Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
2 
Report this post
So leave your A to B, B to C, C to D setup as-is and let it move it's 6 goods.
Them, off to the left of that, put a station with a warehouse out in an empty field. Connect this side station to A and D, bypassing the middle cities. The goods in this new warehouse can now flow straight from one end of your line to the other. You can also build little branches from the side warehouse to cities B and C if they need the goods as well. No need to make long lines here, small train routes that just go from city to side warehouse and back are fine as the warehouse in this setup would get a lot of use.
Now you are transporting 12 goods, 6 between the cities and 6 off to the side of the cities.
This works best if you use the middle 2-4 platforms of the stations to connect the lines of cities. Then you have an unbroken artery of cities that nothing crosses, and you use the outer platforms on both sides of the station for whatever random rural stuff you need to branch off and grab.
For chapter 2, how did you clear the "Chester and Holyhead Railway" task? There are no other minor railways left, bought them all up. The only one in Wales wasn't even the right name? I'm stuck and I'm trying to see how to get past this.
A very good solution.
If it didn't work, and you have NO minors left, you might be bugged. Maybe check if you have an old autosave from before you bought the Hollyhead minor and try again?
In the meantime I have completed the first chapter and I tried the approach with train lines that take longer routes (A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A) instead of A-B, B-C, C-D, D-E). And it turns out the main problem isn't even what I described in my first post, but instead that the train stops at B, gets loaded with goods for A(!), then takes the full scenic route via C-D-E-D-C-B-A to unload it. Which is obviously extremely stupid because the train will come back to B later and could just pick up the goods then.
And the way how the game decides which goods will be delivered to which destination also feels very counter intuitive. For example in the first chapter, albany was sucking up almost all goods even when the demand was already 100% fulfilled and there was 50+ stock in the city - and meanwhile other cities are still at 0. Even adding a warehouse outside of the city didn't fix this - the goods were still labeled as "xxx for albany" when loaded on a train to that warehouse. So the only way for me to complete the task to deliver 8 salt to new york was to create a direct line with the salt mine and new york as the only stops and manually configuring it to wait until 8 salt are loaded.
And now in the 2nd chapter the same problems are coming again. Turner Estate is producing grain right next to london (one stop away with a direct connection). But its storage is always full and trains stopping there only load a single grain at most, even if they still have free slots. Instead the grain is transported from price farm to birmingham, unloaded there, loaded with all 8 slots on the birmingham-oxford-london line and thereby preventing that line from transporting the goods for which I created it in the first place.
Now theoretically the manual loading mode allows me to prevent those issues by forcing it to load and unload specific goods at a specific station. But for that I would need to configure the exact number of cars of each type. So I *could* say "load 4 grain and 4 meat at birmingham -> replace with 4 wood and 4 cloth at oxford -> replace with 2 beer, 2 sugar, 2 milk, 2 corn at london -> replace with 1 beer, 1 sugar, 1 milk, 1 corn, 2 wood, 2 cloth at oxford -> back to birmingham". But that's both a huge amount of micromanaging and extremely inflexible (if there is 8 beer but no other goods waiting, then it will only transport 2 beer and 6 empty slots).
This reminds me of what Louis Castle said about the command&conquer AI: "If you spend time making something not do something stupid it will actually look pretty smart"
Another thing you can do is alternate warehouses, into 2 types eg. Farm Goods and City Goods.
If City A with a Farm WH is connected to corn, it will feed corn to city B, city B gets meat from City C, who feeds it to A. City C has a warehouse and a connection to corn, too, so B and D are connected to corn, and fed with meat, etc. etc. and this allows me to warehouse effectively 12 goods between every city in the daisy chain. As you build out in the midgame, have more access to duplicate grain farms etc. this becomes a lot more manageable. You will need to think about city bypasses though so instead of having just A-B-C-D intercity freight trading you also have A-C and B-D city trading happening too (you'll need that anyway once these cities are each making 2 or 3 factory goods)
In Albany for example it would have been a good tip to retire wheat/corn/logs from the WH's get those to cities alternative ways, and use the slots for apples and vegetables later on.
Theory:
I built a "service" station behind the end of the main line. Then set up the line service station 1 - dover - london - oxford - birmingham - manchester - liverpool - service station 2 - and all stations back to dover. In liverpool and dover I set "maximum number of wagons the train is allowed when leaving the station" to 0, thereby forcing the train to be empty on the way to the service stations and preventing goods from taking the scenic route. Adding a supply tower between dover/liverpool and the service station prevents the trains from stopping in the middle of the main line to resupply and setting the maintenance depot at the service stations to 90% prevents the trains from blocking platforms on the main line forever.
Reality:
So it seems like until the devs fix the algorithms how the destination and trains for goods are selected, most of what the tutorial teaches you only works in the very early game.
So I guess the only thing that reliably works is to create only direct connections for each source and city and hope to not lose sanity while managing 150+ lines...
Only after large remodelings or when I delete tracks currently in use by trains the game removes trains and redeploys them at a different location. But even this does not cause them to take a full cycle to readjust anymore. Instead they drive at most to the next station, then realize "wait a moment, I'm currently at B and have goods for C, it makes no sense that my next stop should be F" and then stop again and fix their schedule.
What currently works best for me is:
Currently I still see two small problems which can hopefully be fixed in another patch:
a. Pick a city you want to grow, don't do all of them at once. When picking location, take care to ensure that it could be fully supplied by direct connection with most basic goods (e.g., wheat, meat, corn, logs).
b. Create a dedicated cargo rail station in that city. Focus on supplying that city with goods over passenger traffic. Use direct double-lines from rural stations and increase the number of cargo trains based on production capacity (and not demand).
c. Set warehouse to store whatever you have excess of (e.g., wheat), then run direct cargo trains to other cities to supply them with that excess.
d. Purchase and upgrade at least one full production chain (e.g., logs, planks, furniture or wool, cloth, garments). Once city of sufficient size, this will fund the rest of your rail network.
Essentially, you view your rail network as a central distribution hub with satellites. You can have multiple hubs, but your priority is exclusively to supply these hubs, anything else growing is just a positive side-effect. This is because profitability of d. scales exponentially with the city size and local consumption (that does not require transportation) is very lucrative, so it is much more profitable to have one very large city than 4 medium sized cities.
Using this approach I typically hit 1mil city by 1835 with all of its satellites capped at 100K and 200-300mil valuation with 1mil/week revenue for the railroad company.
There is no excess, ever because they do not work that way in RE2 like they did in RE1.
The warehouse only allows storage of a good if another station connected to it is attempting to collect it. Which is why the tutorial and description shows you that goods are only held in anticipation of connected rail line. In other words you can set up a grain warehouse and it will not store a single unit of grain until you connect a train demanding grain to that warehouse.
What some of you are attempting to do needs to be similar to what was already said. You need to place a station somewhere else and use that as a stock pile point. Then it will store the goods in anticipation.
For example, let us say London has a warehouse outside the city limits. London is consuming 1 grain, 1 wood, 1 meat, 1 cloth, 1 corn, and 1 sugar a week. If you set that warehouse outside the city to hold those goods then the train running from the warehouse will pull those goods each week. The only thing being done is not having six different trains going in and out of your station in London.
If your stations and rails are set up properly you can complete the scenarios without ever owning a warehouse.
Let us say Topeka and Wichita are using 3 grain per week. That means you got five empty cars leaving the grain farm. So what you do is create a warehouse at the grain farm for beer and meat. Topeka brings beer back after delivering grain to the warehouse and Wichita brings meat back. So now when Topeka grain train leaves it carries the meat from Wichita and Wichita grain train carries beer. This eliminates the need for a Topeka to Wichita freight train.
The anticipated needs of the incoming trains create the warehouse space to send out the excess goods. This also creates room in your two cities to produce more goods.
IF you build Warehouses, put them in Rural Stations between the Cities along the main track, preferably at a Resource Location, but that is not necessary.
Do not build Warehouses early in any game, you do not have enough capital to pay their very expensive build costs. Later in the game you can afford them, but wait as long as you can to build them.
You also are not considering the scenario or chapter. I can see what you mean in say a 1830 scenario where an engine is like 20k and warehouse is like 150 without tech discounts. For example Chapter 3 is 120k for a warehouse. It is 88k for a freight engine. Connecting a warehouse at the grain farm for those three cities saves me at least one to three engines running freight between the cities. It will save me more once I connect a sugar supply to it.
Any expense it incurs early game is quickly overcome by the rapid growth if you are supply that hub with four resources necessary for cities to grow. I used one early game and I got double growth arrows on all three cities. Faster population means more freight demand, more mail, and more passengers.
I would avoid using warehouses in RE1 because they were a pain to set up due to space limitations and the mess of excess tracks, making sure one warehouse route aint just moving the same good back and forth, etc. With RE2 I am finding them much more useful.
While I was referring to "excess" in context of goods not consumed by your hub city (as in, I can deliver 20 of which 15 is consumed and 5 are in excess), I don’t think your description of warehouse operation is accurate in a large network where everything connected to everything. For example, I just checked and I have multiple warehouses with 99 logs that states “Lumber for …” and it is pretty much lists everywhere. Which is the same as all other warehouses, because I have excessive lumber in my network (oh well). At the same time cities demand is 100% met.
This approach works early on, but it is bad advice once your cities grow and will necessitate major overhaul of your rail network. It is by far more efficient to run empty freight trains back (they move faster) to meet the throughput then sending other goods on a detour to avoid running empty trains. It does not cost you that much to run an empty train, but it does cost you a lot to add extra lines to already high utilization lines and to add extra loaded trains to already high-traffic station. More so, gridiron works best when approaching trains are distributed evenly (straight line from a different city) then when they are merging into edge lines from rural business turn-off. 8 – line would choke if all your trains are merged from side rural lines but is fine when it is middle-platform to middle platform.
The supply chain in both RE1 and RE2 works best when it is direct point to point distribution. Don’t add unnecessary stop-overs if it can be helped.