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Every screenshot looks so good but every description of playing sounds horrifying. Whats the jank factor on placing and road connecting buildings these days?
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May 5, 2019 22:26
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If you have fuel off, or maybe it's even competitive with conveyoring it the whole way by the time you do a conveyor tower loop the loop, you can have something like a rate limited step by setting up a tower to feed the power plant and an aggregate loader and using the truck as a slightly slower, more quantum conveyor belt to ferry to aggregate storage.
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May 6, 2019 15:19
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Rereading the last conversation I think I misunderstood what is was actually about but really unless you've really got your mining staff supply down to a science the processing plant and power plant are pretty wide so just trucking off a bit out of a branch straight to a loader seems pretty sufficient for me right now. Compiling a list of things I wish I knew 3 hours earlier into playing: Construction offices aren't needed if you are building by rubles or dollars, everything magically springs from the ground Similarly the road hookups to buildings without employees are for construction equipment, there's no maintenance access for now You can't actually drive through a through lane through buildings on your way somewhere else. Seems easier to live next to the industry and take the bus to the shops than trying to bus into a mine. Playing on easy setting for citizen requirements probably has a lot to do with this and or everybody is going to die at 50 of pollution Finding resources is bullshit, Google the map. Orienting yourself isn't much better but at least you'll have half an idea where the oil is. Footpaths are great I just wish there was a way to know if the bus stop was going to be in range of the mine up the hill.
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May 6, 2019 16:16
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My latest learning that I'm still struggling with what to actually do about it is agent behavior. An agent starts at home and depending if it's work shift time or off shift time, heads out the door to go somewhere First he looks everywhere in range of home. If he doesn't find anything, he hoofs it to the closest bus stop waiting for a bus going somewhere they want to go. Tricky part 1, when a bus schedule says unload, it really means unload. Everybody gets booted off, hope they had a destination here (Apparently there's a behavior on a beta branch where people on the bus get first dibs on getting back in) At the bus stop they do the same thing, look for somewhere interesting to go in range or queue back up for a bus When they get to the destination they do their thing and when it's done, they teleport back home apparently. So if I'm not mistaking and understanding this right, which is far from guaranteed, good public transit is one or more bus stops on a residential area set to loading only, then arriving at one industrial or commercial area set to unload. Sequential stops only good for filling the bus up if needed (or conversely fully unloading eventually but you need to wrestle with unload/load which doesn't work super intuitively yet). Or I guess in other words, people are a resource like any other, created at a residential building and consumed in industrial or commercial buildings. E. I guess the troubling part I'm having is it seems like you should never cross the streams between work busses and play busses which kind of stamps down some of the freedom you would get from no return trips to increase bus utilization on the trip back. Just strictly regimented gather people, drop them off at destination, start again. The other big thing I found out is you can import goods to a storage building at the border at cost and transport them yourself which is basically a cheat code on top of no fuel being a cheat code already. zedprime fucked around with this message at 14:09 on May 7, 2019 |
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May 7, 2019 13:42
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The belt outputs on processing plants exist purely to make your steel works an an amazing fortress of belts, huh.
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May 12, 2019 02:05
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If you're allergic to Tropico agents you're going to have a real hard time getting into it. Most of what I see as the point is marshaling your Tropico agents into a Transport Tycoon sort of logistics grid to build the factories needed to build more logistics grid. It's got a lot of good logistics networking but it still all relies on Tropico labor and resource agents. The labor agent AI is, let's not say dumb. But the first couple hours anyone plays of the game is usually figuring out how to bus them to work because it isn't instantly apparent.
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Oct 13, 2019 05:20
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Lets see if I remember my PHD in worker-ology. I haven't played in a while so maybe some of this is smoothed out. Workers are first to be considered like a material input to your places of business. They are delivered and spend the next 8 hours toiling for the motherland, then reappear in their home. They'll generally find the closest place of employment. So first you need a supply line from the place of residence to the business involving walking paths and buses if its a bit too far to walk. There's a visualization mode to help see this IIRC. Not all adults are ready to be workers though. Every adult will generally spend 8 hours sleeping and having 8 hours to themselves. In the 8 hours to themselves they will try to fulfill their basic and luxury needs. If they lack something critical like food, they will gently caress off from their work shift and spend it trying to fulfill their needs again. So don't make them travel cross country to get their bread if you want a good utilization of adults as workers. Further diluting your worker pool, if you are playing with school and daycares, any adult with children can't go to work if their kids are not enrolled in a daycare or school. Further further diluting your worker pool, if there's a university in the country a lot of adults 18-30 will decide they want a college degree and go get one first before joining the worker pool. Younger adults are considered first but if there's open enrollment slots some older folks will get in on the college degree action too. I think those are the major catches. There's some tricks in not overloading a place of work in one shift as the workers 'decay' and go home, creating wide swings in utilization of the building which can really gently caress with the powerplant if nothing else. The rule of thumb here is move people into the expected residence that will be supplying the powerplant in waves. You can use intra-country moves to smooth this out after the fact.
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May 20, 2020 00:33
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Depending on dificulty settings I think they will endure up to a 2 hour commute before disappearing and reappearing back home. The path finding is a little strange if they haven't honed it in the year I've been away from the game. You don't want to give them the option to go somewhere else if you can help it. The algorithm is I will first see what they can walk to that meets my need and go there I will next get on a random bus with unloads in walking distance of something that meets my needs If nothing directly meets my needs explicitly I'll just ride any old bus I ride the bus to the next bus stop that's says unload and start again from step 1 This causes some strange behaviors if not controlled for. Ex you have two bus routes, A going to glorious ironworks and B going to glorious shopping center. Even if A has 300 open jobs and B has 30, people will tend to split 50/50 each direction. Better if B is on the way to A. People get off and fill up the shopping center and bet back on the bus if it's filled up. Then get to the ironworks and start filling in jobs there. Also if the destination is behind too many layers of transport you can see why they might start ignoring it. You're waiting for them to plinko through the transit if they have a choice of going anywhere else at all.
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May 20, 2020 15:47
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Grevlek posted:So I probably need to play more, but I'm having a hard time finding what to do. Your main goal is to support internal development without import of labor and materials. Its Tropico by way of Impressions monument building. You can buy a simple citizen center with cash outright and pay for it for a decade (or several if you have the cash difficulty setting turned up) but you're going to run out of cash eventually. The first step is a domestic construction economy up through steel. The flower opens from there as far as it being a meditative planned economy zen garden where you build new towns to extend to them the glorious benefit of your domestic development until wrapping clean around to cash printing client state by exporting complex goods. To use a Factorio comparison to complain, the problem with the game's presentation is you can sort of just make red science forever. To a fault because doing the entire supply chain is much more fulfilling personally and economically. But if you want to launch rockets because you can, there's definitely gameplay reasons to supply an entire domestic construction and citizen need fulfillment. And finally car, boat, and airplane exporting economy because you can and its great for you and your nation.
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Jan 1, 2021 04:46
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Squiggle posted:Out of curiosity, once they're at work, are there factors that determine how long they'll stay? Do they work a full shift as long as they get where they're going in time, or is it like....the commute cuts into their potential work output? Anime Store Adventure posted:I can’t say I’ve directly confirmed but it seems like they’re willing to work a full shift. I haven’t noticed that long commutes hurt productivity in THAT way, but with long bus rides, the frequency and the fact there’s no vehicle debunching often means you’ll get a bunch of busses at once and then long periods with no workers. Don’t make crucial industries long road commutes. You can have a power plant or heating plant at the end of a long intercity commute but you need 1. the long commute to work within periods of 8 hours and 2. something of a load balancer to help with 1 by if not having the commutes divide by 8 hours, help fudge a shift change by forcing repeated polling for empty spots at the plant while people are dragged in circles to various stops that are in range to the plant. Getting the power plant (and I assume heating plant, I haven't had the courage to turn that on yet) at even 80% overall equipment effectiveness is a strange art. I like to bootstrap the thing with a train of minibuses to avoid hard shift changes, once the worker slots are staggered bulk delivery of people takes care of itself and the minibuses can move on to other delicate people delivery tasks.
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Jan 1, 2021 23:02
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Arven posted:is there any way to limit the number of people waiting at stops? I started using cableways, and they're awesome, but 4x as many people are waiting at the stops than the line is capable of moving. If its students and leisure time people they are just chaos manifest and I think you just need to work around student/leisure citizen plinko sending them to black holes. I forget if the where should citizens be going to work applies here despite the name. Given how large even the small station is depending what's on the other end you may want a manual transfer from bus stop to cablestop to control how many people show up by virtue of the bandwidth of the lines serving the transfer bus stop instead of apartments next to the cablestop.
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Jan 2, 2021 17:19
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There's some good difficulty settings to turn off some of the systems that can feel like its throwing you off a cliff if you don't do it just right. Much of the game is actually aiming to avoid micromanagement through smart depot design and encapsulated systems of generating things. If you're doing it "right" its not really any more demanding than late game Factorio.
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Jan 2, 2021 19:29
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Much of the early game is a trap that would be entirely avoided by making a toggle between build entirely by foreign manpower and resources, build partially with foeiregn manpower but supplied resources, or build partially with supplied manpower but foreign resources. As it is you will save yourself untold foreign construction hours (e. and transport fees! basically magic free money if you have fuel turned off) if you spend your cash on the following as close as you can to a border (on an empty map presumably): Construction material supply 1x Aggregate Loading connected to: 1x Small aggregate storage. Import 1 tick ofgravel 1x asphalt plant, import 1 tick of gravel and 1 tick of bitumen 1x concrete plant, import 1 tick of gravel and 1 tick of cement 1x Small open storage, import 1 tick steel, bricks, prefab, boards 1x warehouse, import 1 tick mechanical and 1 tick electric components 1x construction office, assign to all above Workers 1x Bus Station 1x Apartment From here you can turn off build by rubles forever if you are patient. At lower difficulty you can use it to build asphalt roads which normally take months but you drastically reduce your spend by using local manpower and the game is not at all clear that you can do that while still importing goods. Then you can split your attention between a power plant or a oil supply chain as something that will give you some early exports while still being integrated to your construction supply chain. zedprime fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 21:49
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Volmarias posted:It makes sense for rails, since double tracking is the way to handle two way traffic in spots that need the throughput, but roads already handle two-way traffic. Outside of making things thematically nice, or adding a side-road for traffic when upgrading a road, I'm not sure where you'd really use it.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:27
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Heat is like an endboss feature, you're real brave trying to deal with it first game.Volmarias posted:I absolutely do this, but if I'm upgrading existing roads in an urban areas, it's dramatically faster to just destroy the existing road and its connections, since the leveling / paving / smoothing equipment all decides to just go right back to the construction yard instead of moving 5 meters over and waiting a few seconds. Given how usually those connections are actually necessary, my choices are "upgrade the city piecemeal so that nothing gets blocked", "gently caress all of the everything for a few months", or "press the button to spend 200 rubles X 8 times to get the worst of it over." The alternative is being a real deal civic planner and micromanaging the road upgrades and you know what, I'll do that if I have the mental capacity in which case you build a construction yard (spam construction yards once you have domestic materials. spam them everywhere) at the start or end of the stretch/blocks that need upgraded to help manage roadworks equipment travel time and plan out the build to get around most of the disruption by effective detours through phasing the project out. I love that the game is about using real world civic and manufacturing project management but its also optional if you have enough cash flow so you can just run the projects you're personally interested in. Which for me changes all the time.
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Jan 3, 2021 21:56
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VostokProgram posted:But those workers will die of pollution. And you'll need to plop a kindergarten and school and all that too. Maybe this is a good use case for cable cars though? Workers dying/starting a dead end people consuming settlement is technically a manageable problem if you grow your citizens elsewhere and move them in every once in a while.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:11
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I haven't built my own cable car way at this point and going off screenshots because the internet doesn't have the cable car stats. They look like 20 people tincans, are they actually more like 6? The minibus is the perfect power plant staffer in more ways than one so if it's comparable then yes, perfect.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:54
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Pretty sure liquid pulls only happen from one entity away so a train will drain your bottom tank in your picture, and by virtue of the sloshing mechanism, will indirectly pull slightly more than not from the top left tank but the pumped path will get priority to the top right still. Messy possibly but will basically get what you want. Loading to the train directly from the refinery will direct 50% always when the train is there which might be preferable as a devil you know. Since you have trains up and running the foolproof alternative is to have refinery to make tank to train load. Then train stop 1 is domestic tank farm and train stop 2 is export stop. Unload until full at domestic tank farm and you will top up anything missing before unloading true excess at the border. You pull all domestic needs from domestic tank farm (from rail stop or road connections or both)
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Jan 5, 2021 00:20
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Labor, trains aren't really going to do much for you when you have predictable, important to keep uptime sort of draws. You would probably most commonly use labor transport by train only for staffing frontier construction zones: your backwoods can become very accessible at a high volume with one train line so you can bring the labor to build the town/worker barracks by train instead of twisting them through dirt back roads by bus. Fake edit while typing: yeah, they are good for steel mills too. I've also see them used for flavor/semi efficient exurb/suburb/urb zoning where all your pop need satisfying buildings (besides food and sports) are downtown and your passenger train line collects off duty folk to go downtown for the less common needs of consumer good shopping, culture, and medical. Especially medical since those are pretty costly to build and staff.
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Jan 9, 2021 21:00
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Can you sort of gauge it by the adults-living-with-parents graph? That seems the most important metric for pop cap anyway, since they are the ones most likely to leave and if they stay they aren't having replacement babies so they are very temporary sources of labor by any measure.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:59
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I don't know how it translates into the game, it should be a fairly simple data mine for someone interested. I think there might even be pollution stats on the buildings otherwise you have the in game monitoring stations to tell. From a realism point of view uranium ore is the most dangerous ore product in the game as a heavy metal. Improperly managed mining exposes the miners to inhalation poisoning by heavy metal and improperly managed tails from ore processing are dangerous as heavy metal sources that can get into the water table. Conversion/purification are high energy processes so there's some occupational danger there but it's all well contained from a pollution point of view. Fuel fab is very mechanical so again occupational hazard but fairly well contained. Because of the danger of it as a heavy metal it is fairly well contained after ore processing so if any part should be dirty it's that. Modeling neglected spent fuel storage is almost secondary to that in my book. I can't over state how many Navajos the US government killed by heavy metal poisoning bootstrapping their nuclear industry by using them in the mines and ore processing, or living downstream of processing tail dumps, and the Soviets were the same by all accounts with forced/penal labor.
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Jan 15, 2021 23:46
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It'd be cool if there was a toggle to group construction sites that touch and let them share construction stores. I'm scared if they're technically in a corner that would make that hard to do though. Alternately or simultaneously it's also be cool to get a construction staging yard that is less expensive than especially the warehouses that lets you at least ship whole trucks of electronic and mechanical components 75% of the way without erecting new construction store yards and warehouses in the town center. This seems about more moddable at least, although micro intensive if there isn't some way to make them work a bit like distribution centers but for construction.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:40
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Unemployment when you have jobs going unfilled is usually overly complex or all default settings commuter arrangements. Do they need to get on a different bus stop/train stop to be able to get to the steel plant? Reduce capacity or set a custom residential building assignment/priority to make sure you split workers in the ratio you want to prioritize and fill jobs. Is it the same bus stop but different routes? Make sure frequency is in favor of the higher priority because everyone who can fit on the bus gets on the bus even if they don't have a job at the other end. They ride in circles in this case and will time out as mentioned. Same bus stop same route? Easiest way to manage, stop at the high priority stuff first even if it's not an intuitive route. Tldr there is literally no AI with worker agents. You need to use route design and route settings to shepherd them to the right places. The most they do is roll dice when they have multiple places to go and default settings will evenly distribute to every option in the path even if you have 1000 jobs available at branch A but only 50 at branch B.
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Apr 26, 2021 14:47
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Lib and let die posted:How in the gently caress do you all connect your coal mines - or anything not on a completely flat stretch of map - to the roads? It's always 'sides are in a slope that is too steep' no matter how much money I waste trying to terraform.
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Apr 26, 2021 16:50
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My favorite part of this game is researching or reinventing basic civil and industrial engineering concepts because a lot of them Just Work. ASA's builds are always amazing for doing that then going next level civil beautification planning. Volmarias posted:There's also a bit of leeway when making roads if they're short enough; you can sometimes plop road segments for short distances in ways that wouldn't be allowed for longer ones.
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Apr 26, 2021 17:20
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For real it'd be great if that scaled by how high the bridge is or if there was an option more tailored to switchbacks because if the cost effective and visually awesome solution was a switchback with the road bed semi supported by piers that would be 
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Apr 27, 2021 00:02
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Now that you mention it it is kind of weird you need at least one wire segment connecting a switch to a substation. Otherwise, for being really into industrial porn I've never seen a power line enhance the look of anything except for those really emblematic forest cuts for HV lines. If you're doing pretty realistic step down of your MV network and running it along roads I don't know that you can make it look any better.
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Apr 27, 2021 22:59
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I don't know if it's be anymore efficient but it seems more thematic if you use one of the small houses as a bunk house for the back country firefighters and then they take the helicopter into town to watch movies and buy food.
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Apr 29, 2021 03:05
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VictualSquid posted:How do you guys setup your cement factory?
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Apr 29, 2021 18:33
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I imagine heavy cableways still slot in for doing construction projects in the mountains before you have a construction helicopter or in parallel to. I don't know if you'd ever realistically use it to move raw ore in real life. If you look at surface mining operations at altitude you're probably looking at conveyors or cog/funicular/high grade rail to get ore down. Looking at the road map and what was explained during cablecars though, I think we got cablecars instead of funicular or cog railways. E. I think my ideal mountain top mining experience would be the more common: turn the top of the mountain, overburden and pay dirt together, into dust and drop it all off the side of the mountain. Then recover from the giant pile. It's awful for everything involved to do in real life so might as well game it out. zedprime fucked around with this message at 18:14 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 18:07
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OwlFancier posted:I think at least historically this is how they did it, you just chuck all the stuff you dig out down a shaft and it comes out at a lower level where it is removed from the mine through a lower adit.
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May 4, 2021 18:54
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Flying conveyors down a ridge or cliff is incredibly liberating for the reason that you don't usually need or want or even can criss cross them with anything. Not even comparable to the conveyor hell that is piping up your processors and mills where everything is competing for space.
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May 4, 2021 19:49
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grate deceiver posted:I'm very into this game, but I keep restarting because I always manage to gently caress up some crucial part of my design and then don't have the will and resources to tear it down and rebuild. Leaving off the table just importing the coal direct to the power plant by setting one tick to autobuy in case you're going full cosmonaut. But I wouldn't wish that on any new person so you should also consider that. You're the only civic planner for a whole region. You're gonna gently caress up and unless you're broke you can probably fix it.
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May 6, 2021 15:28
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Volmarias posted:Seriously though, don't be too hard on yourself, this game is notoriously obtuse and actively fights your best intentions at times.
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May 6, 2021 16:48
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If you're having trouble balancing the budget, building a power plant next to a border power hookup and selling the power from imported coal, or running a border refinery with imported oil and selling the end products both make a ton of money. Supply the people and profit spits out. These are basically the money cheats cosmonaut conduct is meant to avoid. Steel is comparitively complex to set up even on an import raws basis. E. I keep saying on the border because raw material import gets more expensive the more inland you get simulating fuel use (even if you have fuel turned off!) zedprime fucked around with this message at 17:12 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 17:09
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The number one thing that isn't obvious is you need to flatten anywhere you want to seriously build up. The game will helpfully let you build on small flattened spots in a hilly spot and then when you try to build anything else throw up it's arms like I can't build that dense are you crazy. If you flatten the whole thing you can build things right up next to each other. Flatten about twice as much land as you think you'll need. Most buildings can technically work with just a single road hookup but they generally work best with a bunch of trimming to get goods to and from more efficient loading setups than are provided by the building itself. Getting more into personal taste, screw around a while in a game with a ton of money using rubles to buy everything instantly to get an idea of how things hook up and work together. Then restart and do the same thing without buy it instantly and build it yourself. Importing goods for cheap is not intuitive - we discussed that a bit on this page already but you can get cheap inorts by either driving a car or train into a border crossing and telling it to pick up the material, or get it imported directly to your buildings by import magic where you pay more than the equivalent fuel cost to drive it in. You can take advantage of that by building your first construction depot near the border to import the construction materials you need for cheap.
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May 7, 2021 17:18
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It really calls out some of the supply chain handwaving in manufacturing based city builders or automation games. These traditionally have a very gameplay centric ramp of how complex it is to vertically integrate product XYZ. Products used early on take a couple inputs and everything arbitrarily builds on and integrated with everything till you have complex endgame products that are a hodgepodge of everything you make. Vertical integration gets varyingly narrow and wide, simple and complex based on how things are realistically made. A field to food and vodka supply chain is conceptually simple. Grain becomes food and vodka, easy peasy. Now consider building the farm, food, and vodka factory. How many products make a building? A poo poo ton. How do you get them all? Answer changes minute by minute as you vertically integrate the essential but complex construction material industry. What's the ratio of building A to B? I mean you can figure it out but you're not gonna get round numbers by the time OEE meets your transportation network so you are always importing or exporting to keep good OEE. It's the only game I respect to answer the question "how do you build a city/an industry out of frontier land"
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May 7, 2021 19:05
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Unemployment makes them a bit unhappy IIRC in which case it's a self solving problem if they repeatedly can't get work as they escape. You also need to service them so they might as well have a job. Some amount of unemployment is expected to keep everything staffed at ideal levels because sometimes shifts line up that there's just not a job to do when your ready to work. That's kind of a non answer but as long as they aren't eating you to debt there's not huge problems to have more people than jobs and your main worry should be in analyzing unemployment vs open jobs which can mean people are just having trouble getting there.
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May 7, 2021 20:13
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Transferring works fine if you treat them very strictly as collectors and deliverers instead of a mesh and you can then use "where should people go" to direct them to the right transfer while workers for example continue on in the train or transfer back inside it. But yeah at that point its like why need a transfer when you can just build the Citizens Great Needs Complex of a shopping center, hospital, and movie theater or multiples thereof right next to the train stop. But that's really all you can do and its the Sophie's choice of cool main streets in every suburban center or giant needs meeting block right next to the station.
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May 8, 2021 15:55
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The phrasing is more you don't need to do hub and spoke because destinations are interchangeable. That also means a maximized solution is to just build every service everywhere but we quickly get to the copout that maximizing this game is wider than it is deep. Collector routes still work and give a birds eye illusion that it might be hub and spokes. If that's not enough to break away from chasing the maximized needs meeting designs, maybe load up a custom map/original map with spotty church coverage and play with a conduct to fulfill maximum faith needs since the only way to manage that with fixed church locations is collector routes.
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May 8, 2021 18:21
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