Building not producing despite overflow of necessary materials. (Teamsters not working)

[[ISFYLG]HenchmanAce]

So, I have a steel mill and it's not producing because there's no materials being shipped in BUT, my iron mine is overflowing with material to be delivered but they're not being delivered! What's going on? Same thing is happening with my textile factories, they're not getting cotton and wool despite the fact that my cotton farm and lama ranches are overflowing! The Teamsters aren't doing their job properly. What's going on?

[Jet City Gambler]

If goods are piling up, it sounds like you need more teamsters. Try building some parking garages next to your mines and factories, each one employs two teamsters and they will help get the supply chain going, as well as making it easier for your workers to get to their jobs.

[Shrapnel]

Thats the problem with games like these, unless you are either experienced in CBs or an extreme micromanager, bottlenecks like this will cause a slow painful death that is so frustrating to people inexperienced with this genre of games. There's no tutorial or pop up that can highlight said bottlenecks, going back to the lack of experience to these matters killing the fun for the player.

[battlezoby]

If you're not pretty sure you have too many Teamsters, you problably don't have enough!

Seriously, just GO NUTS with the number of teamsters! Only thing possibly bigger is in Mordern Times, layout lots of Metro Stations!! Teamsters can't use the Metro/subway to move goods, but it helps get everyone else off the roads so that Teamsters can do their job with less traffic jams.

In playing T4, lack of Teamsters and traffic jams were the first, possibly the only, general big problem I had in completing Mission Campaign! About 1000 hours of play later, they're still an issue.

[[ISFYLG]HenchmanAce]

Originally posted by battlezoby:

If you're not pretty sure you have too many Teamsters, you problably don't have enough! :check:

Seriously, just GO NUTS with the number of teamsters! Only thing possibly bigger is in Mordern Times, layout lots of Metro Stations!! Teamsters can't use the Metro/subway to move goods, but it helps get everyone else off the roads so that Teamsters can do their job with less traffic jams.

In playing T4, lack of Teamsters and traffic jams were the first, possibly the only, general big problem I had in completing Mission Campaign! About 1000 hours of play later, they're still an issue.

I tried doing that, ended up driving my countrie's economy into the ground. But, at least now the buildings were working.

[battlezoby]

Well, I was obviously exagerating/joking to make a point, but, yea... you have to get it right.

Actually, the road system is a big deal. For one thing, try to avoid 4-way intersections and
only make 3-way/"T" intersecrions. For a bunch of additional advice, search the Tropico 4 forums for my post on roads; maybe I'll search for it myself later and put a link here where I'm not "running off" to doing something else like I am now. :-)

[battlezoby]

Ok... I know there are a lot of typos, and this was from Tropico 4, but here's the
advice I posted. Try some of it out, it should all work in Tropico 5, except some/most
of the mappers have less space, especially due to building when fog or war is still out.

Actually, once you get a lot of money, although I have trouble "biting the bullet" and
doing it myself, it would probably be a good idea, once you get enough money and
the Compass is discovered and the map is revealed, to destroy most of your
original CLUTTER island section, and rebuild in a way that will let the roads
work better! Just hover over the spoiler below to read it. Good luck!
*** SPOILER ALERT ***


1. Perhaps the bigest an simplest.. don't make any 4-way intersections!
Cars jam up waiting for turns and traffic james increase exponentially.

Try to spread out intersections and stick to only 3-ways intersections
whenever feasable. In other words, you can still have essentially a
4-way intersection but don't make the two new road connect to the first
in the same place. Instead, spread them out so that cars turning
one way aren't right on top of the cars turning the other way and there's
some "buffer space" on road in between them.

2. "Jug-handle rights!" On intersections, (especially 4 ways) try to make room
for a curved "1/4th circle [or oval]" making an alternate way to a right hand turn.

In practice, an alternate way to turn left would be better, but I don't think
it's possible due to lack of under/over-passes.

3. Build local roads.

Put things like Teamsters and Factorie together on sepeate roads from your
highways! That way they can "own" that road and only enter and exit traffic
if and when they need to go somewhere else.

Try to keep the main roads to the docks as clear as possible, except
that it might be good to dump a lot of teamsters on it since they're the ones
you want to use it most! (Same with a tourists and tourist docks in you're
going nuts with tourists.)

4. Build 4 and 6 lane "Highways".

You can build more than one road going in the same direction.
If you do some tricks, you can encourage drivers to split up.

One trick in make add some otherwise useless curvers, or even
"mazes" to one road, making it longer, so drivers are more likely
to take the other road(s).

A little otherwise pointless "maze" is good way to start a local
road, btw... even if it's a potential highway otherwise. Drivers

5. Combining the idea of local roads and "highways", an extreme is
three roads going the same direction alongsides each other.
There is a special trick here...

Hopefully cars stopping drop off passengers on the building
to the left and right of the roads (including dropping off people at
housing and othe buildings that don't have roads inherantly) will
[hopefully] take the left and right roads to do so, leaving the
center road to move faster.

Come to think of it, I might have misassumed until just now that
drivers will take the left or right road for local traffic, but maybe
that's wrong....

If not, you could make them one-way roads so you need to use
the highway to travel non-local.

Come to think of it, and this is sick because it will eat land, you
make 2 roads on each side of a center one. One sideroad for
going one-way in one direction, and the other in the other direction.

The middle road (or you can just have 3 road if there aren't any
buildings on more than one side of it) could have a "maze" at each
end. Yes, the "maze" slows traffic a bit, but not nearly as much as
a traffic jam on a busy island with a high population.[/spoiler]

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by battlezoby:

Well, I was obviously exagerating/joking to make a point, but, yea... you have to get it right.

Actually, the road system is a big deal. For one thing, try to avoid 4-way intersections and
only make 3-way/"T" intersecrions. For a bunch of additional advice, search the Tropico 4 forums for my post on roads; maybe I'll search for it myself later and put a link here where I'm not "running off" to doing something else like I am now. :-)

The menu screen for tropico actually pans over a circle design that I started using quite effectively.

Anywhere that would be a 4 way intersection is instead a circle (as tight as possible) so that the 4 roads coming in are all individual 3 way intersections

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1312063673

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1312063715

It's certainly not perfect, but that islands a 4000+ population making a few million dollars a year with no traffic jams, and it probably could have been even more well planned, but the economy grew so fast that I threw those roads together on the fly

[[ISFYLG]HenchmanAce]

Originally posted by Kunovega:

Originally posted by battlezoby:

Well, I was obviously exagerating/joking to make a point, but, yea... you have to get it right.

Actually, the road system is a big deal. For one thing, try to avoid 4-way intersections and
only make 3-way/"T" intersecrions. For a bunch of additional advice, search the Tropico 4 forums for my post on roads; maybe I'll search for it myself later and put a link here where I'm not "running off" to doing something else like I am now. :-)

The menu screen for tropico actually pans over a circle design that I started using quite effectively.

Anywhere that would be a 4 way intersection is instead a circle (as tight as possible) so that the 4 roads coming in are all individual 3 way intersections

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1312063673

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1312063715

It's certainly not perfect, but that islands a 4000+ population making a few million dollars a year with no traffic jams, and it probably could have been even more well planned, but the economy grew so fast that I threw those roads together on the fly

Seems like a great idea, I'll give this one a try too.

[battlezoby]

Thanks Kunovega for posting those screenshots that show people a simple easy way to allievate traffic that's a lot simplier than the complicated stuff I posted under the spoiler black-tags above.

I'm not sure, but putting the teamsters closer to the docks might help a bit too.

I know you said those screenshots are cities without traffic jams,
but I hate to admit the screenshots remind me of when Arnold Schwatzanager said "The most important part of becoming a successfully bodybuilder is to choose your parents carefully."

Those screenshots appear to be sandboxes, or at least parts of an island where the coasts are completely open and there aren't any cliffs or anything else indestructble blocking the shoreline or most of the inner layout. I mentioned Arnold because you can't pick your parents once you're born, and you can't pick your island (beyond the order to use the two suppied) when doing a Campaign.

I don't know how well those builds would do on a different map, but people should be aware that it is a LOT easier to get a big economy without traffic jams on an "all beach" island, or barring that, it's good to keep your commernce near "all beach" areas of an island when parts of the island are open to the beach, and some aren't. On the other hand, the Tropico 5 islands I've seen (All 3 campaigns now, and two of the DLC missions) are all much more friendly than most Tropico 4 islands... they aren't quite as flat AND open as those screenshots appear to be, but at least they're not as restrictive as some/many Tropico 4 mission islands are.

But again, thanks for posting it, and, seriously, great job in posting some advice that was way easier for people to understand. I wish I was better at doing that... it's easy for me, personally, to write verbosely, but very hard for me to edit it down to really simple. :-(

[In part because I get too caught up in the details, like I just did here...]