SA Forums - Games - W&R Soviet Republic: my economy is in shambles at all times Thought I posted this one earlier.
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Jul 8, 2022 09:15
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Definitely read that in the zizek eating from the trash can voice.
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Jul 8, 2022 15:21
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Anyone got any standout recommendations for community maps? Or ideally a curated pack?
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Jul 23, 2022 12:34
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Pharnakes posted:Anyone got any standout recommendations for community maps? Or ideally a curated pack? Anime Store Adventure posted:This is my favorite that I’ve seen that’s an island map. It has a “customs area” on the main island and a pre built power plant so you can do a sort of kosmonaut start without having to auto build too much. It’s interesting enough, though mostly fairly open space if you’re willing to spend a little time with the terrain tools. My current jam has been Kaugsaare with no population, auto building a port and playing mostly Kosmonaut bringing in everything by ship.
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Jul 23, 2022 18:15
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