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After a certain point you might as well just have an ocean of asphalt
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Dec 9, 2020 16:09
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Set a dangerous precedent updating every day - nothing new today, I spent my entire time playing last night redesigning that rail hub - and its still not finished. But its seeming more reasonable.
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Dec 9, 2020 20:50
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My only experience with trains if Factorio, but the chain signal terminology seems familiar enough, as does the buffer structure there. I'm assuming trains can just casually reverse in place at stations in this game? How efficiently will you be using the space in between the rail lines? Will it all be filled up with stops? Could you get space efficiency by moving stuff further out so you can fit stuff in between? What are the transport options/bottlenecks like within the railyard? Trucks?
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Dec 9, 2020 21:50
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Innocent_Bystander posted:My only experience with trains if Factorio, but the chain signal terminology seems familiar enough, as does the buffer structure there. I'm assuming trains can just casually reverse in place at stations in this game? How efficiently will you be using the space in between the rail lines? Will it all be filled up with stops? Could you get space efficiency by moving stuff further out so you can fit stuff in between? What are the transport options/bottlenecks like within the railyard? Trucks? Trains flip when they stop, if they need to. The space that's going unused here is unfortunately kind of just going to be dead. So here's a quick color coded diagram:  In red are three warehouses. Blue is the cargo station, pink is a road cargo station. You can see the connections between them in purple. All three warehouses connect to the train cargo station, the two bottom warehouses also connect to the road cargo station. These connections in purple (called Factory Connections in W&R) are important - they can be a free transfer of resources without a vehicle carrying the goods - so straight from the train/cargo station to the warehouse. They cannot be crossed, are heavily limited by distance, and the amount they're allowed to turn. (You can get a 90 degree angle, but just barely, often.) You can extend these and make networks of them, but then they lose the 'free transfer' aspect and must be staffed by forklifts. I love the idea of this. Forklifts buzzing all over a yard sounds awesome. Unfortunately right now there's two big things that make that suck really hard: Forklifts can carry 0.44 tons of a good only, and still take ~1 second to load at a factory connection, so even if you build a million forklifts, you quickly start to hit the limits of where they can connect to unload. The other part is that I've had extremely weird behaviors surrounding using them to unload a train from a cargo station. (It doesn't seem like they recognize the train as a valid source.) They end up taking absolutely forever to move goods to a point where it can start to screw up production or in this case, keep trains waiting for a long time. I could maybe think up a way to get enough forklifts and an efficient design to make a depot that's more oriented toward having a lot of tightly packed platforms and then try to manage loading/unloading via forklift (with my storages/warehouses separate), but this would get REALLY complicated really fast because of having to manage all the forklift logics. I don't think (probably) it would be any more efficient other than space, but it would look cool as hell, probably. It's a project for another day to see if I can get something like that to work. So my current design relies on the inbound supply trains using the warehouses' single platforms to unload - You'll see they're connected out to the yard. Those trains wait there, until fully unloaded. Outbound/local trains can use the cargo station in the center to come grab what they need without having to wait for a warehouse to become free, and can potentially grab up to 3 goods per train. (I don't think I need to cover any cases where a train would need to carry more than that so I won't have any turnarounds to get from one hub platform to another.) The road cargo station is for exporting - Trucks will grab goods from those bottom two warehouses when the supply is over a certain threshold and take it to a container loading building to be put into containers and loaded onto a ship. In this way, I will always be draining supply, but this should keep my factories producing 'constantly' while also stopping exports if one resource starts to get low. Obviously the third warehouse is not connected - I could still use trucks to grab from here at a reduced rate, but I figure these warehouses will be goods I don't plan to export, like intermediate goods. A lot of these might not even make it to the hub, depending on the production chain's design, so these warehouses might end up being extra storage or even unused. They're not going to get built right away and are more just a planned use of space than totally necessary for the "Bring here, then export the extra goods" logic. Given the footprint and layout of the cargo stations and warehouses, this is about as tightly as I can pack everything. The warehouses being any closer to the cargo stations - the factory connection can't complete because its too short. The bottom right warehouse also has to be a bit further out so it has rail access and it also can't block the road access to the top warehouse with its rail connection (which it is basically pixels away from doing right now - any closer to the 'start' of the road from the warehouse and I can't build it). I don't see a way to save space here, and I think this design sort of dictates the yard/switch design outside of it. I'm not totally sure what the bottlenecks will be to exports. I think, usually, it ends up being production unless I'm going way over the top. I like to have some slack in my supply lines. Technically there is sort of a bottleneck with trucks and container packaging, but only in bursts. Generally they end up having the time to catch up and be idle (or near idle) for a bit until there's another burst of an overage. That said, the last (and only) save I did with a very similar export design didn't have me producing tons and tons of goods in excess. e: I should comment too - there's buildings that would make this a whole lot cleaner of a design available on the workshop, but I avoid them because some seem buggy or have weird behaviors and general balance. This is a little weird looking, but its very easy to trouble shoot because every warehouse is single good and I don't have to swarm one giant distribution center building with tons of trains and trucks. double e: and no, I'm still trying to figure out packaging for the open storages. I am actually considering going for a workshop option for those because their layout is so damned hard to fit. We'll see! Maybe it's forklift time. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 22:20
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Forklifts are so bad that it might be better to do their job with road trucks.
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Dec 9, 2020 22:43
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Yeah you aren’t wrong. I want to make them work, but I don’t think there’s a ton of use cases. I can even make an argument for (passenger) gondolas/cable cars I’m hard pressed to want to use forklifts. I don’t think they’re a bad idea, they just need to maybe have a more instant load/unload instead of having a little brief hitch each time that makes them queue up and maybe carry slightly more. Unfortunately my guess is that the dev doesn’t want to abstract them (as they don’t really abstract much at that level/layer) so they won’t change a lot.
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Dec 9, 2020 22:55
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Yeah you aren’t wrong. I want to make them work, but I don’t think there’s a ton of use cases. I can even make an argument for (passenger) gondolas/cable cars I’m hard pressed to want to use forklifts. I don’t think they’re a bad idea, they just need to maybe have a more instant load/unload instead of having a little brief hitch each time that makes them queue up and maybe carry slightly more. Unfortunately my guess is that the dev doesn’t want to abstract them (as they don’t really abstract much at that level/layer) so they won’t change a lot. Oh I like gondolas, they're great on hilly maps where the mines are way up in the mountains. Imo if you do decide to use forklifts, get some workshop mods that add bigger capacity forklifts and larger forklift garages. The current implementation is just dumb
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Dec 10, 2020 00:45
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Yeah you aren’t wrong. I want to make them work, but I don’t think there’s a ton of use cases. I can even make an argument for (passenger) gondolas/cable cars I’m hard pressed to want to use forklifts. I don’t think they’re a bad idea, they just need to maybe have a more instant load/unload instead of having a little brief hitch each time that makes them queue up and maybe carry slightly more. Unfortunately my guess is that the dev doesn’t want to abstract them (as they don’t really abstract much at that level/layer) so they won’t change a lot. They're already abstracted in the form of instant and invisible transfer for adjoining buildings if you don't have forklifts. The forklifts definitely need some work, or at the very least the factory connection system does.
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Dec 10, 2020 01:00
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Volmarias posted:They're already abstracted in the form of instant and invisible transfer for adjoining buildings if you don't have forklifts. You know that is a good point. Honestly, I would do them not unlike the cablecars. Make them just congaline into a little model of an open warehouse door and give a constant stream of resources. Just don't make them weird discreet vehicles that end up being Trucks But Worse In Every Way.
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Dec 10, 2020 01:20
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Quick (non) update, I played Cyberpunk last night and my game time is extremely limited this weekend, so the next update is probably Monday/Tuesday. (Dunno what LP etiquette is for changes in usual postings.) I downloaded a kinda cheaty open storage to help me with my designs for the rest of the rail hub for resources needing an open storage. I just couldn't find any packaging of the vanilla buildings that looked even remotely good and also didn't use absolutely tons of wasted space. I found somethin g (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2248715131) of which the smaller version is fairly close to the stock size and capacity while giving me plenty of options for layout. I feel a little bad about this (just because I think that these sorts of things are a big part of the challenge of the game for me personally) but I'm covering for it by finding this little gem: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2025204885 Which if you read the description, is modelled after a common Polish railway storage that not only perfectly complements my planned system for delivering goods, but is thematically appropriate. Neat! The first storage will let me finally stop spending way too much time staring at an empty space in the hub for open storage which should get us moving nicely along to the next bits of the game. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 02:51
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The usual etiquette is to disappear and come back two weeks later to tell us your house fell into a sinkhole and/or your computer exploded, so you're fine.
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Dec 11, 2020 03:12
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Solumin posted:The usual etiquette is to disappear and come back two weeks later to tell us your house fell into a sinkhole and/or your computer exploded, so you're fine. Heh, Anime Store Adventure doesn't know about the LP curse.
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Dec 11, 2020 13:57
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Facebook Aunt posted:Heh, Anime Store Adventure doesn't know about the LP curse. They'll learn, soon enough. Wait, this isn't a Darkest Dungeon thread. Oops!
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Dec 12, 2020 03:03
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Part 5: My Republic for a Train It is the winter of 1967. The (still rather unceremoniously named) Sejov Autonomous Region has continued to work toward their five year plan of a major cargo hub. With the steel mill and mechanical components plant working (and exporting those pricey components to neighboring SSRs), most of the work to achieve the plan lies in the hands of their construction workforce. The area has been leveled and planned for the hub.  The new cargo hub, Winter 1967. No other major projects have been undertaken in the region in the meantime - The hub's importance and relative location to the construction depots has effectively tied up the entire fleet of construction vehicles available to the republic. Small efforts have been undertaken to expand and reorganize bits of infrastructure: For example, a high voltage power line has been rebuilt in order to make way for a future rail line to serve Sejov. A small effort has been made to ready a new construction depot far to the north of Miergeni that will allow easier construction in that area. The food factory was also expanded to include livestock farms and a slaughter house.  The Miergeni food factory and slaughterhouse, Fall 1967. Unfortunately, no trains currently cross the new rails laid across the republic. While the flow of Rubles is now decidedly positive, the republic cannot afford expensive, foreign trains. In some ways this has allowed the rail construction to progress uninhibited by traffic - meaning that rail construction vehicles can use what tracks they need in any direction, making it relatively quick to finish out the first branches of the core lines around the republic.  The track around the steel mill is nearly complete, Spring 1968. So far, this has not become an overly urgent issue - the trucks, busses, and roads of the Republic are currently adequate to serve its people - but they are not able to expand to support much growth. Already there are issues with shop stockouts during the winters, requiring pricey foreign imports of food. While infrequent enough to be affordable, such things show the relative weakness of the current infrastructure. Soon, the republic will need to invest in trains, even if they have to sink deeper into debt. The goal, currently, is to pay off as much of their current debt as possible until the cargo hub is ready to receive trains. The city of Nowy Bratwice has become the first real modern 'city' built along Soviet guidelines, though it is far from a pinnacle of planning as it's rapid development to support the steel mill hampered efforts to plan effectively.  Nowy Bratwice, Spring 1968. Once the cargo hub has seen more progress, planning will begin on moving citizens from old cities to new, organized Soviet cities built for the future.
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Dec 14, 2020 22:21
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Part 5b: Ugh Not a lot of visible progress in this update, obviously. From my past couple posts you could see that a whole hell of a lot of time was spent on pause, laying out the hub carefully. Beyond that, I had to do some maintenance on some of the bus lines all over. Some started to get bunched up in ways that they weren't easily working themselves out of - leading to power outages frequent enough to be a pain in the rear end, and also starving my steel mill of coal and iron at times. This is all going to get cleaned up once I get passenger trains operating, so that's good, but that's still a little ways off. I need to make some lines to the cities which don't even have platforms planned right now. My goal was to not really worry about the 'old' cities having train access - just start to shift folks to new planned cities - but I'm not sure what the timing will be. I don't want to sit around waiting for years while people work on new cities if its going to hurt my overall progress enough that it makes more sense to just link the old cities. I'm kind of basing that decision on how quickly the hub gets set up. It seems like it's on track for roughly an early 1970 finish, which is good, and would lead me to think that I can wait to plan out the new cities as its finishing up. Right now we're still importing any oil-based products. One of the next projects is going to be fixing that, but again, there's sort of some timings involved of moving citizens to planned cities and finishing the hub. I have a pretty big construction fleet and I want to avoid buying even more vehicles when I'm this deep in loans (~4million.) Right now they're pretty well utilized, so new projects have to be put behind what's already going. So there's a lot in motion and a lot to come up, but it might not all be super apparent from the pictures. I'm glad to be over laying out the hub and fixing some of the growing pains in the supply lines I have right now. I spent so long dealing with that crap that I finally get to unpause and watch the ant farm again. Too long paused and planning gets boring after awhile. I want to see my trucks go around! I was also super lazy when trying to signal up the weird sidings/spurs around the steel mill during construction, so I spent a ton of time handling this:  Now that I'm building lines "out" instead of sort of "to" each other, though, I can keep it much more organized so I don't have to micromanage the rail construction vehicles. So it's a short update, but hopefully the next one will have a nice, completed railhub to show off. And maybe even trains! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG-xuaRuEfQ
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Dec 14, 2020 22:42
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Nice work! Can you give us a screenshot (or MS Paint over a world map) giving us a sense of your main bus routes & what they're used for?
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Dec 14, 2020 22:49
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Arcturas posted:Nice work! Can you give us a screenshot (or MS Paint over a world map) giving us a sense of your main bus routes & what they're used for? Sure! They're actually pretty simple, my troubleshooting was really just doing some fiddly bits. So, again, for reference:  And my lines:  So, most of these are very self explanatory and uninteresting. Most are just from a bus platform in the city to the worksite. If there's two lines, its because they are identical lines, but they start at two different stops in town. I could do a A>B>A'>B where A and A' are town stops, but if something bunches up the line you tend to get a lot of buses going to the same stop at once. With no anti-bunching other than manual, this could be really nasty. This way if they bunch up, they still equally go to A and A' equally even if they get bunched to want to arrive at each platform at roughly the same time. (This will work itself out a little bit as they have to have some unbunching at B, but not much.)
The interesting/problem ones ended up being the Coal workers (from Sejov to the coal mines) and the Sejov railworkers. Rail construction with the vehicles I have can eat up 132 workers. I have enough people, and I definitely want to keep them well staffed right now since getting trains moving is basically the goal once the hub is working. The coal workers and the Rail workers busses grab from the same Sejov platforms - Rail workers originally just went to the rail construction office and back. The coal workers have probably my longest bus commute - dropping off at the coal power plant and processing facilities, and then hiking up the mountain and dropping the rest at the mines. What ended up happening is that the much shorter rail workers line would sometimes get flush with people, but couldn't dump them all at the rail construction office because it got full and would lock a bunch of people on the bus until they timed out. If these busses took a full load just prior to the coal bus showing up, the (more important) coal workers bus got no workers at all. Now I'm fighting blackouts, especially if busses start to bunch up badly in the busy Sejov stations. At first I just made the coalworkers + railworkers line all one line. Stop at the rail workers, then run up the coal workers line and repeat. This arguably solved the issue because the 1 and 2 lines have more than enough capacity to flood the rail office, but then I noticed that the rail construction office started to empty out in waves and wasn't getting replenished for an obnoxiously long time because of the full period of that long bus route (and vehicles bunching.) Eventually I opted for a half-way solution. I have enough of a coal buffer at the power plant + brick factory that I don't need to worry too much about the worker level at this mine. So there's still a dedicated coal line that stops at the power plant and runs up the hill, but now the rail workers line finishes at the powerplant too, so it keeps the powerplant topped off. This made the line a little longer so that helped prevent the busses quickly filling and trapping workers and now they also had a second destination to get off at. Then I had to spend a little time doing some manual unbunching. Ultimately all of that is just bandaids until I get passenger trains running, but I am proud of getting it fixed for now. I could spend more time observing and working through the lines to be more efficient, but they're due to be replaced anyway. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 23:49
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Part 6: Hub Hubbub The first warehouses are erected in the hub, Autumn 1968 It's all hands on deck for the Five Year Plan. Though always making small and constant improvements and providing attention to the people (of course!), the republic's main focus is that rail hub and port. Exports will be able to flow steadily.  Three shifts work day and night to lay rail at the hub, Autumn 1968  Trucks line up to drop resources for the drydocks, Winter 1968-69  The same construction fleet builds the cargo dock, Spring 1969 By the summer of 1969, most of the buildings of the hub had been built and ready for use, but rail is still under construction. Not that it matters - the Republic does not currently have the funds to import trains. Luckily, though, by the early months of 1970, the Republic was completely debt free! Exporting only excess energy and mechanical components while only importing minimal consumer goods, fuel, and bitumen finally put our small state in the green. While the hub isn't receiving traffic, one can see that it's clearly complete. And with it, our Five Year Plan. (We'll count 'steps toward urbanization' and the construction of Nowy Bratwice toward our urbanization half of the goal.) Surely, though, loans will be negotiated again in order to have trains grace our glorious rails. But why just outright by the trains when we can license their designs and make them instead?  A rail vehicle production facility is erected at the railhub, Spring 1970 Licensing designs will be expensive, but means that we can effectively start to make vehicles for free. We will need enough trains that it will more than pay for itself, and we can also export and sell brand new trains for high value once we have produced what we need. We also have a drydock at the port, which will provide us the same luxury for ships. Both of these, though, will need a substantial workforce.  It's Time For A Five Year PlanWe've neglected our people for too long in their old city block homes that do not allow for the full experience of socialism, and we will soon need to connect them all via rail, letting us get rid of our reliance on sometimes treacherous bus routes. By 1975, we aim to have all citizens living in modern, planned cities and connected to their work by rail. There will be some exceptions - Already there are a few places where the central committee has seen fit to maintain bus routes, but only when the distance is short and the method more appropriate than it is now, making up the backbone of our public transit. We will lay down new cities and move the population from the aging city centers of the past into these new monuments to socialism. The first of which will be Nowy Sejov which will provide a workforce for both the drydock and rail vehicle production facility, as well as the industries that Sejov serves today. Other goals of the plan include producing fuel and bitumen and beginning road vehicle production, but those are seen as secondary to our urbanization project. Ten years into our glorious and to-be-named Republic, we have provided some aerial photography of the region. Please feel free to hang these in your assigned flat and salute them when feeling less than patriotic.  Sejov to the left, the railhub on the right. Nowy Sejov's groundworks in the center, Winter 1969.  Miergeni and its industries, railhub in the background, Winter 1969.  The Nowy Bratwice Steel Mill complex, Sejov to the left, Gliwilystok to the right, Winter 1969.  Sejov's coal industry, Winter 1969. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 22:07
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
Did the Rail build vehicles get stuck in the same block there or? And are those two way signals there? because with double track you really should have each line of track one way. Additionally - entering a junction, you should only have chain signals until the exit. That double junction there - just treat it as one junction. The goal here is to never have it possible for a train to stop in a junction. Storing trains on straight track is okay. Having a train blocking a junction though can disrupt your entire train network. I am hoping that the game is smart enough to recognise (and not reserve) tracks for trains going straight through when there's a curve like as shown. In Factorio you put 2 or 3 tiles between your tracks so you can add a chain signal to split the blocks.
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Dec 15, 2020 22:49
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Veloxyll posted:Did the Rail build vehicles get stuck in the same block there or? And are those two way signals there? because with double track you really should have each line of track one way. I'll have to take a look at that area with your help, thanks! It's close to the steel mill, so I think my thought was "cram any trains in as close as possible" since they'll all be slow/approaching or leaving a station. Those signals might have just been me trying to make the rail cons. vehicles not run into each other (which obviously failed) and might not even be there anymore. That said, though, I often find weird junctions like that after not looking at that area for a bit and come back and go, "What was I thinking?" If those signals still exist, they're at least going to have been fixed to be unidirectional. Rail construction vehicles build in one direction, then flip and come back down the way they came. My steel mill was particularly annoying to build with them because they can never make up their mind of which way they want to go as it was effectively a loop/siding. Now that I'm not building there I have a much more refined way of letting them build out track by owning an entire huge section and then chip away at it, then add a little X crossing at the end, signal the finished part correctly, and repeat. What probably happened here was that train was building down the line (probably the left/top most spur into the warehouse barely pictured) and then said "woops, I'm empty, time to flip around." while still occupying that block. In the mean time another vehicle came up behind him. I had tried to fix this with copious use of pre-signals, but I have trouble thinking through the right logic when the trains are allowed to flip willy-nilly. Luckily its a temporary problem for construction vehicles. Sometimes trains are extremely dumb though. I had this happen:  I have no idea why that first train thinks it cannot enter that last block before entering the depot. This killed power for my republic long enough I had to import power and manually unbunch the busses.
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Dec 16, 2020 00:14
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I'll have to take a look at that area with your help, thanks! It's close to the steel mill, so I think my thought was "cram any trains in as close as possible" since they'll all be slow/approaching or leaving a station. Those signals might have just been me trying to make the rail cons. vehicles not run into each other (which obviously failed) and might not even be there anymore. That said, though, I often find weird junctions like that after not looking at that area for a bit and come back and go, "What was I thinking?" If those signals still exist, they're at least going to have been fixed to be unidirectional. I was going to suggest something similar. Just have an X at the near end of new lengths of track, and signal it once the track is built. Not quite as quick but also no trapped trains. I also have no idea why that train going to the depot can't move onwards. The next block should be the track in front to the depot. Which doesn't appear to have anything in it. Does the game use signals to operate road crossings or how do they get closed? I'll have a proper look later and maybe do a quick signal guide based on this image.
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Dec 16, 2020 00:44
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Veloxyll posted:I was going to suggest something similar. Just have an X at the near end of new lengths of track, and signal it once the track is built. Not quite as quick but also no trapped trains. It very well could be something with the road crossing, but I don't know! It sure seemed like a crossing basically doesn't affect trains, but I should investigate further. Strangely enough I left that signaled exactly the same after deleting and replacing the signal and it hasn't happened again. I'd appreciate a signals guide - I feel like I do kind of know what I'm doing, but its been mostly cobbled together from experience and thinking through, "Okay, I want this signal further back from the intersection if I want the main trunk to have precedence." Even if there's an existing one somewhere you like. I really prefer text/screenshots rather than a video guide. I haven't looked too deeply because I've always been distracted by the fact that its someone using another game's visuals and terms and the guides weren't immediately understandable to me. And guess what we also have now that I almost completely glossed over for a very long time! New in the beta.  Now I can mix up regular and pre-signals.
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Dec 16, 2020 01:11
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Veloxyll posted:I was going to suggest something similar. Just have an X at the near end of new lengths of track, and signal it once the track is built. Not quite as quick but also no trapped trains. The thing that makes it tricky is that normal rail traffic is relatively easy to signal. Rail construction, however, follows signals as rigorously as any other train but likes to flip around on the wrong track after finishing construction and get stuck.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:15
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Log082 posted:The thing that makes it tricky is that normal rail traffic is relatively easy to signal. Rail construction, however, follows signals as rigorously as any other train but likes to flip around on the wrong track after finishing construction and get stuck. This desperately needs the "ignore signals" button that TTD has
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Dec 16, 2020 02:17
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 Ways to fail a 5 year plan, Fig. 1. Pay attention to your heating in winter, folks. "Ah drat it, my commute to the power plant is messy" became nearly half my Republic dead. e: on the bright side, now would be a very easy time to rehome the remaining citizens. 
Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Dec 16, 2020 |
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Dec 16, 2020 05:35
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Anime Store Adventure posted:It very well could be something with the road crossing, but I don't know! It sure seemed like a crossing basically doesn't affect trains, but I should investigate further. Strangely enough I left that signaled exactly the same after deleting and replacing the signal and it hasn't happened again. Hooray! I was going to write it tonight, but christmas shopping has left me pooped.
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Dec 16, 2020 06:26
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I don't think the game tells you this anywhere, but if you buy an excavator for your quarries, you can set their workers to 0 and it'll still produce. Same with farm fields and tractors/harvesters.
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Dec 16, 2020 13:20
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Griz posted:I don't think the game tells you this anywhere, but if you buy an excavator for your quarries, you can set their workers to 0 and it'll still produce. Same with farm fields and tractors/harvesters. In the case of farm fields it can still be pretty nice to have a supply of labor nearby because having laborers and equipment working together lets you sow and harvest very fast. With the quarries it's a waste to do it any other way than excavators though because the workers can't do anything until a dumper shows up to load up, and I think the tutorial actually does mention that the excavators makes laborers unnecessary.
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Dec 16, 2020 18:21
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Also thanks for doing this LP. I'm starting to get to a level of development where rail transport is becoming necessary and as somebody without the first clue about trains or signaling I'm very interested in where these latest updates are going.
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Dec 16, 2020 18:28
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
Sounds like you've discovered the importance of the Technical Services building! I've occasionally made a small town that exists solely to service the power plant, for this specific reason (or other town workforces deciding to not have enough people show up at the bus stop at the right time). Sure, they'll get cancer from all the coal ash, but you need to break a few bodies to make a glorious Soviet republic omelette 
Volmarias fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Dec 16, 2020 |
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Dec 16, 2020 18:32
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Volmarias posted:Sounds like you've discovered the importance of the Technical Services building! Actually no, this was just a poor cycle time on the train from the new city. I’ve moved all the folks from Sejov to Nowy Sejov (I’ll post an update today to show the city.) The workers were finishing their shift and often the train would have just missed them or the next was too far away. Then I had an issue that was (and remains) super frustrating: My coal spur has two passenger stations in a row: one for the power plant, brick factory, and coal processing, then one up the hill for the mine. In my genius I thought “hey, a lot of times that the power plant empties out it’s when everything is full, so the train drops no new employees. This frequently means that the mine is near capacity too, so the train comes back by the station to get back out to the trunk line with ~10-40 people still on it sometimes. Why not just have them stop on the way back down the hill?” Amazing, genius, I’m a master planner. Until the trains decide that the best time to refuel is coming down the hill, so they push right by the station, go all the way to the fuel station, then come back to the power station’s train terminal, but now they’re facing the wrong direction to get back to the town and there’s not adequate room for a turnaround up the hill. After spending slightly too long to notice this I lost half my guys.
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Dec 16, 2020 19:11
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Pornographic Memory posted:In the case of farm fields it can still be pretty nice to have a supply of labor nearby because having laborers and equipment working together lets you sow and harvest very fast. I once accidentally had workers hit a field because they could reach it from where they were dropped off for the food factory and yeah, it's actually not the worst thing to have workers help with fields. In this case it worked well because I had enough of a food buffer that they could go hit the fields without really interrupting that supply chain. I don't think I would actively plan around doing this, admittedly, unless I was trying to do some kind of "almost no imports including vehicles" challenge. Pornographic Memory posted:Also thanks for doing this LP. I'm starting to get to a level of development where rail transport is becoming necessary and as somebody without the first clue about trains or signaling I'm very interested in where these latest updates are going. The joke is on you, two fold. You're always at a level of development where rail transport is necessary - It seriously does feel like its always useful. And secondly, relying on me for signalling and trains is bad. I definitely picked up a lot more than a few buddies I was helping along, but I would evaluate my network goal as "trying to make sure trains don't get stuck" rather than a more elegant "make sure they run very efficiently." I do the latter where I can, but its clear I have a lot to learn. If someone (or I) dig up a good signalling guide, I'll add it to the OP, though. But thanks! I am enjoying doing the LP, though I might drop the more narrative style and kind of mix the more nuts and bolts posts with the picture posts because it feels like its becoming more interesting to delve into the mechanics than it is to see buildings go up and down and stills of trucks. (To me, at least.)
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Dec 16, 2020 19:47
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Part 7: We uh, We Murdered Some Folks More or less dispensing with the 'historical record' voice - I'll still keep a sort of narrative in mind, but I'm into a part of the game where I feel it starts to get more focused on the actual 'mechanics' and that's what'll end up being more interesting. (Plus it felt kinda stiff.) As previously mentioned, our Republic saw a, uh, problem with the electricity grid in the early months of 1972. This meant that the heat plants didn't run, and well, But why? Well, because we moved the entire workforce for the coal industry complex (including our power plant) from Sejov to Nowy Sejov - a new planned city with a nice big organized town center, room to grow, and with significant rail access. There were some kinks to work out in the rail line, to say the least. This city will fairly heavily utilize private car commuters (once we can build cars) so we've even planned out tons of parking lots to bring the city to an absolute gridlock (this will almost certainly happen.) While we will still have rail access to the rail vehicle production factory and likely the coal industrial complex, there is not any passenger rail access to the drydocks (a clear oversight in our port design) and we are currently using minibusses to serve the Sejov Construction industries. We don't have to - these can easily be reached by private cars and don't need a constant, large workforce - so being served by car is perfectly fine. The drydocks will have a bus line - they are very close to the west/northwest side of Nowy Sejov - but also have a little room we can reclaim from the river to put some parking lots on. We may need to address the workforce issues at the power plant, though, and likely it will require a small town near to it - or we can ship or conveyor the coal closer to Nowy Sejov and put a new power plant much closer. That sounds good. We could even leave the old plant and hook it's lines up to solely export, helping us climb back out of our new debt from licensing train designs. I'll also be using this city to experiment district ideas for my large city/cities. I feel like the end state of this is basically creating a massive city that actually gets fed/powered/heated, so I want to have some ideas of how I'd lay out districts when it comes to that. I can learn a lot of things - is that going to be too many cars in that small of a space, do the buses work well in the style I've set them up, do I have enough of x/y/z service, etc. Obviously I know some of this from previous saves, but now that I'm borrowing Rob074's tenements from the workshop, some of that will be a little different, and further refining always helps.  Nowy Sejov The town 'center' is to the left, now, as I'm planning new districts on that edge too. I may move the population of Miergeni into there and use that to feed the food factory, as I'm not sure I really need the town of Miergeni where it is right now - it isn't really far enough away from Nowy Sejov to be of use to distant (future) industries to the north, and it isn't close enough to really want to use the same local cargo depots for consumer goods - Which to me, is basically the real delineation of what constitutes it being it's own town/city at this point. Right now it serves the food and meat factories, but not only do those factories need to change, but Nowy Sejov can do it almost just as easily.  The local warehouse for Nowy Sejov. I should experiment here - I think that I might be able to forego the cargo platform if trains can push meat from the warehouse's train platform through a factory connection. I'm not sure if this is allowed because the station itself (the warehouse) cannot store meat.The small distribution center (with no vehicles, yet) will be the last leg of delivery for the town's supplies. I haven't bought vehicles because I haven't gotten the trains built to deliver supplies to the localities, yet. That, and I am currently only self-producing food and meat, which is close enough that I can sneak by via truck for now. Clothes and alcohol get imported straight to the town's store and pubs, for now. (Electronics I do not import.) I also notice I neglected some signals on the railway. But what did we do with the Stary Sejov?  More like nary-a-Sejov.  They weren't using them anyway.  You can just barely make out the remnants. It could be argued that this is wasteful - painstakingly erecting an entire new city, moving everyone over, and then wantonly demolishing the old city - but it feels good (and it's part of our Five Year Plan!) I had designs on maybe taking down half of the city, reorganizing it, adding better rail access, etc.. But all of those seemed messy. (I may still borrow this approach for the other cities in order to fully modernize them by 1975.) In the meantime, things are absolutely cookin' at the Rail Vehicle Production factory.  Huddling together for warmth.  Now that's the fires of industry.  Some of our first railcars. I mentioned that we're back in debt - pretty bad debt too - from licensing rail designs. I got a decent diesel engine which was nearly 5 million rubles to license, but I will need a lot of them and once they're no longer needed, we can export them for a ton of cash. (I think. I have only seen easily how to export train cars, but I believe that engines work the same way. I will experiment when the factory pops out a new engine.) Let me emphasize what a few posters mentioned about this game - it absolutely rocks building your own vehicles. I could have gotten a lot of things moving quicker by just outright buying more things, but knowing that you built the train that carried the people to the steel mill that forged the steel that made the truck that carried the asphalt to your new road - just awesome. Next steps are to work toward our Five Year urbanization plan continually, but also I have designs on a refinery outside of Gliwilystok - we spend about 300k-400k rubles in fuel imports each year and this is increasing, generally. (We have saved some by moving to electric busses in Nowy Sejov and moving some infrastructure once served by truck or bus fleets to more efficient trains.) Not only would we save that 300k and the (much lower, relatively) cost of importing bitumen for asphalt, but we would likely over produce and actually make that swing more like 600k rubles total. It all depends on how much oil we can pull out of the small field near the port - this map is stingy with resources, so we'll have to see. I'd like to redo our food and meat supply chain more or less entirely, but I think crucially I need to start thinking about feeding the drydock. I nearly have enough trains to start feeding the port with more than just bricks and prefabs - I can start moving my mechanical parts exports there instead of taking trucks all the way to the border. I do want to export the low-price stuff as well, but it might not even be worth it until I can source my own fuel for the ships. (I haven't done the math, admittedly.) This isn't super profitable, but I like it from a roleplay perspective, and it means that a lot of my infrastructure isn't just sitting idle forever.  I named the port! One of my Polish uncle's nickname was 'Piatek,' Polish for Friday. (He must have kicked rear end at parties.) It sounded good! I wanted to put like "Memorial Port" or something, but the character limit is draconian. Port Piatek works. We always pronounced it "Pea-un-tech" but I have no idea if that's close to accurate. quick e: The northern oil field is not even in process for being built yet, it is just laid out. I am working toward the one near the port, though, with the refinery just south of Gliwilystok. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Dec 16, 2020 |
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Dec 16, 2020 23:10
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Why cars instead of public transit?
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Dec 17, 2020 03:24
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Solumin posted:Why cars instead of public transit? Functionally, not too much of a reason. Cars do have a good function of being able to let people go where they need to, when they need to - they can be great to help sweep up extra workforce that gets missed because of public transit. Even then, its not incredibly useful. For me, it's because I like seeing all the cars drive around and its another challenge to manage the traffic. I sort of picture it as another luxury afforded to my well taken care of citizens.
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Dec 17, 2020 03:34
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Part 8: Living With Our Decisions Taking loans again to buy vehicle licenses for rail production and our drydock was absolutely important - those vehicles are worth tons of money to export, so we'll make it back - but it does put us on a pretty big squeeze in the short term. Food and meat don't have their supply chain quite worked out - I needed to get the trains built and some towns needed supporting infrastructure (rail connected warehouses nearby) such that they could get deliveries. They're all still supplied by truck, but sometimes that results in a stock-out (which I backstop with automatic imports, costing us cash.) I'm not also not producing enough crops every year, so I'm having to import those at a reasonably pricey rate (for the amount I need.) Not to mention that we're still not making our own fuel, nor anything requiring oil as part of its supply chain. Like mentioned, fuel is becoming really, really expensive. This was partially an oversight, but also just poor planning. I had designs on a few small oil fields, but they were never convenient and didn't fit into my overall plan of what I was working on. Now we're paying for it - literally. But let's first talk Five Year Plans and our ongoing urbanization. Nowy Bratwice has gotten a new, large heating plant in anticipation for moving some citizens here from the old cities and more fully staffing all of the industries in and around the steel mill complex.  Nowy Bratwice, ~1973  New flats, pictured left, in Nowy Bratwice This has become crucial, as we've started work on the refinery and oil field, both of which will use absolutely tons of steel. For awhile, the steel mill was working almost completely fully staffed and I was still regularly running out of steel as construction of the pipelines was underway. Not to mention we are using significant amounts of steel producing vehicles now, too. I could have used less by bringing the fuel via train or truck to the refinery and not piping it there - but there's already not enough oil in that field to keep the refinery going at full tilt and that'll just end up costing me more in the long term trying to feed the refinery. I'd even have to lay new track if I did it by rail. Just pipe it, one less thing to think about.  Building the Oil Field, near to the port and over the hills from the steel mill.  Laying out the refinery, near Gliwilystok We also fixed our power issue - a second power plant much closer to Nowy Sejov means that we can serve it via bus and keep it much better staffed. I've retouched the grid a bit such that the old power plant exists almost entirely just to export electricity which, while not extremely expensive, helps us subsidize what we're still importing and it's pretty 'cheap' for us in labor and coal to export. This also will help as we start to get closer to maxing out the capacity of a single plant - we can split the grid up a little. If/when we get to electric rail, this could become very important.  The new, "main" powerplant. We are well underway in urbanizing, though. It's been decided that we aught to raze the old town of Miergeni and move its population to Nowy Sejov - we can serve the food factory and slaughterhouse by bus, for now, until we get better train service out there.  Nowy Sejov continues to grow.  Toying with different apartment designs.  Tearing down Miergeni. The apartments from that Rob guy on the workshop rock - he designed them so they can fit together nicely and you can make awesome courtyards like that. Aesthetically I wouldn't probably put the kindergarten in the center, usually, but I was just toying with different designs here. Importantly though, while we're pretty well on track to make the five year plan as well as make the oil industry at the same time, we're also fighting out of our debt hole and the rail hub/port is seeing more and more action. The stores for construction goods are filling up and slowly but surely we're bringing more and more goods.  Starting to fill things up.  Packing containers with Mechanical Components.  A train of brand new diesel engines headed for the border - Worth millions of Rubles. We've also now finally got a few boats built and they can start to carry goods beyond our borders as well.  Ships load goods for export.  A ship loaded entirely with mechanical parts.  It's worth a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21yj2lEgrA Recorded video of the crew in action. But now we're into the nasty part of the game - for me. We're into where I've made the decisions I'm going to make about where things go and how things work. These end up being nontrivial to change, at least if you keep in mind an 'end' date, which I sort of do. I see the date as a vague challenge, even though you can keep playing, and I'd measure myself against where I am in the late 80's/early 90's as what was "achieved." But now I'm at where I can see or have learned how I might do things better, differently, or anything like that, and everything is baked in enough that its ingame years to really tear up any major parts of the infrastructure or layout. I see previous delays and how I could be farther along, what I'd do differently. I've already had a few sandbox experiments where I play around with various buildings, vehicles, etc, and get feelings for new things I could do more effectively. Ultimately this is silly, the game is endless and I could go back and tear things up right now and do them the better way, but it doesn't scratch that same itch as starting fresh. I play city builders weird. I've definitely picked up a good deal more about how to better engineer a train system now and gotten a much better feel for the correct way to space things for trains. I was both giving two much or not enough, depending on where you looked. Normally I don't have any problem just being like, "Eh you know what, lets scrap it." You learn, build back better, and then your next save you edge even closer to some personal perfection! But now there's a big Let's Play attached to that save, oh no. In effect, though, this is a good thing for me this time. I still haven't successfully done a few crucial builds in the game because I've ended up restarting before I got around to them. I've never built a working nuclear plant and obviously, being new, I have not toyed with tourism or airplanes - and I really want to figure those out. So going forward here, I'm going to be focusing a little bit more on those three things to help learn. It's a bit at odds with what I had mentally set out to do (build a major metropolis that both is functional and looks good with all the amenities), and maybe I'll still find some time for that, but now I want to experiment a little bit and take what I've learned into a new save, eventually. I also don't know if we'll get to total resource independence this time - if I want to focus on some of these other systems heavily, I won't be prioritizing things like electric components if my current exports outpace imports enough to buy them. (I am very aware of this brutal failure of true communism in my state - noted.) So our last Five Year Plan was urbanization - that's a big check, we're done. All of our citizens, except for a limited few that are soon to be moved, are in modern apartments with all the services they need - heat, schools, shops, culture. My next goal is going to be bringing tourists into the Republic - and unfortunately I'm going to leave it as vague as that. I really have no idea what they exactly want or need other than vague UI hints about "star ratings" of attractions. We may consider making a passenger port and maybe even an airport as part of this, but that remains to be seen - Right now I am thinking we'll start with train access. An airport is certainly in the cards, but I'm not totally sure what it's going to take. If it seems feasible quickly, that might be the route, even if its a small one.
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Dec 21, 2020 00:04
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I hope with the big urbanization move done, you'll be designing some prettier places to live in for our citizens. Brutalist concrete blocks are great, but they're visually and aesthetically boring. We need green spaces. Parks.
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Dec 21, 2020 00:50
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Lynneth posted:I hope with the big urbanization move done, you'll be designing some prettier places to live in for our citizens. Brutalist concrete blocks are great, but they're visually and aesthetically boring. We need green spaces. Parks. Ugh. Yes. You're right. And I haven't. And I immediately feel bad about it. Let me level with you and the wealth of others I assume are looking at Nowy Bratwice and going, "This looks bad even for Soviet brutalism" - When chasing my tourist dreams, I'll make a proper aesthetically pleasing city. Maybe Sejov and Bratwice aren't going to look good, but I should put my back into aesthetics for one of these developments.
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Dec 21, 2020 01:30
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Everything you do in this game confirms that while I still really want to play it, I would be terrible at it.
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Dec 21, 2020 03:59
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Everything you do in this game confirms that while I still really want to play it, I would be terrible at it. Don’t feel bad. I consider myself fairly competent at this style of game in general and particularly alright at this one - and I still constantly feel incompetent. You have to power through it! For me it’s that I know I can make both Functional and Aesthetically Pleasing work, but it really takes me extra effort and time paused to lay out things nicely, use a little extra space to make things look nice and square, etc. The problem is then I get a couple drinks in me on a Friday night and slap together a factory complex that sucks (aesthetically), but becomes crucial to my infrastructure, and now it feels extremely arduous to replace. The other big hardship in this is absolutely trains. I’m not a big “train planning” gamer. I bounced off of factorio, I’ve only played a slight amount of transport fever 2 (which has a much more baked in, less involved train sim) and that’s really it. I’m generally a “learn on my own” instead of reading or watching guides, so there’s a whole ton of trial and error. If you aren’t adverse to guides, this won’t be as huge an issue. You should still be comfortable with the logic of signaling, though - it’s one of those things that while it seems very, very simple when regarding its elements, I manage to constantly make new and confusing situations that I can’t quite understand. If you aren’t super into aesthetics and even remotely competent with trains, you can make this game work mechanically pretty easily. If you are into making it look very pretty, it just takes more patience. Hell, you can probably make this game almost work exclusively with trucks, you probably just can’t feed the entire map from one central production point that way.
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Dec 21, 2020 04:14
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