All my towns collapsed their production

[Skignovilous]

Hey, I'm not sure if this is because of the update, but my first 4 towns were fine and all at 100% satisfaction, then when I played today, mountains reached level 20 and I unlocked the possibility to build on Jungle. I didn't build there yet, but, when i finished the quest all my 4 towns collapsed and went down to 50ish%. I'm uncertain what I did wrong since, so far, The game has been pretty chill

[Ruin]

The most recent update can easily cripple your towns, especially if you were already in the late game.

I've pretty much decided to start over because my level 47 main town and the rest of my towns (level 35 - 44) have all been completely crippled by the update.

I'm sure I could resurrect all of my towns, but i think that would likely involve waiting for hours on end to allow backlog and trade post storage to build up, or simply deconstructing everything and rebuilding it from scratch, neither of which I want to do.

I'm not saying the changes made were bad, but it simply changed things enough to break some worlds, especially if trade volumes are so high that all you need is one production cap trading each resource.

[Erik Asmussen]

@Skignovilous: Sorry about this - I didn't expect the changes to have this kind of effect on a town at your stage. I had a number of people testing it out on the beta branch and they also didn't report issues like this. So it's not an intentional thing. I will see if I can diagnose and fix the problem.

Can you dig around a bit and see if there is anything in particular that is causing the bottleneck? Like, were you depending on some trading import / export that is no longer working, or is item storage suddenly a problem?

If you can't figure it out, maybe you can send me your save file? It's located here, and you can email to [e-mail]:

PC: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\ [YOUR STEAM ID] \2207490\remote\Saved Games
OSX: Users\ [your user folder] \Library\Application Support\Steam\userdata\ [your account ID] \2207490\remote\Saved Games

[Erik Asmussen]

@Ruin: Very possibly what happened here is your storage is suddenly much smaller, due to the removal of the omni storage boosts. This can interfere with production.

However, my guess is you can fix everything by adding a couple levels of the new "Storage Boost" town perk. It will make your item storage capacity dynamically respond to how much the item is needed. The same is true with Trading capacity - now, the Rail Depots provide a dynamic amount of storage to match item demand.

The other benefit is you won't have storage that far exceeds your ability to produce items. So it probably won't take long to stabilize after you make this change.

Let me know how it goes though - it's hard for me to anticipate the effects of these balance changes on all types of towns, so it may take a few patches for me to get right.

[Ruin]

Originally posted by Erik Asmussen:

@Ruin: Very possibly what happened here is your storage is suddenly much smaller, due to the removal of the omni storage boosts. This can interfere with production.

However, my guess is you can fix everything by adding a couple levels of the new "Storage Boost" town perk. It will make your item storage capacity dynamically respond to how much the item is needed. The same is true with Trading capacity - now, the Rail Depots provide a dynamic amount of storage to match item demand.

The other benefit is you won't have storage that far exceeds your ability to produce items. So it probably won't take long to stabilize after you make this change.

Let me know how it goes though - it's hard for me to anticipate the effects of these balance changes on all types of towns, so it may take a few patches for me to get right.

In my case, I don't think the case is too little storage capacity, I thinks its actually too much storage capacity. Idk for certain, but it felt like my main town, which was over producing enough prior that it didn't have any problems keeping up with other towns' deficits, suddenly couldn't keep up with the other town's needs and all of my towns had plenty of storage cap and not enough production, main town included. I also noticed a lot of the trading post storages that were previously full, seemed to be empty constantly or just starting to refill.

Perhaps when the changes applied to the save, it deleted all of my storage cap due to the removal of the upgrades then after all of my storage was gone it then applied the other changes to increase storage? idk

Regardless, I've restarted and im fine with it. I still have my previous save if I ever wanted to return to it so its not too big a deal.

[Skignovilous]

Just want to report back and say that its fixed now. Not sure what you did in your end, but I saw a patch just happened. Thank you so much! Love Factory Town games, I've been playing the other one since 2020.

[General Frost]

Yeah im having similar issues and im still only in early game only have the river. But my grain productions has completely tanked and lost all storage's of that and its next tear products in seconds and now everything in pasture and the tailor are starting to tank as well.

As far as i can tell at my place in the game the storage size should have no impact on me to this degree. Its like my production values were changed. I went from positive grain production set to auto to -90 or more and the auto didn't seem to kick in. I doubled the workers and im still at around -19. and unless i missed something nothing changed in the patch should of done something like this. Im also now losing rock -92 and iron deposits when before the patch i was only negative on gold because i don't have the research to increase the gold deposit rates.

[PaulLloyd]

In my case the issue wasn't the changes affecting the trading, but the natural resource generation. I had to add a lot to Iron Ore Deposit and Grain harvesting, The most severe case was in the River town where the Iron Ore Deposit output well under a quarter of the demand. Before the patch the allocated workers were sufficient, now I have either to add hundreds more, or start bringing in iron products from somewhere else.

[Manifusion]

One thing i imagine hits a lot of people out of the blue with the recent changes is largely to do with how the auto assign will allocate resources.

With the expansion of the trading storage, the auto assign tends to dump all resources into trading at the expense of the town itself, so that even if you had the resources to stay productive, much of it could be siphoned off into the ether until they become full.

One recommendation I could suggest is to adjust the auto assign, preferably to have it prioritize production potential of the town before trading away the overflow. At the very least more options in how it allocates resources would go a long ways, as I really like to use it for dynamically adjusting to production needs when expanding the various towns.

[Neko_Baron]

Yeah I loaded up today to find all my towns have tanked, I think the auto assign is messed up the most? I noticed some were sitting at just 1 to process and had to manually set it higher, and then enabling auto assign would just drop it back down to only 1 crippling itself again which is a huge problem for a late game save as its not easy to work out why and whats broken the most.

[Erik Asmussen]

Originally posted by Neko_Baron:

Yeah I loaded up today to find all my towns have tanked, I think the auto assign is messed up the most? I noticed some were sitting at just 1 to process and had to manually set it higher, and then enabling auto assign would just drop it back down to only 1 crippling itself again which is a huge problem for a late game save as its not easy to work out why and whats broken the most.

Is auto-assign setting to 1 capacity because the recipe doesn't have enough ingredients, or because the output is full?

If there's not enough ingredients, the recipe progress bar will show the recipe is running at less than 100% efficiency. If the output is full, the recipe progress bar will show over 100%, meaning you have assigned more capacity than it can actually use. But if the progress bar shows exactly 100%, it means it's running exactly at the speed you have assigned and probably could handle more assigned capacity.

So if it's showing 100% and it's still limited at 1 capacity, then there's definitely a problem.

If anyone is having similar auto-assign issues I'd love to see your save file. Save files are here and you can email to [e-mail]:

PC: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\ [YOUR STEAM ID] \2207490\remote\Saved Games
OSX: Users\ [your user folder] \Library\Application Support\Steam\userdata\ [your account ID] \2207490\remote\Saved Games

[Erik Asmussen]

Someone sent me their save file and I was able to diagnose the problem. Here's what I believe happened:

- Rail Depots suddenly became very powerful, since they now scale with trading import demand. So advanced towns with lots of trading, and potentially dozens of rail depots, now have billions or trillions of spare storage in their trading posts.
- All the towns then began producing like crazy to fill this new storage
- This creates shortages in important things like Power. Which then causes things like Harvesting to slow down.

So I believe you can stabilize your towns by taking these steps:

- Delete all Rail Depots in all towns, until things stabilize, then add back one at a time. You may only need 1 Rail Depot.
- Until Power supply stabilizes, make sure your towns are not trying to export Power. If your Desert is really good at producing Power, which it often is, you can export Power from there and import it into all your other towns.
- Set a Production Limit (the little speedometer button over the recipe progress bars) for all Trading Posts to "Demand: 110%". This will make sure towns only produce items to supply what is needed for import, not just to fill empty space at the Trading Post.

Once things are stabilized, you can slowly start to add Rail Depots back. But again you may only need 1 since it scales with demand.

Let me know if this helps. I will also try to add some logic to the game that will avoid this situation somehow.

[Erik Asmussen]

Ok, I have version 1.1.4 up on the beta branch. Here are the patch notes. I'd love to hear if anyone that was having production instability finds that this patch resolves it. Might not be perfect, but should be much much better.

• Reverted the ‘Dynamic Storage’ effect of Rail Depots. They were causing too much town instability due to sudden increase in storage.
  
• The global perk “Global Trading Capacity” now has the dynamic storage effect that Rail Depots did in the previous version. Each level will now provide a bonus to all traded items’ global storage based on a percentage of that items’ peak per-second demand
  
• Since the Global Trading Capacity perk is now much stronger, the level of it was reduced to 1 for any players that had levels in it. Quest Coins are refunded for these levels. This allows players to more carefully increase their trading post storage without causing major production shortages.
  
• Fixed label on Quest Coins button saying 'Perks' instead of the number of available quest coins