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So, loving the new map. They also snuck in a massive chemical plant into the publictest patch, which is both nice to not have to build a ton of chemical factories, and a challenge in and of itself because its literally the size of a small city. Speaking of small cities! I've got my first proper one (nearly) running in the mountains.  No close up shots yet because I still need to finish bits and detail it, but I love the look. It would suck to live there though, because its so tightly packed that like 75% of bedrooms would be annoyingly close to the train tracks that bisect the city. Hey, its a narrow valley, what can you do?  This is the rise up the valley which was a dirt road that I repositioned to make room for rail and paved. One thing I love about this map is that it has fun and interesting terrain to work with that also has very clear "this is where you can build the infrastructure to get up there" space without me having to level for days and days. Things like the little bridges into the city are a nice touch.  Obligatory, bragging: "Look at how good I can use available space" topography screenshot. You can also see here center frame where I'm digging a sewage pipe. I had to reload a save after populating the town once - turns out you really can't truck out sewage fast enough, so I'm having to dig an absolutely hellish sewage pipe down to the river way, way downhill. (I have a mod sewage outlet that doesn't technically need water, but I don't want to cheat that bad, nor do I like the 'roleplay' of dumping my raw sewage downhill.) This town will feed the gravel and coal/brick/cement industries, which I have overbuilt and am quickly running out of money. None of those are particularly lucrative exports but I'm hoping I can export enough to make it worth it.  This is the dedicated gravel industry. It has construction waste handling as well, since the coal mines/processing (pictured distant background) will be generating tons of that. Notable is I got a nice lucky spot with the storage pit - the conveyor that goes out of frame goes direct to a train loader, so it can be properly used with train distro centers to export excess. In the near foreground you can see I even used a cablecar! This was to shuttle workers from my existing old/crappy/hastily thrown together "need workers to kick construction off in realistic mode" because I thought busses would take too long to wrap around to the actual road entrance. (This wasn't totally the case, but hey.) Cable cars kind of stink with research enabled - they feel so niche already so adding multiple research gates to get them stinks, but hey. Cable cars.  And the recently completed Coal/Brick/Cement industry. Showed it earlier before it was built because I loved having space to make nice train tracks. Everything here is set up to enable train export as needed, also has maintenance next to the train distro there. Maintenance is a pain in the rear end for a lot of trains, so I'm trying to build that into designs wherever I can. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 22:13
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Double post and all but wanted to promote a mod You Didn't Know You Wanted: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3022150983 This mod adds what might at first seem like a lot of extraneous stuff of dubious usefulness, and I know at one point it did have some problems that could cause crashing, so be warned about that. I haven't used every single item in it, but its worked well for me and helps a TON to organize electricity specifically for cities. Why do I like it so much? The stock electrical switches look weird to me, IMO. They're big, and then often have big wires crammed around them. Worse, everything seems like its floating, especially if you look closely at underground cable connections. This becomes especially true for the various transformers (vanilla and mod) that I was using, and often had to daisy chain a few back to back to feed a big town. That stinks! This mod has the building you want to fix that.  It's this buddy. It's a transformer that's properly set up for a ton of connections. You could definitely overload it with med voltage connections, but its just so much cleaner to supply a wide area with med voltage. No, I don't know why the transformer thing is on a mini train track. I assume this is based on something I don't know about, maybe the real building its based on had that connection to rail. It's the only thing that bugs me about the building.   So it looks a little bit chaotic, admittedly, but you can see it has connections tight to the building to attach your cables, and the other distant connections to support overhead wires. (I believe that the "furthest out" connection is for 2.35MW wires, but I use these mostly for transitioning to underground cable.) From this building I basically just built a trunk of underground cable out to every substation feeding the city and split them off when needed to a substation. The high voltage in connects the wires nicely and everything too. Then there's these:   High voltage switches that aren't massive buildings on the ground, all with 'dynamically' connecting wires, as you can see. It'll have the proper wiring set up when I connect that third leg. I like these a lot. (Apparently they don't work with 14MW and one other wire type, it mentions it in the mod desc.) There's also a version of these for overhead medium voltage, which is crazy helpful for rural areas. You can run a single medium voltage wire along a road and then use these smaller switches to split off something quickly to a substation. You still have to build a substation to get power anywhere, but its way more natural to only have a substation next to your remote gas station/snow plow garage along a faraway road than what looks to be heavy duty electrical switching!
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Jan 1, 2024 22:38
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 I'm never going to stop designing horrible highway interchanges I don't need in a game that rarely approaches enough traffic to need highways.
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Jan 4, 2024 03:31
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
Have the devs actually fixed merging yet, so that highways aren't absurd trap roads?
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Jan 4, 2024 03:45
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Volmarias posted:Have the devs actually fixed merging yet, so that highways aren't absurd trap roads? If I give yield priority signs they seem to work well enough? I haven’t absolutely choked one yet so it remains to be seen. Once I get personal cars going I’ll find out. 
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Jan 4, 2024 03:59
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Volmarias posted:Have the devs actually fixed merging yet, so that highways aren't absurd trap roads?  oh gently caress you're right (I hosed up a line by deleting a building and choked an intersection near the highway.)
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Jan 4, 2024 04:18
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I tried playing with research enabled, and I do not think I will be enabling it again until the tech tree has been reworked to be less strangely punishing.
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Jan 4, 2024 06:03
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
 HV electric transformers in particular are capital-H Heavy and it's much easier, if you don't have access to a road crane that can lift potentially 50-200+ tons (which are a thing today, but only really started to proliferate anywhere in the mid-1980s, and as far as I know more or less didn't exist in the SU - to the extent that anything of that size existed at all it would have been either fixed in position or on rails itself) to just move the thing on a specialized trailer, sort of like you would e.g a railway locomotive on road; getting it on and off the trailer, and the movement from unloading to the exact spot where it's going to live, are the hard part, so it makes sense to have that be something you can do without much in the way of heavy equipment. And, you wouldn't really want to be slinging cranes, cables and the like around after everything's built and there's a bunch of wiring all around.Basically the rails aren't there because there was a railway that ran to the transformer station (though maybe there was the odd one that was in just the right place for that, who knows), but rather to move the transformer from outside the transformer station to inside the transformer station from however it got there. If you have a few metres of rail you can just unload it at the gate and slide it down the track (even if it's not on wheels) with some big jacks, rather than having to work around all the other stuff in there. This is the UK in the 60s but it somewhat shows just how awkward it is to move the things around when you can only really pull or raise from below, not lift from above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4nqWE26yqk A lot of the relatively smaller Soviet ones in particular are just permanently on rails because, I assume, there was more of a focus on being easy to install/replace without much in the way of heavy equipment. Places with more access to larger cranes, or more space to work, or that don't expect to get nuked and have to replace a bunch of transformers, don't necessarily bother (until you get to the really gigantic power station transformers, or ones with a lot of surrounding obstructions etc), but they'll very often be mounted on rails even if the transformer itself isn't on wheels, since it's then easier to move a little bit to get everything lined up properly (and I assume there's some advantages to, say, not getting the base wet etc) - or they might just be installed that way then you remove the rails and use them for the next install.  (Germany) http://www.ues.su/en/news/29-11-2013-item/ (Kyrgyzstan, showing install)
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Jan 4, 2024 22:17
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Love this post! I should probably be aware of this since my undergrad was EE, but hey, never too late to learn. I sort of figured that it couldn't just be 'weird looking' for no reason since the entire mod sort of exists as a "make your electrical infrastructure prettier through fastidious detail." Glorgnole posted:I tried playing with research enabled, and I do not think I will be enabling it again until the tech tree has been reworked to be less strangely punishing. I like some of the ideas like repeatable "Research and distribute a vaccine to help counter pandemic events" and "Everytime you want a new electric/pipeline connection you have to negotiate it" and all, but gating both distribution centers and geological mapping of coal and iron as well as some of the basic waste handling between two separate universities that with stock buildings are pretty big investments in both building and working pop is a mistake. Honestly I play with it on, but with my slower time mod and early start it feels kind of silly other than those first crucial techs that are a royal pain. It isn't a terrible idea, but it needs a pretty big second pass imo. The early gating is annoying enough that I don't think the neat bits make up for it.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:56
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I'd like to see instead rather than gating everything behind binary unlocks, development instead. So you can access some deposits at gamestart, and could unlock, say, open cast mines. Or mines to a greater depth, or buildings of x stories for concrete pannels, there's lots can be done with the system. As it stands though it's a giant pain in the rear end, it's like the game wants you to build the capital university city as your first, except you can't really do that becuase you haven't unlocked the stuff to support such a large city like distribution centres. And you can't aford to do that going in anyway, so yea, definetly in need of refinement.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:36
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My main issue with research is that it has essentially just two states: painfully restrictive and irrelevant. Once you have your basic set up researches done you extremely quickly run out of important stuff to research and outpace your ability to actually build new stuff. I also play with the slowed date mod and by the end of 1962 (corresponds to vanilla 1968 roughly) I am usually done with all the parts I am remotely interested in. By that stage I am nowhere near building nuclear power plants but I have them researched because why not. I do like the population boost/brake mechanic though, and the vaccine mechanic keeps the medical university relevant far longer. I just wish they expanded it to the other universities as well. Let me design new propaganda campaigns in the party headquarters for a repeatable one-time boost to loyalty. Let me research new production methods for a stacking 5% buff to output/resource cost/pollution emission for a given good. There is a hidden production penalty to electronics as time passes, let me counteract that by researching new semiconductor technologies. Stuff like that.
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Jan 6, 2024 02:32
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ArchangeI posted:My main issue with research is that it has essentially just two states: painfully restrictive and irrelevant. Once you have your basic set up researches done you extremely quickly run out of important stuff to research and outpace your ability to actually build new stuff. I also play with the slowed date mod and by the end of 1962 (corresponds to vanilla 1968 roughly) I am usually done with all the parts I am remotely interested in. By that stage I am nowhere near building nuclear power plants but I have them researched because why not. This is all good thought about it and I had some similar ideas. It is really too binary and thus it makes itself irrelevant. I get with the slowed calendar mod we aren't giving it any help, but IMO they should slow down calendar time because when they picked the timescale, it was before every city needed 10x more fuckin' services and infrastructure than the game has now. Don't get me wrong, I like almost all of those additions, but if you want to feel like you're actually progressing in the decades and not just watching the date crawl up into the 2000's endlessly you've either got to be extremely efficient in building and expanding or slow the dates down. Everything else about the other weird timescales (workdays, travel time, etc) is fine, just slow down literally calendar time, but I digress. The medical university does have the most important ones and I'd definitely like to see more buffs/boosts even if they're on that sort of 'longish but temporary' type of thing. Things like the geological survey should instead be "You can see all the resources on the map, but they start at a low efficiency and ramp up to full based on several techs." At the start of the game I just want to see where there's coal, and I don't need much right away. In fact, you end up with absurd amounts of coal early because generally you need a few trucks worth per 'day' to a heating plant and power plant, toss in a little for cement maybe. Getting a fully staffed and working steel mill feels like, to me, decidedly the 'midgame' republic transition point and by then you've probably got rail infrastructure to haul coal from somewhere else - or if you modified research, could make your current coal facility efficient enough. Pollution is a clear big one in general because you can't avoid it. Let me do some kind of weird scrubbing (tainting water) so that I can put a heating plant less than 500m from my closest residence without killing half of the closest buildings every winter. + There's a ton more you could do with propaganda and things like that, like you mentioned, too, but even more with vague 'foreign policy' stuff. Give me some long, but temporary "extradition treaty" to 'prevent escapes' (mechanically just delay them significantly.) One thing that honestly would sort of seem like a pain, but I'd like the flavor, is make me negotiate using a 'tech' to buy NATO blueprints for my vehicles. Give some economic things where I can get cheaper loans, or something. -- I've been working on trying to clean up my initial hasty "get off the ground" city, but using the exact same area without shutting down the city and moving it 'twice.' This has sucked loving rear end, and I actually have disabled realistic mode despite promising myself to always use it except in absolute emergencies ("woops I didn't notice a traffic jam and now I have to load an autosave from 45m ago or lose my entire population to frostbite.") I didn't do a good job, or really any job of planning ahead to remake the city, even though I knew I would. Here's the old city, though I wish I had better screenshots. This is already after I've started to build the 'new' part of the city visible basically in the top 3rd of the frame. Pretty early on I demolished the old city houses here because they were placed like dogshit for my ideal layout of the city, but the replacement apartments were just slotted where they would fit. Everything with the hipped roofs and the buildings around them was built with, "If it fits, slap it down" using the existing, awful road layout.  And finally, after about twice as long as I thought, I've almost gotten rid of the entire 'old' city. You can still see the last remnants here: The fire station, the prison, and the vehicle maintenance (all vaguely bottom right.) You can see a duplicate vehicle maintenance top left, which will also have a connected train depot so I no longer have to stress about my trains on lines going out of wack. The old maintenance is next on the demolition list, and then eventually the prison next to it. You can see the groundwork for the new prison up on the hill top left, serviced by a cableway. They're actually pretty useful in weird spots in this map! Once I get those two down and the last 3 old apartments in the center down, I can finally finish the main avenue and get rid of the last vestiges of bad infrastructure.  It's a little sprawl-y, but I like to reserve my big highrises for the capital and cities serving larger industries. This is pretty close to the edge of the map, so it feels more 'backwater'-ish. A lot of the room between blocks is reserved for car parks, if you might be wondering why its so spread out. Christ, though, trying to clean up 'services' (water, sewage, electric, heat) and switch a city over to better ones suuuuucks. That, combined with "I don't want to build a massive temporary store so I can demolish my old stores because they exist where I want to build the new store" is why I had to let myself 'cheat' a little by turning off realistic. That and things like "This entire town will die of poop before you can delete a 30m section of pipe to route a new 30m section in to the new network" are an absolute pain in the rear end. The new networks are pretty though. Check my pipe 'bus' down from water and heating. No, it is prohibited to discuss the coal dust in the water from the treatment plant next to the heating plant. It's from the charcoal filters, we swear. (Connecting every pipe is almost certainly overkill here, but god help me I like to overbuild, and I might sprawl quite aways to service my aluminum industry with enough workers.) 
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Jan 6, 2024 03:41
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 Always like seeing your screenshots. One question for you - how needy are existing residents when you start building for them? I just came back to this game and am playing realistic on the empty map (Julian Uninhabited). I always like the theory of coming into a map of existing residents and building around/for them, but I'm always worried that by the time I've gotten all of my amenities in order, everyone will have hosed off for the west and/or turned to a life of crime. I start a game on Passage (which looks loving amazing) and immediately get worried about the many messages about someone being low on happiness 6 km away from my start. Is this guide mostly accurate? https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926621716 Basically avoid building anything within walking distance of existing populations before you're ready for them to be "awake"? Or is it fine to just Kramer in there and start building things willy-nilly and if they don't like it then just let them gently caress off?
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Jan 6, 2024 09:07
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I guess im done with my current game for now and im looking at starting a new map. One thing that happened in my old game was that all my expansion stuck together, and in my next go I want to spread out more. The free construction offices make is easy to base the mechanisms out there, and for supplies I could either lay down a long road and then throw trucks at the problem, or build up a rail and a rail logistics center first. How good are helicopter construction offices? Can they deliver stuff for big constructions by themselves in a useful timeframe, or are they basically just useful as long-range shuttles for concrete and asphalt? And is there a way to make rail construction less annoying? What I want is a section of my rail network that runs according to signals, and then the parts with new construction that do not have signals to give the track layers full access. Right now I always have to manually trigger the track layers to cross the last signal before the block in construction, because those signals are always red. Nektu fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 17:54
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ABen posted:
That guide is pretty accurate to my experience. Some maps have areas that have “active” areas I’ve noticed, though, often in a spot where the map maker sort of expects you to “start” so be aware of that if you’re super careful about not wanting escapees. I’ve never had too much trouble using foreign workforce to get just enough built in/around a city more or less following that guide’s rules to get a city working, but I also treat my initial pop pretty expendably and will move residents from other “old towns” if a ton start escaping because they didn’t finish the store yet or whatever. Nektu posted:I guess im done with my current game for now and im looking at starting a new map. I’ve been playing early start + slow time long enough that I haven’t gotten to helicopters in a save or two, but IIRC they’re not great for large constructions unless you build an absolute fleet, which I don’t know how feasible that is. I’ve generally liked them for things like building large oil derrick fields and that. I don’t think rail construction ever really gets better, I tend to babysit the sections of track under construction. You can try to build just a disconnected section and let your builders go wild, then connect it to the signaled network as your last bit, but that’s inconvenient in its own way. It stinks, and things like trying to make normal rail electrified on a running network are some of the only things that I don’t even try to do in realistic.
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Jan 6, 2024 19:24
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Helicopter COs are golden for certain infra and extractive stuff, especially the infra stuff like pipes and wires that get buggy re: where their "road connections" are based on build order and even direction they were drawn. I don't find as much use for aggregates with them because, especially for asphalt and gravel, you can just convoy some BZ 252s up dirt roads at full speed anyway. But when you need 11 tons total of material off in some far field for a HV switch, or whatever it takes for a cableway pole on top of a mountain, or a babby cargo rail station/open storage/CO to build a new settlement out from, they're amazing. Rail just has to be turbo-babysat, yeah. In general I find it best to alternate strategic single-track thrusts with conversion to double-tracking; not only can you go standard-electrified-electrify the standard so you never actually take a section of the line out of service, you can also use the loopback previously reserved for return trips to put another construction set on and work from both directions.
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Jan 7, 2024 05:11
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I like to build a compound with a bunch of extra helipads attached to heli COs. You can then use more of their slots actually for helicopters, so stuff them full of cargo helis and set them to off map resupply. They will just fly off map and pick up whatever's needed. You probably also want a fuel tank there because doing this will use a lot of fuel, but it allows you to solve problems basically just by throwing fuel at them. I also suggest having a separate CO for your passenger helis and only allow them to do worker transit, if you try to have one CO do both cargo and passenger transport what will happen is it will spend 90% of the time lifting cargo with the passenger helis rather than supplying workers. The cheapo little MI-2s are pretty good for passengers, they don't use much fuel and are good at dropping off a steady trickle of workers to fiddly little sites like, as mentioned, infrastructure projects.
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Jan 7, 2024 06:27
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Mandoric posted:not only can you go standard-electrified-electrify the standard so you never actually take a section of the line out of service, you can also use the loopback previously reserved for return trips to put another construction set on and work from both directions.
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Jan 8, 2024 10:52
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Nektu posted:I don't get it. Do you build a single rail with a loop that ends in the second track leading back to where the first rail started? How does this help with electrification? Starting from an idealized  , left to right rail CO, coal mine, coal power plant1α: draw line from rail CO to coal mine with slack on either end  1β: add spurs to connect to each; delete slack on rail CO end. build eastbound electrified spur to begin double track. Here's where actual construction rather than laying plans begin if you're building from resources.  1γ: leaving room for westbound spur into mine, build electrified loopback and westbound spur to begin double track. Add signals such that all spurs are isolated, and a signal in the middle of the line.  (it's hard to see behind the "no electricity" warning, but the stump downward off the right side is its own segment.) 1δ: Build electrified westbound spur into coal mine and electrified loopback on far west end. Make sure the new loopback also has a spur for double track. These two can be worked semi-independently, especially if the westbound spur to the mine is built in segments. Of course, cut them off with signals ASAP.  2α: Continue trunk line eastward to the coal plant, while also adding an electrified stub for future double tracking use.   2β: Build eastbound spur to coal plant.  At this point, rail cargo can hypothetically run between the mine and plant, though of course I've left out the repetitive step of you actually needing three building connections (depot/CO, source, destination). Not only that, but you can do further construction without impacting the main line. 3α: Build an electrified loopback on the far end of the coal plant, again leaving room for a westbound spur in; also begin connecting the second line from both sides as separate constructions (draw halfway, then draw the other half from the other side.) Proper signals usage will keep each from blocking the main line.   You can leave out loopbacks between every stop, but do need them on both ends of the line so that cargo can "go the long way" when you are installing or expanding spurs to buildings and so that construction sets can also work westbound. 3β: Now that the second track is operational and electrified, you can block off the first one to electrify it. There will still be short interruptions as the crossovers themselves are electrified, which you can probably avoid with more micro during the original construction, but they're in the day of work rather than month of work scale. E: Might even be able to skip electrifying the crossovers with the proper train setups if the simulation's detailed enough. Can't really ask for momentum to carry through because trains will stop at the signal that's about at the end of electrification, but a light engine on the rear might be enough to push the engine on the front back onto a catenary. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 17:53
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Playing again for the first time in a couple years, and do heat pipes and exchangers lose heat over distance? I thought I was solid going into my first winter with 300m3 plant, piping, pump, and exchanger, and reliable worker and coal supply, but I still had a lot of people freeze at the peak of the cold. It looked like the water temperatures were dropping a lot going from plant to pump, to exchanger, to buildings. My pipes were very long, hence the pump. Had to turn off the calendar slowdown mod so everybody wouldn't be dead by spring.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:17
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Fray posted:Playing again for the first time in a couple years, and do heat pipes and exchangers lose heat over distance? I thought I was solid going into my first winter with 300m3 plant, piping, pump, and exchanger, and solid worker and coal supply, but I still had a lot of people freeze at the peak of the cold. It looked like the water temperatures were dropping a lot going from plant to pump, to exchanger, to buildings. My pipes were very long, hence the pump. Had to turn off the calendar slowdown mod so everybody wouldn't be dead by spring. Yes. I think the minimum heat tank temp to maintain full ambient temp in buildings is ~40-50C, but I haven't watched too closely. That's when I noticed at the coldest parts of winter I was starting to get "Temp in building too low." It takes a lot of distance to drop 90C to that temp, though. If you aren't maintaining 90C at the heating plant, you are either not getting full efficiency out of the plant (easy to see - look at the red productivity bar) or you are overdrawing the plant and need another, or larger heating plant. You should be able to tell that if your heating plant is pegged at 100% productivity but things aren't heating up. You also can't "help" the loss over distance, afaik. Building 2x heating plants will still have a linear(?) drop in temp the further from the plants. You could potentially get away with two heating plants on either side of a town, but I've never needed to do that. I think you should be able to support heat at least through one pumping station, but if its really on the edges it might be too far. Putting heating plants away from your city is smart since I get more death from heating coal pollution than almost anything else - except of course the distinct lack of heating coal pollution indicating there's no heat.  Generally my rule has been to put it ~400m from the very edge of a town and not to put any other polluting industry around it, such that collected pollution can dissipate more effectively. Sometimes the cloud just blows over the city and you get to deal with a bunch of death, though.e: Loaded up my save quick to check. The open heating station is in the center there, and you can see the heating plant up on the hill. The pipe from the plant to this exchanger is 85% 'straight' to the exchanger, though it has a little bend. It's within 50m of being max length without needing a pump in between, and at a perfect 90C, you can see this exchanger is pumping out 82.  I don't know if the drop off gets more dramatic further out, as its been awhile since I've needed to do that. Once I get to the other side of town I'll have some examples. You can see the heat water in buildings is only in the mid 70's, so theres another step down from exchanger to building. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 18:23
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They need to redo track building. It completely hampers the cosmo game mode which is otherwise great fun. Trucks should be able to make deliveries to train lines. The track builder should be abstracted one more level up and just work like a tower crane or whatever The track builder being a train just screws everything up
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Jan 8, 2024 18:36
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Yes. I think the minimum heat tank temp to maintain full ambient temp in buildings is ~40-50C, but I haven't watched too closely. That's when I noticed at the coldest parts of winter I was starting to get "Temp in building too low." It takes a lot of distance to drop 90C to that temp, though. If you aren't maintaining 90C at the heating plant, you are either not getting full efficiency out of the plant (easy to see - look at the red productivity bar) or you are overdrawing the plant and need another, or larger heating plant. You should be able to tell that if your heating plant is pegged at 100% productivity but things aren't heating up. You also can't "help" the loss over distance, afaik. Building 2x heating plants will still have a linear(?) drop in temp the further from the plants. You could potentially get away with two heating plants on either side of a town, but I've never needed to do that. Yep, I'm seeing reddit posts that there's another drop from the exchanger to the served buildings. In my case that looks pretty significant since I put my exchanger in the middle of town and the residences are near the edges. Maybe I'd do better to replace the big exchanger with 2-3 small ones. My heat plant is also farther than yours, well over one max pipe length, since I wanted to co-locate it with my coal processing. Maybe that's too far.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:49
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euphronius posted:They need to redo track building. It completely hampers the cosmo game mode which is otherwise great fun. Trucks should be able to make deliveries to train lines. The track builder should be abstracted one more level up and just work like a tower crane or whatever I just want to be able to build tracks with regular construction offices, I don't mind if its at a 50% penalty or whatever. Also protip: underground heatpipes lose less heat over distance.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:50
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Fray posted:Yep, I'm seeing reddit posts that there's another drop from the exchanger to the served buildings. In my case that looks pretty significant since I put my exchanger in the middle of town and the residences are near the edges. Maybe I'd do better to replace the big exchanger with 2-3 small ones. My heat plant is also farther than yours, well over one max pipe length, since I wanted to co-locate it with my coal processing. Maybe that's too far. My advice would be to shift it closer to the town and don't worry about the coal too much. If the drive is under 2km and not often blocked, you can get away with the buffer storage in the plant if you set up your lines well. I have two types of 'layouts' for heating plants.  This one really works best (sometimes only) for smaller plants. I connected up two truck ag. unloading as you can see there, and also have a line that feeds the building directly. These 3 lines are only 6 total trucks, but all are set to wait until unloaded. This way they don't spill into the road and create "traffic jam" notifications, which I find annoying. The timing of this picture makes it look a little dire, but even during winter there's just enough slack in the lines that there's always at least 1 truck at the heating plant or about to arrive, with the building's internal buffer storage covering the slight gaps between truck loads if there is one. The coal loading is 1600m away by road - generally plowed and light if any traffic - and my trucks are dinky 5t, but only 48kmh 1930's boys. You could certainly use this for a large plant though if you have bigger trucks or a reasonably close coal source. Big trucks function as a useful buffer storage. Important edit: Also if you need shuttle workers to the plant, either don't block one of the plant's parking spaces with trucks or build a separate bus stop. I've more than once killed a city because I forgot this and coal trucks blocked the workers from making heat. Again, the truck-delivered with multiple unloaders is sort of niche. This town feeds the coal industry so its relatively close, and its also built up in a mountain valley where I really couldn't fit a coal storage or train unloader, which:  The other design I use for most heating plants. No need for an ag storage - the smallest is 890t and thats just brutal overkill for a single heating plant. That's a train ag. unloader on the left there, and I set up a single train on a line to get coal and wait until unloaded. That train isn't even max length (working off of 150m trains as my 'max' right now) and it can hold 192t of coal. During the winter it makes a few trips, with the heating plant's internal buffer covering when its out getting more coal. Certainly this method becomes a little shady if your train has to go a great distance and/or is generally slow, in which case yeah, you might need the big old storage, but for most cases I find a train functioning as storage is good enough. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 19:08
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I need to dig around the discord and reddit too, but has anyone found a way to get trains to automatically repair if they're assigned to a line? I generally like to build a maintenance office in between one or two train distro offices so those trains get covered, but my trains on lines don't seem to ever want to seek out a valid repair depot themselves, which makes it annoying to micromanage. I have a valid repair depot that is literally one small interchange off of the line's path, and a train is breaking down at 60%+ wear and won't ever divert from the line to go there, even after I "forced" repair on it. I got around this once by making my end stations for passenger trains "attached" to maintenance offices but this really quickly becomes a truly backbreaking design constraint that every single rail line necessarily pass through a station linked to a maintenance office periodically such that I don't have to manually route trains off of a line, repair them, and start them up. It's fine right now when I have a limited number of lines but even with one or two more cities it'll become untenable even for as long as trains last with maintenance. e: So it seems like End stations without repair attached to them gently caress up lines. That sucks until I electrify. I like to run diesel trains for passengers early on and use end stations for fuel so they don't have to go jump to a fuel station somewhere, and it also keeps them nicely spread out over the route. I've had plenty of trains on lines go repair themselves, but only ones without an end station. You can connect the end station to maintenance, so I assume the train's logic is "I will visit the end station for maintenance - oops, no maintenance, better run my route" and they never break that loop to go look for a maintenance depot. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 19:49
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SkyeAuroline posted:Just following up: turns out I had a screenshot of the "jammed" train loader on hand after all. The bottom train and farthest right train are on a direct line to/from the customs office and have used all three slots while I've been watching; the others are DO trains, and the DO dispatches to all three slots fine. Just every 5-10 minutes I'll get a situation like this where a customs office slot is open, the trains in the customs office aren't moving and are busy loading/unloading, and the remaining trains won't move even if forced. Train lengths are all short enough to fit the CO without tripping any signals, and they work properly most of the time. I think I figured this out. Go to the cheat menu and enter landscape editor mode - add a signal behind each different railway platform beyond the border. If the map maker didn't signal beyond the border, but built nice tracks, then trains will see the customs house as one block that only one train can occupy. I just had this happen, popped into the editor mode, and fixed it by throwing appropriate signals across the border to make sure each platform was its own block.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:01
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Mandoric posted:TRAAAAINS ..... Thanks for the explanation though.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:28
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
Really love this setup and the visuals of it. Workers & Resources: Soviet Appalachia
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Jan 12, 2024 15:56
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Bought this game after basically falling in love while playing the basically useless tutorials  Started a new game since my demo save didn't appear to transfer over. I forgot to check for imported power before starting to build and there is none close to me  So I've been playing it as idler as I slowly figure out everything that needs to be done for getting a coal powerplant up and running. I am getting close Real Close™.
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Jan 16, 2024 02:17
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Please keep us appraised of your progress. And don't worry; "Ooops, I didn't notice a stuck train/bus and my entire population froze" is normal when learning the game. Also when having learned the game.
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Jan 16, 2024 02:33
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The game is a kinder, gentler dwarf fortress in this way. Expect to start over when you're just starting out, a lot. And don't be afraid to turn things while you get the hang of it.
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Jan 16, 2024 02:43
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Yeah post a lot and ask questions! It’s a very fun game to learn if you have the specific brain worms it demands. There’s new tutorials in the public beta available on Steam. They seem a tiny bit fraught with bugs still, but it seems a LOT more helpful than the existing tutorials from ages ago.
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Jan 16, 2024 07:19
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Volmarias posted:The game is a kinder, gentler dwarf fortress in this way. Expect to start over when you're just starting out, a lot. And don't be afraid to turn things while you get the hang of it. Zuntîrerok, "Anvilplant". It is a concrete plinth. All craftsovietcitizenship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of aluminium and decorated with wood. On the item is an image of Vladimir Peaceruler, the sovietcitizen. The sovietcitizen is making a speech.
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Jan 16, 2024 07:30
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Power has been turned on  Proof of concept complete. The only thing I had to google was the existence of technical offices because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to transport water. Why can't we just use oil trucks? They hold liquid and it's not like I'm drinking the water. Took me awhile to reason out that I couldn't just have undocumented people hanging out at the borders working in my power plant. I am very security conscious. So I've got a flat of 31 people and boy are they full of complaints. "My kids can't go to school so I can't work. I'm bored, I'm hungry, the powerplant ate my pants and I can't buy more."  I guess the next steps are building a real area for people to live away from the smog factory. Though still giving these ones a walmart and a Lenin to stare at them while they sleep. 
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Jan 16, 2024 08:21
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You absolutely can have randos hanging out at the border working in any industry, just gotta bus em over.
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Jan 16, 2024 13:08
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has anyone had issues with crashes when pedestrian overpasses / stairs? Or is my game just cursed
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Jan 16, 2024 13:47
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OwlFancier posted:You absolutely can have randos hanging out at the border working in any industry, just gotta bus em over. No idea how to get them to the power plant then?
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Jan 16, 2024 15:34
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The General posted:No idea how to get them to the power plant then? you just set up bus route: border post > pick up workers > workplace (powerplant, fire department, heating plant, water treatment plant, whatever your need requires) > drop off workers. easy as. two notes: if the border post is empty of workers you'll have to wait for the next go around the bus will fiil up to its designated maximum, if you have a bus with 100 seats, it will try to fill 100 workers. When they then get to the workplace and there are only 30 work spots available the rest will stay on the bus until a later work spot OR they despawn after 8 hours. this will mean you have paid for workers without getting their labor. double nine fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 15:55
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The General posted:No idea how to get them to the power plant then? Buy bus at the border, send it to a vehicle depot. Select bus. Make line saying pick up workers at the border (not tourists) and deliver them either to a bus station within walking distance of the power plant, or to the power plant itself. Start vehicle on line.
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Jan 16, 2024 15:56
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