Resource collection

[Talk To The Paw]

Hi all!
I've been wondering if its a bug or a feature. so decided to post it here.
I seem to face the same issue in the "harder" missions - but i'm sure the same mechanics work in each scenario, it's just that I cannot figure out how to beat it now

What's the best positioning of the industry chain buildings in the game? Everytime I lose it when, for example, a bakery stands still because it has 0 grain, even though the field nearby has 100% stock, but no one picks it up. Or a brewery is not working, despite having full stock of grain - but it has 0 water, and no one will pick it up from the well across the road. Damn!

May be I missed the best configuration or how do I make the workers collect much needed resourses? do make it clear, this glitch happens when the corresponding industry buildings are standing in line, or across a road - I always build them nearby, but even the obvious combinations do not give the expected result.

Help enyone?

[playboi14]

Hi there mate, sorry about the delay, I've been interstate on business

There's a lot that happens with the delivery and collection of goods (and it gets more complex the larger you scale your city). I'll provide a breakdown of what's going on below.

Industrial Building Types

Each industrial buildings is categorised into one of the following: *resource generator*, *resource transformer*, *resource holders*, *resource distributor*

Generators
These buildings create a resource, generally out of nothing. For example *wheat farms*, *wells*, *livestock ranches*, *sheep Herders* etc. They produce X amount every X seconds so long as they're running

Transformers
These buildings create a resource but require other resources. For example a *mill* creates *flour* but requires *wheat*. Until it has workers and its resource it won't create its goods (and if it makes multiple goods, it alternates every few seconds to see if it can create any of them)

Holders
These buildings just hold goods, for example the *warehouse*. Generally when transformers or generators create goods, they want to send them somewhere. Most buildings have a threshold that says 'dont send this good anywhere until we have X amount locally', thats to ensure that a bakery doesn't create an item and send it straight away to a food storage yard.

Distributors
These buildings are mostly the markets and other things, they exist to go to other industries and take their goods (so that citizens can collect from one place instead of going all across the map)

Workers

Each industrial building has three types of *agents*, *workers*, *delivery agent* and *collection agent*.

The *delivery* agent will find the goods this building creates and will try and send it somewhere (either another building

The *collection* agent will go to any place that it can find within range to collect its good. For example a *bakery* will go to surrounding *mills* to look for *flour*, but they'll also go to *food storage yards*

The *workers* are just there to create the good, nothing special.

Each building has a set number of *delivery* and *collection* agents it will hire.

• For *generator* buildings they only have *delivery* agents
  
• For *transformers* they have both *collection* and *delivery* agents (e.g a mil will both accept wheat from farms + they will send their own agent to them to collect it, while another agent tries to export their flour to another building)
  
• For *holder* buildings, they generally wont have agents
  
• For *distribution* buildings they will just have *collection* agents who go across the map looking for the goods they need (e.g the market will send out agents to collect bread, wine etc)

Staffing at buildings

Most buildings will operate on a *minimum* of workers, but wont fun at full efficiency until they're fully staffed (e.g the market only needs 2x Low roman + 1x medium roman to operate, but can hold 4x and 2x respectively. This means you've got less workers to collect goods.

Balancing Industries

Generally for industries you need a fair few generators to make the first basic good for example *wheat*, then the next step of the process will generally require multiple of those goods, e.g *flour* needs 2x wheat. Then the next step requires 3x flour to make a single *bread*

A good plan is to make several of the generators and put them near the resource transformers, make it easy to send your wheat > flour and then create your bread.

Fighting for resources

Sometimes your industries fight for goods, e.g if you build 2 mils and one is closer to the farms, that mil doesn't factor in there's another mil who could use the wheat, there's a chance that as your second mil gets to the farms they're empty. Also these farms will try and send their goods to the *closest* transformer in walking distance.

Also some *residential* buildings also need raw resources like water (but most of the time they stick to processed goods). If you drop one well in the middle near residential buildings, they will be competing with your industrial collection agents (a brewery might only have 2 agents and by the time they get there, 5 houses just collected some water). What I think useful is putting wells and other things near industries to act as a dedicated well of sorts.

Common Industrial Issues

When making bread for example you can run into issues where the reason you're not creating the resource is that about building down the line is causing the blockage. For example:

You've got a single road from the left to the right, at the back left you've got 3x wheat farms, next to them you have a single mill and to the right of that you've got a bakery.

With 3x wheat and 3 delivery agents it pushes out wheat to the mill, with 2x wheat the mill can create a single flour. The mill will both collect from the farms (the closest) and deliver to the bakery.

The bakery will collect flour from the mill and bring it back, it needs 3x to make a single bread. Right now there's no where to deliver this bread to, so it just stockpiles.

All of that works. But if you added another mill to the right of the bakery, it would now fight for resources. None of the farms would deliver to this mill (because the closest one is the one near them), so the only wheat it will collect is from it's own agents. This mill would be creating flour super slowly.

However, because it's also right near the bakery, this is the first mill the bakeries agents will go to, they will most likely find nothing, do a search on the map for a second mill and find the first good mill. They'll have to walk over and collect their resource, wasting a lot of time!

This can slow down resource generation as the agents are constantly running around.

Extra thoughts

If you click on the agents as they run around (which can be hard in busy cities), you can see where these agents are going, if you notice you're getting a lot of "couldn't collect x resource from y" it generally means that place is the closest to this agent, so it's wasting time running around.

Hopefully some of this makes sense as to how it works and that you're able to get through all the missions, I've been slowly adjusting building to make it easier to generate resources, along with reducing the number of upgraded dwellings you need to win. Let me know what mission you're up to and I can always have another look at the balance!

If you've got a screenshot of the layout and buildings I might be able to reproduce it to see if there's some sort of patching bug (the way the game works is by pathing in 5m increments in each direction until an agent can get to another building, so sometimes you get results that don't look like they're the closest match but that's what the agents choose)

[Talk To The Paw]

thanks for this detailed reply. I will analyse which condition I seem to fail in my games.
I'm currently at the latest Gaul missions, last three, as I remember. I didn't make screenshots the last time, but I will if it seems necessary.

[Talk To The Paw]

Hi, coming back to the resource collection topic.
I tried again, but still cannot understand where do I go wrong.
I can have a pretty straightforward production line, but while the first "generation" building will be overful, the next ones will be empty and non working. This is an illustration from my last game, hope it gives you some idea - even though dyes are generated far away, they still get delivered, while the locally generated animals will not be delivered to the furmaker in time.
And its true for the rest of industries, the longer the production line, the worse it gets.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000596859

[playboi14]

Originally posted by Talk To The Paw:

Hi, coming back to the resource collection topic.
I tried again, but still cannot understand where do I go wrong.
I can have a pretty straightforward production line, but while the first "generation" building will be overful, the next ones will be empty and non working. This is an illustration from my last game, hope it gives you some idea - even though dyes are generated far away, they still get delivered, while the locally generated animals will not be delivered to the furmaker in time.
And its true for the rest of industries, the longer the production line, the worse it gets.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000596859

I'll have a look at the Gaul campaign to make sure there's not a bug. I mostly looked through the Roman gameplay a while back when I looked at this one :)

I'll check to see if there's not a bug with one of the buildings or agents preventing this from working

[playboi14]

I'm still having a look into this mate, I'll continue to debug this and hopefully cross off if it's a bug or not.

Currently the way the agents work can cause buildings to fight for resources (e.g. everyone running to the same well because it's the closest) so I'm hoping this is just a positioning issue.