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Volmarias posted:Aircraft, airports, and Tourism are now available in the test branch. This is live, now, actually.
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Jan 1, 2021 01:28
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zedprime posted:Difficulty affects this a lot but even after finding your favorite setting I'm not sure its the point. A citizen is like a slightly more complex raw material. They are something to extract and use to make new things. This is a super good 'meta' summary! I am obsessed with the game now, but even I bounced off of it initially. I think its hard to break yourself out of the Tropico (or similar game) idea of money kind of being the One Resource as the player. This game can get super boring if you just fastidiously export and then jam autobuild - there's really not a lot to the 'end' game other than just expanding, and if you really want, you can just brute force it. I can build a horribly inefficient city, but still make all of my citizens 100% happy because I can export a huge amount of fuel or something near the border, then autobuy things at stores. Now, when I go back to Tropico I get frustrated that everything is tied to money inherently. You really have to lean into the idea that your goal should be self sufficiency and making that system efficient and further, basically becoming independent of money. That's where it shines - making everything you need, getting it where it needs to be, and doing it well. You can always improve designs and industries. And further - which you touched on - planning your perfect garden is a huge part of it. Maybe some of your early designs are messy because they need to be - but once you're flush with resources and have the backbones of infrastructure set up, its amazing to make a new rail spur to a warehouse, then use that warehouse to supply a brand new town you built that's hyper efficient. Anyone sort of on the fence I encourage you to play like that and try to wean yourself off of treating money like your resource - It's just for blueprints or getting started, ideally. I hate to overpromote, but I haven't posted it here and just wanted to share. I recently started an LP for the game, and there's some useful posts/mini-guides buried in it. On top of that, I'm just excited about it! Check it out over here! I won't harp on it but its super fun and this is easily my best save yet - and you can go see my false start too. There's a whole ton of words and many are just drivel but there might be some helpful info tucked in and there's plenty of pictures if you want to see how I've done things for inspiration.
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Jan 1, 2021 06:06
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Spaseman posted:My game is telling me that I supposedly have 8k educated workers but I can't get enough people to fully staff my hospital, pub, grocer,and daycare. I have a distillery connected by bus route and I haven't had a single person show up for a shift in a long while. My total job needs are really only like 200 positions at any given moment so I don't understand how even with everything running 24/7, I can't get anyone in my distillery. Workers do take long breaks. By now you’d think I’d have an idea of what it takes in real to actually have a constant, say 200 workers, but I’m not sure. Off the top of my head as a guess: 500 total. Again, that doesn’t really add up to 8K - but they definitely have access to those jobs, right? Honestly there’s a whole host of weird things that could be a problem given your description. I mean, are you finding that things are staffed like half way, or are you saying that they won’t get above 25/30? It’s really hard to actually, absolutely max workplaces at near a 100% duty cycle. I consider about an 80% average maximum, realistically. It has to do with how workers find jobs. That situation sounds super weird and I’d need pictures or more info to give a better diagnosis of what’s going on.
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Jan 1, 2021 08:15
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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? 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.
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Jan 1, 2021 21:40
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Spaseman posted:This is my entire city and manufacturing area. Citizens live on the left side and take the bus to the right where the factory is. The only thing I can think of is that the game is simply giving me the wrong info about how many educated citizens I really have. I don’t have a good idea about education time. It’s kind of a bother for your current situation but once you’re out of that hole it’s very set and forget. Town halls are super useful! A town hall will give you stats just for the specific named region (those names on the map matter!) this becomes very useful to know “oh, this town is stretched thin” or “oh, this town has a ton of idle labor.” It’ll help you with sizing towns and things. The default one I think only requires 25 jobs? (And power and heat.) You can kind of infer it from taking a sort of average of what each apartment says, too, but it’s not as quick. e: and related to Pornographic Memory’s post: if you’re OK with getting into mods, Rob074’s collections on the workshop have bigger kindergartens and smaller clinics/hospitals. Both are super useful and relatively balanced. The big kindergartens are really almost a necessity. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Jan 1, 2021 |
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Jan 1, 2021 22:53
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zedprime posted:Once they get to work they always work 8 hours. *comedic whoop whoop whoop whoop from clicking on cable cars* Okay, maybe not, but technically they’re perfect for this application. Honestly my solution for this has been to either put the critical industries (power, heat) as a stop before something like mines or a vehicle factory or something - that way you can absolutely flood the line and there’s always vehicles dropping off workers if need be, but you aren’t wasting workers on the line as a whole. The amount of workers for those critical worksites hardly draws from the larger ones, and to be honest, I don’t want you to work the mine if there’s no power anyway 
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Jan 2, 2021 01:16
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OwlFancier posted:Do workers use overlapping transport routes intelligently or do I have to manually gently caress with it? You have to use two adjacent stops and tell them at the end stop of the city line to get out, with a workplace destination of the next stop. They’ll wander over there and wait for the next bus. They won’t figure out this transfer on their own and you can’t have them disembark and stay at a single station. Be careful, while this works fine, it can easily start to create issues with commute time if you rely too heavily on multiple transfers. And yes, basically. People have downtime where they satisfy needs and things so it’s not super useful to finesse your staffing and population to try to get it perfect. As with anything in this game, a small buffer is pretty cheap and saves you a lot of headache.
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Jan 2, 2021 12:59
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OwlFancier posted:The micromanagement seems to be the point, yes. There are view modes (magnifying glass right side of the screen) but they’re still not amazing. For placement, you really have to make everything nice and level first. This is crappy but it’s much easier to place things if it’s level first. I really want to build cities going up a slope but it’s just not realistic given the limitations. I’m not sure what you mean by “adjust” but you can always build another building where you want it - this game won’t ever have a “move building” button because it’s definitely committing to the ‘build with trucks on site’ thing. There is definitely, as zed prime said, a focus on designing so you don’t have to micromanage things. In my current save I don’t have to look at any of my construction or consumer goods chains beyond a quick check that no wrench showed up - something like bricks get made and shipped wherever they need to be automatically while I can go focus on a new project. My people feed and clothe themselves. Granted, that new project is going to require a lot of careful attention and ‘micro’ set up but the ideal is getting it running efficiently just like the other production chains. I realize this doesn’t really assuage your concern or help you fight through it, but if you’re spending your time in game having to like, baby sit trucks or buses, you may just need to redesign whatever system is causing you to have to micromanage something. It takes a lot of patience to set things up correctly and unfortunately, a lot knowledge which I only managed to get through false starts and trial and error. An addendum to that too: it’s a trap to think everything is going to be 100% staffed or happy or whatever 100% of the time. I have tons of buses going to a power plant and it’s flush with frequent staff. Every now and then it’s going to crap out, though, because things just aligned that the workforce dropped suddenly to 2/20. The line is quick enough this doesn’t last long, but it’s going to happen. So long as it’s not for days, this is fine. I think a lot of people make their own hell in this game by worrying too much about trying to wring the most out of every little thing when you can’t and often don’t need to - and if you do, it’s better to build a second instance of it than try to push it above 75% productivity. I’ve seen lots of complaints about the little dip in productivity of the gravel processing facility when trucks switch - I built gravel roads with like 50 dump trucks and my gravel pit still only just barely drained, then it refilled quickly once the roads were done. No point in fixing that little blip - but it bugs a lot of people who play these type of games because yeah, it is an inefficiency. It took me a long time to learn to ignore that. This game has some ‘fuzzy’ aspects like that. But honestly if “manually connecting everything” is a complaint here, this probably isn’t the game you’re looking for. The real point of the game is your infrastructure “system” design. But hopefully if you do think you want to stick with it some of those points can help, maybe?
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Jan 2, 2021 20:23
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And as a general comment, while you can build some nice looking cities, this game is much more of a production chain/ “transport fever” style of game than a city builder at its core. You’ll spend most of your time wanting to lay road and rail and figuring out how to get goods where they need to be. I would never first compare this game to Cities Skylines or even Tropico, even though it has a lot of DNA shared with both - I’d say it’s closest to Transport Fever of the games I’ve played - it’s just that you also design the towns and factories. But with enough carefully placed foliage and maybe some workshop mods for cosmetics and variety you can make nice looking stuff, too, but it takes insane amounts of patience and, as with anything in this, careful planning. 
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Jan 2, 2021 20:34
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OwlFancier posted:I am used to playing with move it in CS to be able to line things up nicely. I appreciate that the game does make time and resource investment important but for that exact reason I would appreciate being able to nudge things around in the blueprint phase. I have tried to level things but I also find the leveling tools to be very crap, again especially compared to CS. They are slow and it is hard to notice if they are doing anything and also there is no contour mode that I can find, to actually see if you have leveled things. I have no defense for the terraforming tools other than I usually buy a massive fleet of excavators and bulldozers and move them around so at the very least it’s fast but it’s still tough. “level to center” is basically 90% of everything when laying stuff out. Also turn on wireframe mode! That’s the contour mode you’re looking for. Truck distribution centers do not have terrible throughput for everything, but it depends heavily on your application. Yes, anything you can conveyor almost certainly should be. Coal and iron aren’t ever going to be well served by trucks. But I managed to initially sustain my small republic on 3 medium ones 1 - one importing consumer goods, one for fuel, and one for construction goods. I use them still to bring coal to my cement factory and to take my cement to anywhere it’s needed, even over 5k away. It doesn’t need to be fast, it just needs to be faster than the slowest part of the chain. Unless you’re using the maximum production of your prefab factory all day, trucks give it plenty of cement and gravel, for example. Stick a storage adjacent so if you build 20 apartments it won’t run out immediately and you’ll be good for awhile. If you don’t have it already, you absolutely need the conveyor mods from the workshop. They’re basically a requirement because I too would have quit the game entirely if I had to rely on the vanilla tower. The electrical system is a little too in depth, granted, as with things like bus stops requiring to be “part” of the road. Like I’ve mentioned, some of it sadly is stuff you just have to live with - but some of it is just learning the games systems. e: you haven’t even mentioned “why does the game have wooden railways when they seem basically as cheap/expensive as concrete ones but dramatically worse in top speed” or “why are there half a dozen trucks that have no material advantage over others” - those are relatively minor but are things that bug the crap out of me. Oh, and my biggest one: why the hell can’t people still use the road if I’m just installing lampposts/electric caternaries. (Okay, I guess this technically makes sense that they’d close the road to do this, but it suuuucks.) Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 20:46
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OwlFancier posted:I haven't gotten to the point where I have used railways, the things prior to that are already too tiresome. Never mind building things without using money. Yeah I mean, again, I have no defense of it. There are buttons that will help some of this, for example on a line, you can select “assign vehicle to” and then select multiple in a depot, then use that same line window to press start on each of them, but it’s weird. It could be easier and it just isn’t. You’re definitely at a tough spot because there’s more usability you aren’t finding and you won’t easily find because the UI justsucks. I can only defend and enjoy the game because I’ve played it enough to be annulled to it. If you think there’s a diamond in the rough with your enjoying this game my only advice is to read all the buttons and poke around all the Ui pages until you start to brute force your way to an understanding of exactly what you can do and how you can use it. That said, if your frustrations about “building things not using auto build” is more tied to the time it takes and generally not like the manual building.... eehhh this might not be your cup of tea. I can see though how if you’re having trouble with everything else, then having to go through the steps of manual builds would make you want to pull your hair out.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:02
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OwlFancier posted:I haven't even gotten half of the necessary materials to build anything without using the funding and trying to allocate resources to being able to do that would take far too long, I have enough trouble trying to stabilize funding as is. Would you want me to spend some time and try to write you a decent early game guide to help you get to manual building? Totally fine if not - but just wanted to ask before I take the time to write it out. It would kind of be a build order + a few tips and tricks - probably wouldn't help you much with a lot of the UI futzing. beats for junkies posted:This game is hitting the same factorio/anno " I love when I get a good 'ant farm' of traffic going and having that same realization. I'll avoid crossposting a ton of pics from my LP thread but I had some really pretty instances of tons of trucks on my divided highways. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 21:19
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OwlFancier posted:No it's fine I don't think it's an issue of me not understanding how it works, I suspect from looking at the construction office interface that I would be able to understand it but it seems entirely unapplicable unless I figured out what the hell even the point of the rest of the game is. As it stands I have yet to manage to reach the end of the year without spending everything constructing a small town and a basic coal industry and ending up entirely stagnant, so anything more complex than that seems rather academic. FWIW, even with hundreds of hours in the game now, I like to start my games on easy money (10mil rubles start) because otherwise you do have to do some quick and early exports (like fuel or liquor) to get sustainable funds - and even then you can't ignore the problem - but 10 mil would let you almost autobuild everything through steel if you're judicious with it. A couple tips: You can use distribution centers to import from the border - this can save you significant costs over either autobuild or auto-import. I do this for components and did for steel for a long time. It's not going to be the thing that saves your economy, but it adds up quickly. e: You also probably want to be fairly close to a border for this to be effective. It *will* get really annoying if you're miles away from the border you're grabbing from. You can import (manually or auto) to a storage and point construction offices to that. This is one of those things that you might go, "well, yeah" but for some reason its easy to have this mental lapse and think you need to be producing everything yourself to have a successful construction office. I did this in my first few games, as did a buddy. Honestly, its hard for me to say there's a lot of 'rest of the game' beyond your industries. Basically producing everything and eventually vehicles is the end game and any extended fun comes from making your systems better, more efficient, and more extensive. (To borrow Factorio's common refrain, but for W&R: The Socialism Factory must expand to meet the growing needs of the Socialism Factory.) I definitely want to make massive, pretty-looking metropolises, but that's definitely a self imposed goal. Technically you can 'beat' the game by just building a ton of liquor production near the border and then just magically import everything with your gains. I'm guessing you know that, but I just want to make sure you aren't looking for something that isn't basically supply chains.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:40
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Pornographic Memory posted:Do tourist attractions do anything for your own citizens? I don't really want to get too into tourism but they seem like cool looking buildings and it would be nice to give my citizens more entertainment options than just drinking and movies. I have no tourists and they definitely visit it but I have no idea what it grants them. Maybe just a happiness boost? I have a sight tower (mod - a church tower that’s a “cathedral tour”) and it gets visited, but it doesn’t seem to improve any citizens cultural enjoyment. It does “attraction” but citizens aren’t measured on that so who knows? I like to add them anyway as flavor/decor, but I dunno if it’s actually helping.
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Jan 3, 2021 03:48
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Distro center will certainly help for that. I have almost exclusively replaced truck routes (other than quarry ones) with distro centers, since generally they’re performing exactly the same function as a static route but with added logic that idles as necessary and can easily branch out to additional destinations. Highly recommend you grab the roadside conveyor mods from the workshop! You’ve definitely got a good start but let me tell you that you’ll come to hate laying out conveyor engines using only the vanilla options. Nice start! It seems like you’re figuring out the bits you need to understand early on. My advice is play your save until you’re sure you want to restart, but then spend a little time experimenting. It’s so much easier to try an idea that ends up failing when you know that you’re going to restart anyway.
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Jan 3, 2021 09:49
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Some projects I can manage to do the 'long' road first, pave it, and then go back and branch the small roads off of it so the main/longer road doesn't require 50 different pieces, but yes, of all things in the game that I jam autobuild its most frequently the short road between a building entry and nearby road.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:24
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zedprime posted:Combine these two concepts for the correct way to build long roads: string mud roads to each intersection so you can build the 10m, 200m, and 70m roads parallelly. Leave service mud roads either as the backroad for your slow vehicles or clear them later if you need to grid out/build on the new road. Yes, to add to this definitely don't sleep on mud roads. They're free and instant and you can help along a lot of construction 'chokepoints' by throwing a few of these in. They can be a useful detour if you need to pave a main road, or do something like replace a section of road with a bridge to go over railroad.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:35
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OwlFancier posted:Apparently seven people didn't go to work in the heating plant and so several thousand people froze to death and now nobody lives in my country... Heat is specifically the worst thing (and lack of electricity also shuts down heating plants) and I recommend playing without that until you’re comfortable with it. I still have to keep an eye on things because you never know when you’ll do something like woops, I was building a rail line across the road the buses need to use for the heat plant in mid January and now everyone’s dead. I recommend putting it sort of close to your town. You can probably just barely put it in range of an apartment or two and still avoid most of the pollution it generates, which avoids the commute issue entirely. You may also find out the game more or less wants you to do this, as even large plants can’t support more than a decently large town and they have fairly punishing drop offs of temp with each pump station and raw distance.
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Jan 3, 2021 21:46
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I don't think I shared it here yet, but I made a mod collection for this game. I just updated it with everything I'm currently using, and I even tried to take the time to arrange all of them logically, but then steam just cancelled my ordering, whelp. Find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2329453474 There's notes in the collection, but feel free to ask if you eye something you aren't sure if you want any specific ones in your game or if you're using something I haven't included that you think goons should know about. Also I say it everywhere but don't miss the linked robs074 collections, they're one of the major reasons my cities look good. The only vehicles mods I've added are a few Polish themed ones for my current save - I haven't felt the need to explore vehicle options but there might be others out there. Maps I haven't explored much either, at least since the patch (that added bauxite.)
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Jan 4, 2021 08:11
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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? Those workers will have a reduced lifespan, not outright die! I think Generally I try to put my heating plant just barely in range of a single apartment (or two) on the very edge of town and it keeps the pollution at bay
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Jan 4, 2021 19:14
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zedprime posted: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. I think the smaller ones might be 5-6, but I’ve only ever used them for mines so I’ve opted for the big ones which are 10-12. It factors out to the equivalent of 35kph but with functionally no delay in arriving one per second or so. They’re really handy for things that you want to keep staffed, assuming you can tolerate the visuals in a place that may not call for cable cars. Arven posted:I just learned you can use cable car stations as bus stops. This... solves a lot of problems I was having. I tried this once and it didn’t work for me (no one got off the bus), I ended up having to drop folks at a bus station nearby. I’ll have to see if I mucked it up somehow.
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Jan 4, 2021 20:16
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Arven posted:You can have busses pick people up from them I meant. Any time I build a cableway workers seem to prioritize it over the bus station right next door, so my solution was to set the cableway as a source of passengers. Cableways aren't capable of keeping up with the throughput of people waiting at them, so having busses steal from the waiting worker pool doesn't matter. You’re in luck because I have two mines currently served by bus and I might be able to do an experiment to test this theory out. (Though really you just need to roughly measure the arrival frequency*capacity to compare rates.)
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Jan 4, 2021 20:24
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Does anyone have a solid handle on the mechanics of oil/fuel pumping? I think I can make an adequate 'overflow to an export tank' set up by doing something like:  I think what happens here is that the two pumps will force the "Domestic use" tank to fill first, because they're actively pumped, and the export tank will only fill when the intermediate tank starts to fill up (I believe these will fill evenly, so if the intermediate tank is at 200L, the export tank will be at 200L.) This is absolutely what I want to happen, because I always want there to be domestically available bitumen and fuel. What then confuses me though is that I'm not sure what happens if I attach a train loading to the export tank. Is this going to function as a pump, so it'll have the same 'priority' as the domestic tank if a train is waiting? I think maybe the train loading can only "see" what's in the export tank, so it won't actively 'pull' through the intermediary tank, but I'm not sure. If no one knows, I'm going to try this set up and see if it works. e: considering there are multiple outputs of the refinery you might be able to treat that as the "intermediate" tank, even. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 23:42
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zedprime posted: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. I had thought of this, since it’s how I intend to set up my other goods that will be overproduced for export, but I’m just in a spot where this set up would be so much more convenient for me space and set up wise right now. (I sort of need to get fuel going quickly, if I want to keep pace with the goals I have.) I’m going to try what I drew and see - what you described about the “sloshing” is why I think it’ll work. Im not worried if there’s some minor inefficiencies in the set up, so long as it doesn’t either 1. Extinct my domestic supply or 2. Block up the refinery because I’m not using enough of either fuel or bitumen. I’m also going to try to cut out that intermediate tank, and just pump to the domestic tank and go un-pumped to the overflow/export tank from the refinery. Conveyors added priority, why can’t I have it for pipes? 
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Jan 5, 2021 00:41
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I would pay actual hard earned dollars to have a tool that either measured rail distance since the last signal when I had the tool selected, or something that would just autoplace a signal every x meters until it hits a junction of any kind and let me figure out the intersections. I actually kind enjoy signalling an intersection, there's a certain zen to it and it feels good to finish. Signalling the long rear end trunk lines sucks and is boring.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:14
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Pornographic Memory posted:nothing like laying a ton of track and only finding out an hour later when you actually route a train down it that one of your 50 non-junction signals is facing the wrong direction You would think this would be simple to remember and notice but it always happens. Worse, I have a friend, born and lived in the US and has now been in the UK for about a year. He plays and is absolutely constantly mentally screwing up the signals and his brain isn't tuned enough to right-hand drive that he can stare right at the problem signal and not notice it. I feel for him.
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Jan 6, 2021 02:20
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OwlFancier posted:I haven't actually tried it with pipes because I have nothing to pipe, but conveyor towers have a priority function, do pipe splitters also have one? If so can you use that to make your overflow system? They do not, but the above design did work (though I used the refinery itself as the “intermediate” tank.) I haven’t tried it with a waiting train but I’m pretty sure the train can only pull from the overflow tank so it should be Working as Intended.
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Jan 6, 2021 17:31
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Arven posted:Wait... the signals in this game are right hand drive? gently caress. You can signal it either way you want! And also, I might have confused the terms. I signal as though it is a car driving in the right lane, for clarity.
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Jan 7, 2021 05:40
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GOOD TIMES ON METH posted:Someone in the old Management game thread posted a big list of mods to try with this game that I'm now interested in after sinking a dozen hours in vanilla. Does anyone have a link to that post or is he in this thread somewhere? Hey that's me https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2329453474 I covered any weird caveats in the notes in the collection. I tried to organize them once but steam decided it didn't like my order so its all over the place. Lemme know if you have any questions! e: really the meat of what I use are the rob074 collections linked. Most everything in that collection is the few extra necessary ones (like conveyors) and then random ploppable cosmetics. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 16:45
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https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-9 Mixed traaaaaaaaaains.
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Jan 9, 2021 07:04
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OwlFancier posted:I'm struggling to see how trains are practical for delivering passengers. Frankly I'm struggling to see how long range commutes are practical at all. Trains have high volume but I can't see how you'd use more than a fraction of it, and you also seem like you would lose a huge amount of productivity with staffing shortages unless you somehow flood your train lines with trains, which jams them up because of block restrictions. zedprime posted: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. A lot of it comes down to planning on using them, too. You can pretty adequately serve anything by bus and, since you start with buses more or less out of necessity, you'll probably not see much need to change to trains or trams for those industries you're already serving by bus and you can continue to plan on building towns and industries to work that way. Instead, though, you can plan on putting industries along train lines to serve multiple with one train line, or to serve big workforce-sinks like steel mills or vehicle plants. There's also the issue of more and more road vehicles eventually choking things up with traffic, especially as you get multiple bus lines with 6, 8, 10, 12, etc buses per line to one big platform. This gets compounded when you add private vehicles into the mix. You can argue "Well why would you do that," and you're right - Really, you don't need trains for labor and can use buses and manage the traffic any number of ways, but that's just part of the sandbox of the game, imo. I want to give my dudes little cars to drive around, so eventually buses are going start adding to the issue. Plus, I'd like to move as much to electric as possible once I get a nuclear plant going so as much as I can I'm running on clean energy! Totally unnecessary, but part of my personal 'endgame.' Eventually I'll use trains to get students to the university in a main city from their small town that doesn't have one. I can, absolutely, just build another university which again leaves you at, "So why use trains?" so I guess my argument is just that its a sandbox. While I see what you're picking at re: 'appeal' of stations, I think its just sadly another case of sort of having to work within the confines of the system and understanding that there's going to be some limitations and rules you'll have to brute force with line and station logic. Having them have a more or less equal 'weight' as a destination allows you to manually control the flow and adds additional challenge regarding transporting people. If a train station could serve a much larger area you'd start to get into gamey things like having citizens travel 50ft on a tram to another train station and now they can walk anywhere they need to. Though I think implicit in what you're saying is, "I'd rather I didn't have to worry about priorities and deciding for peoples' transit myself, and would like the buildings I place to help make those decisions for citizens in a more automatic way" and, while understandable, definitely goes against the philosophy of what the game's doing. It also starts to create some weird issues of its own where if you don't agree with what those rules are, you're now actively fighting against logic instead of just having a sort of "dumb" network where you've made and can change all the rules. It's like the very common question of "Can I get people to transfer lines?" which usually people find janky - and it is janky - to have to force everyone via a rule to congaline to a new station. But the minute you start to delve into, "Well just let them choose another station automatically or wait there for another bus" you open up absolutely tons of cases that become really hard to handle both as the game designer or as the player designing a network. The solution they have isn't intuitive in many ways but it gives you a whole lot of control and the relatively simple, 'dumb' behaviors mean that the complexity of your system all comes from you. (Whether or not you see that as a good thing, though, is definitely a matter of opinion, because part of that involves a lot of thinking, clicking, and often reevaluating when it doesn't work exactly how you had planned.) That said I do wish the game had something more like transport fever 2 wherein you gain something from shuffling people around. "Profit" doesn't seem right for the game, but I wish there was perhaps more of an 'internal tourist' sort of feeling, maybe it gives them some kind of boost as a 'vacation' or whatever. Or, perhaps your excess citizens from the huge birthrate could be delivered safely to the Soviet border for a boost in your population's loyalty, since you're taking care of people... Or something. I don't have good ideas for it, but there's definitely a lack of reasons other than bigger industries or planning to use trains to serve multiple industries. Tourists help somewhat, at least.
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Jan 10, 2021 00:42
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How big are you making your trains? I mean, yes, you are going to have to bus people to a single station if you’re intending to use that station to fill up multiple trains of hundreds of people from the same platform and the result of that might be that you find it’s just easier to skip the train step. It all depends on how you’re approaching it though - I have a pretty distant city staffing my refinery. It has two bus lines, one that grabs passengers from the edges of the city and brings them to the center for services, another that does the same stops on the edges but grabs workers instead and drops them adjacent to the train station, where they walk. It’s a total of four bus stops and a train station, and only because I chose to separate the town service stop and the train station bus stop. It’s not massively complex. That town is far from finished but I’ve already managed to get a train of up to 200 people once (the line is two passenger trains with a roughly 360 capacity each which isn’t a great frequency, but it’s good enough for now.) Granted that’s not consistent but I could easily be pumping a lot more people into that train station with just two distant “feeder” bus stops and my cities aren’t totally built on top of each other. The trains I have are faster than buses but functionally there’s not a whole huge advantage for trains if for arguments sake my bus fleet and my trains ran at about the same speed, and arguably in a steady state that speed isn’t that important if the bus line maintains a higher frequency and isn’t getting stuck or dumping workers because of timeouts. So ultimately sure, maybe I don’t need trains that way, but getting 500 people to one spot is the same challenge whether you do it at the factory complex or whether you do it at the train station. Walking distance is like 400m along lighted roads. You can put thousands of workers in a 400m square area with services included. There’s definitely challenges with factory Tetris and getting people to work from their destination stop, not much to say about that. There’s some balanced mods (in terms of workers/production rate/footprint) that do offer better, or at least different factory connection options - and often you don’t need to connect things at all and can serve them via a very close by depot and just have a truck line or distro center that shunts goods that short distance to keep the factories fed, or the factory’s output empty. Which, yes, this gets “fiddly” but ultimately that’s really what the meat and potatoes of the challenge and network design is here.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:00
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I dunno man I think you just fundamentally are bouncing off what the games presenting and instead of risking coming off as rude trying to pick into some of your things and explaining why I personally like them, I’ve got to just sort of settle on I don’t think you’re going to be a fan. Nothing wrong at all with that, it is a really weird and unique “layer” of game that you’re correct in saying really isn’t good as either a pure aesthetic builder or pure factorio production game. You have to sort of thread between the two and that has a a very niche appeal, I’d think.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:09
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biglads posted:Info about the cheat menu Wait, they're hiding an auto spacing feature from us? Aaaaaaah! It must be janky or something if they're hiding it.
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Jan 11, 2021 21:21
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OwlFancier posted:I wish that distribution centers could handle pickup from fields, seems daft really to have to store trucks in the agro farm when you only use them for a fraction of the year. This is absolutely the way to do this. I don't even buy trucks for my farms themselves anymore. (The UI sort of implies that the farm is broken if you don't have a truck, but its lying.) The real challenge is storing enough grain in a convenient way for an entire year. I'm already to a point where my modded-in 5000 crop massive grain silo is empty before mid-summer. I'd have to have a *lot* of grain silos using only stock buildings, which means a lot more futzing with making sure that the crops get from each silo to where they need to go. Crops are my bane.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:05
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OwlFancier posted:I think I need to rejigger the agro factory to add road cargo stations offloading to grain silos which then direct connect to factories. Previously I had the agro farms connecting direct to the silos which makes it hard to get direct connections to all the various crop processors. Using only stock buildings, I had success with 3 grain silos stuck together with factory connections, then told the distro centers to drop their crops from fields in the center one. Because resources will travel for free between a single connection, this will fill all 3. Then I used the two outer silos as a source for bringing it to nearby factories or their attached storages. Using that 3-long chain helped total storage capacity, but also stopped the distro centers or lines handling BigGrainStorage->Factory from immediately rushing the BigGrainStorage dock with all their trucks and slowing up my harvest dramatically. You could probably easily invert this too and deliver to the outside and pull from the middle - that's probably smarter. Now with the massive grain silo, I just stick a road cargo depot alongside and call it a day. e: yeah my current set up is just "big grain silo gets fed by road cargo station and thats also where trucks go to load and feed factories" but that only scales so far and it's becoming a problem for me. I could simply duplicate the set up to expand it, but I want something more elegant.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:13
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OwlFancier posted:Will silos connected directly to each other share resources then? I tried that and it seemed like it was just sitting in one of them. Yes, but you need to be careful - dropping off something at the center silo will jump *one* connection and fill the other two, but I don't think this works if you connect a silo to a silo and then to a cargo station. I think the truck dropping stuff off that "pushes" resources will count the cargo station->silo as the one 'free' transfer over a factory connection. The "sharing" is basically a function of the truck being able to push or pull resources, and it can do this through one connection. I think this logic probably exists to enable road cargo stations and it isn't a true intention that buildings 'share,' so you have to be conscious of the truck being what's doing the 'sharing.' You could reasonably just connect as many silos as you want to a road cargo station and that road cargo station would functionally act as a single, massive storage, but I don't think they'll share with each other. e: now that I think about it that can't be totally right with sharing, because factories will spit out to one additional storage.. I don't know. My advice is to use caution and test a lot.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:22
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OwlFancier posted:That makes more sense if it only shares when it overflows one silo. I think that cargo stations with silos connected is likely to be the best long term storage solution. It is - I think the only thing I'm not a big fan of with this approach is that I like to be able to separate the input and output docks for something like this.. Though I suppose you could just use the dock of the silo itself as the input, then the cargo station as the output. That, and reasonably aesthetically pleasing packaging, but that's with everything.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:29
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Trucks become super untenable super quickly unless you go completely over the top with them. In my LP playthrough I'm only really just getting my trains running in a real way around 1973~5, and I've been spending millions on truck fleets to keep things rolling. On top of that, I wasn't yet producing my own fuel, and I was risking importing like 1.5 million of fuel (in one year) until I prioritized to make my own fuel. I am still basically running over 500 trucks and I still haven't become fully resource independent. Further this worked well because for 'roleplay' purposes I set up a lot of divided highways, which also help prevent trucks really getting choked up on roads at times. Still overkill for anything but roleplay, but occasionally helpful. That said, I still support setting up separate towns for industries and splitting things up more than having one big city, but that's a personal organizational preference. I don't think there's any functional difference. I've just noticed that I'm a lot happier with the game when I compartmentalize because fixing issues midgame this way is often a local problem instead of a systemic problem. I did plan ahead though, and I have some rail depots set up to move the large mass of goods somewhere locally, then distros that will eventually pull from those rail stops only a short distance to towns. Generally, industries get directly connect to the rail system, but the way my save has shaped up I haven't run into much of that beyond my steel mill thus far. I just need to connect the industries to get things to those depots instead of sending the trucks directly, but that's going to require a little retooling of the industries I've slapped down. On trains: Veloxyll wrote up a guide on signalling that was extremely helpful to me here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3950400&pagenumber=4#post511076216 It also references this guide on steam, though you'll note he did find an error in the 2-2T junction: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1991851668 And there's an official guide from the devs for more simple, at least partially blocking intersections: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1718149719 Generally I like to avoid guides and fly by the seat of my pants, but I really couldn't even begin to understand rail signalling until I got into these few guides despite it seeming relatively simple in what each signal did. It was still a process to learn what I know now, though, and I still feel like I'm mostly stealing from others at times rather than truly understanding. A few tips I did learn: The 'regular' train depot's max train length is 150m, and the 'long' passenger or cargo platform is 75m. I try to make everything based around that. Also crucially Owlfancier, your stop that looks like this:  That's a design I have *always* had trouble with if trains can turn around/choose a platform via the X-crossover. I'm not exactly sure how or why it breaks because I've never caught it in the moment of breaking, only after the trains were stuck, but just beware. r I've started making stations like that connect to the trunk lines with a T intersection and make the other side of the station a loop around. Alternatively, make the station like that, but instead of flipping in station, lock them to a specific platform and give them a turnaround on the trunk line 'after' they depart the station. E: and re: train length, any trains much longer than your station won't be able to flip and then subsequently use the X-crossing, because the head of the train will be past the crossing. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 06:01
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:40 |
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OwlFancier posted:What is the mechanism for sustaining populations in towns? My established towns seem to refill buildings if I relocate people out of them, but my new towns do not seem super keen on spreading out from their residences. Maybe slightly related to population weirdness, especially if you're on the test branch: 0.8.3.17 -Decreased/slowed birthrate by 40% 0.8.3.18 -Birthrate was increased back by 20% 0.8.3.19 -Tweaked again the birthrate, tweaked on different place so to change should be more linear Not sure what the current non-test version is.
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Jan 12, 2021 19:22
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