Logistics conundrum, need some advice

[strongled]

I find myself in the almost-late game (Computing I'd say is the start of late game?) and while my base is suboptimal because I'm new and I'm still trying to create blueprints (+ I used my space poorly), I am also wondering if it's also an issue of where I'm making my products and what I'm moving.

At the start, I went for making the products wherever and getting both products and ores to where I needed them, so every blueprint was warehouses into assemblers or whatever, logistically that was incredibly bad, and the amount of cars just weren't enough no matter what vehicle cap I was at.

So I changed it to ores being moved only in a new game after a death spiral. Nothing else is moved because my blueprinted factories are self-sustaining (ores into base items into advanced items into more advanced items etc) with only pipes going from one end of map to the other. The issue with this strategy is that I found myself eating through the base resources a bit too fast while I'm trying to keep unity, health, food, diesel, maintenance and mining in an equilibrium, so my early game was just a lot of waiting for construction materials, so I can get more construction materials, while suffering from an excess of slag, rocks and dirt.

Now I'm thinking that I just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up with abusing pipes (I mean, they're belts but better and can fit anywhere, so why not, am I right? No lifts needed either) and by using trains a bit too late. Pipes eat a lot of maintenance right now too, about the same like my cars.

I was also thinking that maybe I should actually go a level deeper and just build every relevant factory near the mines, but I don't see that really working, every blueprint needs coal and one other ore in the beginning, later you're going for 3-4 ores/sands/other stuff per factory.

So, I understand that the whole shtick of the game is to actually create problems for you to resolve, but maybe my thinking is wrong somewhere, how do you guys deal with logistics?

[BigSilverHotdog]

Lots of belts, pipes, and dump haul trucks, with trucks requiring full loads, always using level 2 overloaded, and especially focused on replacing trucks with belts whenever there is high throughput. It took me a long time to recognize that belts are almost always preferable to trucks for any distance not extreme, even when playing with belts requiring power to operate.

[NiceGuy]

1. Don't grow too fast.
2. Don't use excessive numbers of trucks.
3. Use edicts for maintenance, food consumption, diesel consuption, water consumption.
Only built what you really need just to sustain your minimum of needed people. If you get a new tech just built enough to supply your existing people with it. Only increase people number if you need more workers to just sustain your existing ones. Don't increase people's number or production capacity just because you can. This will only get you in a death spiral which will end up eating through the limited resources too fast and you can not keep up with demand.

I have 1500 people, just started with computing. I only have 3 trains and 55 medium trucks. Especially productions with high material demand need to be feed by conveyors and pipes. Only use trucks for small deliveries and on short routes. Trucks must not be your main transportation unit.
Also check modem techs, usually they improve your productivity. Especially for diesel production, coal consumption, iron and copper production. Upgraded assembly also use less workers.

[Lucky_Star_Fan]

Personally I make a single giant industrial hub near where I start and then funnel in raw materials from further away as necessary. Beyond say 300-400 tiles it starts being worth using trains to move ore I think. Try to keep in mind how soon you will deplete your resources, a lot of starting locations have tons of iron but not much copper for example, so you would need to find and begin exploiting your next copper sooner. Even with maintenance costs, pipes are still very cheap in terms of upkeep, I wouldn't worry about piping liquids long distance until you get to 200+ tiles and even then transporting water to your farms/settlement from a groundwater source is worth it.

It is super worth cutting out any truck trip you can. A 50 length belt is going to be better than needing a truck to move goods between nearby factories in almost every case.

[strongled]

Originally posted by BigSilverHotdog:

Lots of belts, pipes, and dump haul trucks, with trucks requiring full loads, always using level 2 overloaded, and especially focused on replacing trucks with belts whenever there is high throughput. It took me a long time to recognize that belts are almost always preferable to trucks for any distance not extreme, even when playing with belts requiring power to operate.

I don't like that trains haven't been mentioned in your gameplay, while I think belts can replace trucks in many situations, I don't really see how you don't have issues with space, materials and overall just base functionality if you're moving the ores only with belts, belts simply aren't as flexible as pipes, so either you're the greatest designer ever or your bases are very small. Since my factories are all "self-sustaining", the only thing I move with trucks are ores from the train hub. (except dumping)

Same goes for you:

Originally posted by Lucky_Star_Fan:

Personally I make a single giant industrial hub near where I start and then funnel in raw materials from further away as necessary. Beyond say 300-400 tiles it starts being worth using trains to move ore I think. Try to keep in mind how soon you will deplete your resources, a lot of starting locations have tons of iron but not much copper for example, so you would need to find and begin exploiting your next copper sooner. Even with maintenance costs, pipes are still very cheap in terms of upkeep, I wouldn't worry about piping liquids long distance until you get to 200+ tiles and even then transporting water to your farms/settlement from a groundwater source is worth it.

It is super worth cutting out any truck trip you can. A 50 length belt is going to be better than needing a truck to move goods between nearby factories in almost every case.

Then again, maybe i don't get what you mean by tiles? Are we really talking about 1 small tile or like chunks? The only time I ever use belts to move big distances is with food, because I specifically designed my farms and city to have an area where they receive food from afar, but it was still occupying a LOT of space and it still looks like ♥♥♥♥. Honestly though, pipes taking almost as much maintenance as cars should tell you why I'm a bit sour about them.

I will think about a playthrough where I really try to just move everything with belts (and trains) and while I'm sure it works (No reason not to work), it'll be kinda tedious and ugly.

Anyway, yes, I do the same thing, I have my industry all near my starting area, obviously with some exceptions because of space. I have 7 3-6 trains, 2 per each (iron, copper, limestone) except for coal that isn't as intensively used in my base (coal is belted towards power right there), currently none of my starting resources are available anymore and I started with my secondaries for quite a while (I'm at Year 576).
Things aren't going badly per say, like I've had some situations where I wasn't paying attention and I got myself a few shortages meaning I had to resolve some potential death spirals (maintenance, water and diesel being the worst offenders).

Originally posted by NiceGuy:

1. Don't grow too fast.
2. Don't use excessive numbers of trucks.
3. Use edicts for maintenance, food consumption, diesel consuption, water consumption.
Only built what you really need just to sustain your minimum of needed people. If you get a new tech just built enough to supply your existing people with it. Only increase people number if you need more workers to just sustain your existing ones. Don't increase people's number or production capacity just because you can. This will only get you in a death spiral which will end up eating through the limited resources too fast and you can not keep up with demand.

I have 1500 people, just started with computing. I only have 3 trains and 55 medium trucks. Especially productions with high material demand need to be feed by conveyors and pipes. Only use trucks for small deliveries and on short routes. Trucks must not be your main transportation unit.
Also check modem techs, usually they improve your productivity. Especially for diesel production, coal consumption, iron and copper production. Upgraded assembly also use less workers.

These are the deranged ravings of a lunatic! How can you have 1500 people at Computing? Are you in like year 10000? There's just no way you've been waiting so long for anything to happen. Or are we all playing on different settings? I'm playing on full Realistic. I'm at 5400 people with 200 free workers, and even I feel like I'm too slow to build up. Your production scale must be veeeeeeery low, my Construction Parts 3 blueprint is ~420 workers and that's one "factory" producing 30 CP3s per month, I base everything on the max possible materials from a blast furnace/arc furnace, so unless I specifically make my blueprint to produce extra base materials for later, everything is just used on the spot.

Your advice is sound overall but it's a bit too slow for my taste. I also can't use all those edicts without getting myself some Unity, that means food, goods, electricity, water and keeping pollution as low as possible and also healthcare.

Half or more of my trucks are used for dumping, yeah, they do move the ores from my train hub to my factory, but it's barely anywhere near the problem of the constant deluge of dirt, rock and slag. I really need to make some more train tracks and move dirt, rock and slag faster and I need to actually get to use the slag to sour water contract, because it's a waste not to, it translates far too well to more coal (sulfur to coal), fertilizer and water.

When I opened this thread I was thinking that maybe someone will come up and tell me more specifics about their blueprints honestly, because the main issue I brought up is factory layout, like if there's any step up from perfect ratiod producers feeding into each other. My conclusion was belts as well there, like iron, sand, limestone, coal, copper, all of them being belted directly to the factory so the cars will only have to dump and mine, but I think it's a bit too space intensive.

[NiceGuy]

As I don't go for a maga factory or town but try to keep it as small as needed I don't use blueprints.
I do the insane start on the dragon tail Island where you start on a small island in front of the giant main land. I'm somewhere at year 300 and it took about the first 250 year to make the connection to the mainland. I can post some screens later if you like.

[SpeedDaemon]

There are two basic principles to keep logistics under control:
1. Overall layout (what's next to what)
2. Where in the production chains to have your longer transport links

Examples:
Electronics and copper. For the first point, the only place copper is used is in electronics production, so they should be directly next to each other. For the second point, for Electronics I, you get 1 electronics I per copper, but it also needs rubber, so you're better off transporting electronics I long distances than both the copper and rubber to make them.

For slag, you can export it via contract next to where it's produced, and process sour water or sludge next to the dock. Not only are some of the products of sour water processing used or produced by smelting, the volume of the fuel gas/compost or sulfur/NH3 is far smaller than the slag.

Since you're at the point were you're into computing, you should be able to produce most of the high-value export items (servers, consumer electronics, etc.) needed to trade for your ores. The thing about cargo ships is that they basically teleport their imports to exactly where you need them (as long as it's on the coast... :).

Now that we have trains, it's easy to distribute the trickle of those exports around the map, and then keep the imports right next to where you use them. You can also have multiple places importing and smelting stuff, if it makes sense, because you can have multiple cargo ships on one contract that drop off where you need stuff.

[strongled]

Originally posted by NiceGuy:

As I don't go for a maga factory or town but try to keep it as small as needed I don't use blueprints.
I do the insane start on the dragon tail Island where you start on a small island in front of the giant main land. I'm somewhere at year 300 and it took about the first 250 year to make the connection to the mainland. I can post some screens later if you like.

Sure, why not? This is my uh, base? Factory?
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0tpf
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0Q7s
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0ZkG
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0L2n
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE122e
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE13Yu
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE1Fkb
I didn't use Steam screenshotting because I'm dumb and now I'm lazy. You can see pretty much everything with these.

Originally posted by SpeedDaemon:

There are two basic principles to keep logistics under control:
1. Overall layout (what's next to what)
2. Where in the production chains to have your longer transport links

Examples:
Electronics and copper. For the first point, the only place copper is used is in electronics production, so they should be directly next to each other. For the second point, for Electronics I, you get 1 electronics I per copper, but it also needs rubber, so you're better off transporting electronics I long distances than both the copper and rubber to make them.

For slag, you can export it via contract next to where it's produced, and process sour water or sludge next to the dock. Not only are some of the products of sour water processing used or produced by smelting, the volume of the fuel gas/compost or sulfur/NH3 is far smaller than the slag.

Since you're at the point were you're into computing, you should be able to produce most of the high-value export items (servers, consumer electronics, etc.) needed to trade for your ores. The thing about cargo ships is that they basically teleport their imports to exactly where you need them (as long as it's on the coast... :).

Now that we have trains, it's easy to distribute the trickle of those exports around the map, and then keep the imports right next to where you use them. You can also have multiple places importing and smelting stuff, if it makes sense, because you can have multiple cargo ships on one contract that drop off where you need stuff.

So in the end, I should think about say, instead of moving limestone, sand and salt to make it near the factory, I just move the glass mix that I'll make somewhere else. Instead of making Electronics II on the spot (which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge as an addition to a factory, by the way, see image https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3561416290), I make the Electronics II somewhere else and move Electronics II. Which is funny, I did as a "stopgap" because I was a bit burned out of making another blueprint with the addition of Electronics II which is huge and I started thinking about just solving other problems instead.

I can see why when we're talking about the things that need a lot of different types of materials and different hauling methods, and since I do use trains, I shouldn't have much of an issue bringing those complete products instead of all the elements making them because at some point, it's a lot more logistically efficient considering a Vehicle Parts 2 is made out of like 10~ or so items instead of moving all 10 of those resources/base items. I guess my shortcoming is always the fact that I pick one extreme over the other and I just don't care to think outside that choice anymore, I actually did bring up the same thing right in the OP, but instead of mixing that potential solution with what I'm using now, I just discarded it, lmao.

To talk about something smaller, I guess I can see where it's better for me to just make the Steel factory right near the Iron and just move Coal and Limestone instead of Iron, Coal and Limestone. That's 2-3 less trucks moving one item. I'll think more about how transportation should be in my game by myself.

[SpeedDaemon]

For steel, specifically, it's bad to move the ore, because it's 2 ore to 1 steel, so even with limestone, coal/graphite and water, it's STILL more efficient to move the steel.

Don't forget you can do multi-modal transport, too. I'm about to move my initial steel smelting (mine is depleting, and it's in the way, anyway) over to a new iron mine. It would be a long belt to bring it over, but I can basically us a train to bring it to the same buffer storage as before, and let the existing shorter belts and trucks do the "last mile" distribution. That avoids having space-gobbling train stations all over the place.

[Lucky_Star_Fan]

When I say tile I mean 1 belt/pipe section. I still think pipes are worth using over medium distances because unlike belts they do not require power. I do have a few of the mega tank trucks for liquid deliveries, mostly diesel or hydrogen to further fuel stations.

[Rümmler]

Originally posted by strongled:

This is my uh, base? Factory?
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0tpf
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0Q7s
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0ZkG
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0L2n
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE122e
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE13Yu
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE1Fkb
I didn't use Steam screenshotting because I'm dumb and now I'm lazy. You can see pretty much everything with these.

Do you only have this one lab running? I do wonder because the scaling of the rest looks much bigger - the water pipe spam looks like are sporting 50k citizen or something.

Same with all these power plants. What do you use these amounts of electricity and water for - I feel like the answer to your question might be tied to scaling.

The tldr would be "your factory looks to big for what it is doing". Unless I miss something which is off the screen.

[strongled]

Originally posted by Rümmler:

Originally posted by strongled:

This is my uh, base? Factory?
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0tpf
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0Q7s
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0ZkG
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE0L2n
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE122e
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE13Yu
https://freeimage.host/i/KBE1Fkb
I didn't use Steam screenshotting because I'm dumb and now I'm lazy. You can see pretty much everything with these.

Do you only have this one lab running? I do wonder because the scaling of the rest looks much bigger - the water pipe spam looks like are sporting 50k citizen or something.

Same with all these power plants. What do you use these amounts of electricity and water for - I feel like the answer to your question might be tied to scaling.

The tldr would be "your factory looks to big for what it is doing". Unless I miss something which is off the screen.

Right now it's only that one lab because I haven't been focusing on research much, wanting to actually get everything else up to the research scale I'm on (and because the lab area can't be upscaled).
The pipe spam is from the fact that I don't have a clear outline like on Factorio on how much a group of buildings need and how much a single pipe can put out, I found myself running out of throughput for the level of pipe I was on and running into waste diseases or not enough water for my farms, so I did patchwork... I consume 2.4k water and make 3.2k water. I know that I can calculate these things, but that only works for me in the beginning, when I then have to add the new (at the time new), water consumption for steel, but also a new farm, but then also the upscaling of something else that needs water (like acid), you start to lose track and at the several points where I had these issues, it wasn't feasible to have a closed circuit water system.

As for the power, I'm not sure what you mean, I was running into power issues with anything less even when supplied (some of these though are there to use extra fuel, at the time I didn't need it), I outright almost died a few times because of clogs too. At first I wanted to let go of coal power and go for gas power with naphtha, since I was running into power issues because of too much rock/dirt clogging my ore sorters and liquid is just so much better at being moved (desalinators need steam, gas power means I can make their blueprints more compact), that planned kind of failed because oil scaling of that level just eats up all the space in the world and I didn't have contracts ready for oil.
Now I do have contracts for oil ready, but I don't really care about that anymore, I'm going for nuclear for now and I'll keep a few boilers on standby and that's it, I just need diesel for now.
Note that Hydrogen was also too annoying to make at this level (and I didn't try out naphtha at the time when hydrogen was an option), Fuel Gas too.
Also, with auto on the mains, they won't be running 24/7, resource usage is limited for power then too.

For me it just makes sense to overproduce so you can have a better time scaling up production for later too, it's not like my steel production uses water or power if their outputs are full, but when that much steel is needed, it'll need that much water and power. I can't compute the idea of let's say, having 24 steel production, and not using all of it, with say, 2 assemblers 3's making mechanical parts. Later on I noticed that some things require steel as is and I just made a steel factory just for that.

Also, this is just my second game, and I'm not going to super optimize my base, I will start a new game after I'm done with testing all the research paths and making some blueprints. I did start to actually use belts a bit more, so my trucks don't need to supply so many resources, right now only dumping is problematic, since that's all they do and they're super busy.

EDIT: In general, if I ever don't use a research path, it's because I'm dealing with problems that might death spiral me, and if it's not because of that, I would rather focus on another project or I don't see the feasibility at the time (like I didn't see balancers having the "priority" button when I first started, you can imagine a lot of ratio issues were arising there). It's one thing I learned from Factorio not to start dipping my toes into everything, but make a sufficiently functional system first, so I don't have to strip down everything, it makes everything look neat and allows me to design better blueprints. As you can see though, some designs just aren't that great because I didn't understand building limitations (e.g. like belt height interactions).

[strongled]

By the way, my logistics are now running smoothly. It seems that trains are always the answer, no matter if it's Factorio or here.

Now the trucks have even dealt with all the dumping.
So, transporting rock to make hydrogen fluoride is certainly a great idea. I'm only using dirt for extra fertilizer and for dumping.

[Rümmler]

Thanks for the detailed answer - I am really curious how other players set their games up, so that's why I asked here.

2-3k water sounds like alot for one lab, but that's maybe I always design my island around research. Meaning, everything I do is either to get research up OR prevents breaking down of other sectors which I need.

There are 5 main ressource sinks in the game, mainly:
1. Citizen - You need them to run everything else
2. Maintenance - same here
3. Energy/Fuel - absolutely needed

4. Construction Parts - crucial for building up, but can be frozen. Typically happens to me when I reach endgame and scaling is more a balancing aspect and not so much what I can afford in building.
5. Research - can be frozen as well

So whenever I see setups where people scale up 1 and... in your case maybe 4, I wonder why and what else they do. I can only assume you stockpile products, because you don't seem to run alot of citizens (which are finally useful now thanks to offices), and 2 and 3 grow with scaling up the other factors.

And I agree with trains being the new big thing here, as much as I hate the fact that the station logic needs some improvements asap. Pipes are still better than trains, unless it's small amounts to areas where you already have a train network setup.

And yeah, as for the blueprints: Just keep on doing them, you will get better fast. People who download "THE ULTIMATE OIL SETUP #12834288" from the Hub will miss out a crucial learning experience. It gotta be finetuned to Your style anyway.

[strongled]

Originally posted by Rümmler:

Thanks for the detailed answer - I am really curious how other players set their games up, so that's why I asked here.

2-3k water sounds like alot for one lab, but that's maybe I always design my island around research. Meaning, everything I do is either to get research up OR prevents breaking down of other sectors which I need.

There are 5 main ressource sinks in the game, mainly:
1. Citizen - You need them to run everything else
2. Maintenance - same here
3. Energy/Fuel - absolutely needed

4. Construction Parts - crucial for building up, but can be frozen. Typically happens to me when I reach endgame and scaling is more a balancing aspect and not so much what I can afford in building.
5. Research - can be frozen as well

So whenever I see setups where people scale up 1 and... in your case maybe 4, I wonder why and what else they do. I can only assume you stockpile products, because you don't seem to run alot of citizens (which are finally useful now thanks to offices), and 2 and 3 grow with scaling up the other factors.

And I agree with trains being the new big thing here, as much as I hate the fact that the station logic needs some improvements asap. Pipes are still better than trains, unless it's small amounts to areas where you already have a train network setup.

And yeah, as for the blueprints: Just keep on doing them, you will get better fast. People who download "THE ULTIMATE OIL SETUP #12834288" from the Hub will miss out a crucial learning experience. It gotta be finetuned to Your style anyway.

Acid, fertilizer, factories, boilers, all use water. And I think one of the highest water requirement beyond farms (at 850) is boilers, with about 20 (with just 3-4 that aren't running nonstop), that's another 900~ or so water. My settlement uses 350 water.

So I'm certainly stockpiling, but not as much as you think. Every factory setup I made until now is a closed circuit system (unlike how I do with Factorio, because logistics are limited in Captain of Industry, at least to a point) except those that are meant to produce cement blocks, steel, electronics, etc but they're practically always full, never really running much until I need a burst of them (e.g. pipe upgrade to 4 or new gens). What's going on is that because of the closed circuit factories, I can't bring copper ingots to a factory that needs it, I will make it there in the setup, that's where you see the high number of workers. This works early, but mid-late, I will have to pick and choose what items will be transported instead of just transporting raw resources, it's what my initial post was ruminating about and what I talked to SpeedDaemon about.

The only thing that constantly runs are mines, those never stop and if I see raw resources going in the red, I immediately check for problems.

I also don't see the point of actually going for more than 1-2 labs anyway, because unity is always a problem, especially with world mines and contracts, and there just isn't enough to research beyond the seemingly infinite researches at the end of the tree.

Note that I didn't yet open offices, because I'm focusing right now on getting rid of any logistics bottlenecks, rocks being the worst offenders and getting actual good power sources, like nuclear.

I'm a Factorio player with thousands of hours, so I know the power of making my own blueprints. The only thing I never really bothered with in that game were balancers and train intersections, with balancers being a case of laziness and intersections being me unable to understand them (so not only laziness, but I just can't understand where to start from to understand train throughput), but all my blueprints in that game are perfectly ratio'd, everything is run by train.
Anyway, I am also quite sad about the train logic being kinda meh, then again, Factorio was pretty bad with that too until Space Age, having to use circuits (you still have to for anything a bit more advanced) a lot. I haven't experimented in-depth with trains here, I'll have to see what groupings are meant for and how requesting trains work. For now I brute forced my iron ore trains to go to the first iron ore stop after going to the mine, then back to the mine and then to the second iron ore drop by just adding the iron mine twice in the station line.

[SpeedDaemon]

Originally posted by strongled:

The pipe spam is from the fact that I don't have a clear outline like on Factorio on how much a group of buildings need and how much a single pipe can put out, I found myself running out of throughput for the level of pipe I was on and running into waste diseases or not enough water for my farms, so I did patchwork... I consume 2.4k water and make 3.2k water. I know that I can calculate these things, but that only works for me in the beginning, when I then have to add the new (at the time new), water consumption for steel, but also a new farm, but then also the upscaling of something else that needs water (like acid), you start to lose track and at the several points where I had these issues, it wasn't feasible to have a closed circuit water system.

Don't forget that you can put down surfaces on the terrain, and then use the paint tool to write on them. This is great for leaving yourself notes at, say, a water pipe split, as to how much is splitting off, and how much is remaining (especially handy if you've buried the pipes!). Also useful to note intput/output numbers for factory blocks, so you're not constantly having to re-do the math when figuring total requirements.