Teamster, how do they work exactly ?

[Elementium]

I want to use them efficiently

I know they transport items.

What I don't know it's are they more efficient if their building is close to what they need to haul ? (like docks for unloading/loading wealth) (or like near my generators in order to fuel them in coal ?)

Or Can I just make 20-30 of them at the same place for the whole island ?

[Taiwan Number One]

NASA is still trying to figure that one out. I've heard teamsters give priority to the oldest order, but I can't say if that's true. The way that's worked for me is to sprinkle them throughout the island(some at the docks, some in the center of the island, some near remote buildings that require resources to function, etcetera.) The general rule is 1 teamster office per 100 population which from my experience works out fine.

[Elementium]

Ok ok will try with this advice in mind ^^

[Kunovega]

There's 3 ways you can approach this:

1. The simple method, roughly 1 teamster office per 100 people (assuming they are fully staffed, basically 8% of your population is teamsters)

2. The rough estimate method: 2 teamsters per building that has product to move (that's every raw resource, factory, smugglers docks, oyster farms, and every dock that is set to import (not export)) ~ note there's 8 teamsters per building, so basically for every 4 buildings that needs product moved you need a teamster office (full staffed)

3. The details method: this is generally more complex than it's worth but technically each office will have different effectiveness levels (depending on mentorship, managers, etc), and you can calculate how much each teamster can move and how long they take to move it. From there you need to compare how much each of your producers is in need of moving. This will vary wildly depending on managers, upgrades and era. Generally as things get upgraded they make more product, and more product means more teamsters. Corn for example when fully upgraded can be producing triple or more it's original volume. If you want to be detailed, you need to know which buildings are producing more than than they used to and add teamsters accordingly. (i mean a corn farm at triple effectiveness needs triple the teamster volume it used to.. of course if you have a teamster office that is more effective than normal... see where this is going? it's a balancing act)

Methods 1 and 2 often end up with similar estimates and are far easier to manage on the fly than trying to be detailed. If you find yourself with buildings that have overloaded output storage, just assume you counted something wrong and make another teamster office nearby.

The biggest variable in any of these methods that many people forget is:
Import trade routes. Normally your exports are destined for the docks and you count their origin point, not their drop off, but if you have imports coming in, suddenty those docks are also pick up points just like any other raw resource or factory and if those products are being used in your economy they need a teamster to move them around.

Have 4 trade routes set to import? That's a teamster office (of 8) right there, just as if you had 3 farms and 1 factory with products to move. And this will change as your economy changes.

Also an alternative for really large islands or long term planning is: build double the number of actual teamster offices you think you will need so that you can properly place them around the island early, but shut off half the worker slots until you actually need them. This is rarely cost effective but it can help with long term planning on extremely long missions.

One thing people often forget is that simply having teamster offices does not mean you have the teamsters. I've seen people say "but I built 10 teamster offices for my 40 farms/factories but nothings being moved" ~ sure, but did all of your teamsters leave their jobs for a highschool education to go work in those factories? If you overbuilt, your teamsters offices may not even be staffed yet due to low population (people go get an education if jobs are available)

----
As for placement: they need to be near the location they are picking up materials from. They will drive it to the docks from wherever. If you are using imports, then they need to be near the docks, because they'll be moving things off the docks.

Basically you can squeeze teamsters in almost everywhere, just not near tourism or entertainment.

If you think of each living area as a hub with 4 sides, you cluster living and welfare buildings in the center, you put docks off to one side, production and resources production off to another side, entertainment on another side and tourism on the last side. Tourism and entertainment should have easy access to each other, if not overlapping. Industry and production should have a bunch of teamsters spread in and between them and the docks. And plug the gaps between tourism/industry or entertainment/docks with trees and a recycling plant for beauty and pollution reduction.

Of course you'll free form that into whatever shape you need, but that's the basic idea

Then as many hubs as you can handle for whatever your goals are.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

Eventually you'll move to tourism and entertainment profits. I dislike managing an island with more than 6-8 teamster offices, it can get very busy.

That's half the fun, I regularly get into 20 to 40 teamsters offices with multiples of factories and 50 docks. 100 trade routes is fun to manage

[Elementium]

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

Eventually you'll move to tourism and entertainment profits. I dislike managing an island with more than 6-8 teamster offices, it can get very busy.

My 3rd island is under developpment, I always move to some tourism, my industrial area was not good as espected, I got mutliple industial building to produce any item in masssince I tied to do some tourism and grow my own crops plus trying to be ecological, , there were not enough people in the island to run it.

I did try to push it 3k via the option but with regular uprising, my population have issue to go over 2.1k

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by Soketsu:

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

Eventually you'll move to tourism and entertainment profits. I dislike managing an island with more than 6-8 teamster offices, it can get very busy.

My 3rd island is under developpment, I always move to some tourism, my industrial area was not good as espected, I got mutliple industial building to produce any item in masssince I tied to do some tourism and grow my own crops plus trying to be ecological, , there were not enough people in the island to run it.

I did try to push it 3k via the option but with regular uprising, my population have issue to go over 2.1k

If you are making enough money, you simply buy the population. You can import workers of any education, even uneducated. I can handle 4000+ populations with over 90% happyness and no rebels

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

I think that Kunovega is completely mad, I can never manage that much stuff. Maybe I'll try one day. Importing food is the way to go I reckon - when I use plantations they always run out of workers and I sudden find that hundreds of people are starving to death and I can never remedy the issue. 50 docks would definitely help though.

It's just a matter of understanding the building interactions. It might help that I've been playing the entire franchise since the first one. Tropico 5 is actually the easiest of them all, this version made things far easier than ever before. Even the farms are simpler to manage now that they are perfectly marked rectangles, previous games you had to guess where they were going to plant and leave enough space for them to wander into new fields. Tropico 5 doesn't even require crop rotation (aside from tobacco farming, which is better off avoided entirely)

In past games you sometimes had to redo a map several times to figure out how to get through it. In tropico 5 I don't think I've had to retry a mission more than once because 99% of them can be easily won with the same overwhelming economy model and knowing which factions to crush while bolstering another

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

90% happiness and no rebels? whoa. If my PC was better then I'd increase the population cap so that I can survive Modern Times. Importing workers is a good idea - when I owned Tropico on PS4 it wasn't so good though, you had to hit the arrow button and 'x' constantly. I wish there was an option to say "fill positions with foreign workers".

Colonial into world wars are the only two that sometimes trip me up. If I can get into the cold war era, it's smooth sailing and I can play a map for as long as I want. By the time I'm in the modern era my problems are so far into the past that my population is incredibly happy and overflowing with people and happyness for as long as I feel like keeping it going:

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

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

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by jeffkiwi5:

Colonial Era and World Wars are hard but usually I run into problems when trying to get Cold War tech, and also Modern Times. Fortunately if you have a rocket launch thingy for research points, it's quite easy to unlock tech in Modern Times. You need a lot of research points though.

2 library, 1 or more of every science thing, and global research initiative.

By the end of the world wars you should have a stable industry economy, just start making political gains and your global research initiative will carry the rest

Cold wars are spent upping tourism and entertainment values, and with targeted exports and praise you'll be rolling in research points. By the time you get to the modern era with stem cells all of your hosptals start kicking in research as well

The key is balancing the population enough to afford all of that, but like I said I can do that pre world wars, cold is just ramp up

[Elementium]

After testing I may have forgot one thing in my setup, so can you confirm me that well designed road help to move resources more freely ?

[Elementium]

I know that

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by Soketsu:

After testing I may have forgot one thing in my setup, so can you confirm me that well designed road help to move resources more freely ?

If your roads have a lot of choke points, it will slow down the system. I personally don't see major problems until 2000+ populations, your mileage may vary

You can just watch your intersections. If lots of cars are stuck waiting for others to turn, it will slow down your entire economy

Use curves whenever you can instead of hard corners (try not to create a corner for just 2 roads meeting, that should be a curve and just 1 winding road)

Where you do create intersections, try not to make it more than a 3 way (4 ways slow down traffic bad). You can avoid 4 way intersections by making tiny circles (which are basically 3 way intersections with a circle in the middle). This will break up traffic and keep it flowing

If you have a large island, be sure you have more than one road going in the same direction so traffic joining from different hubs can get to the dock areas multiple ways without traffic clogs

With experience this should all be second nature

[Elementium]

Alrigt alright, will try with more curves :)

[Elementium]

I wanted just to thank you for the advice, my tropical island are twice stronger than my previous one and I manage to get it faster thanks to it :)

[Tristan]

This is nice piece of knowledge. Also monitoring a farm, I've just noticed teamsters will arrive to the farm in a car, but will leave the farm running behind a wheelbarrow ! So you need a parking near exporting buildings (and as said before, teamster office near the town with buildings, church, ...).

And one last thing, when u want to monitor export, export = 0$ doesn't mean your resource is not exported, it will show 0$ if the resource is transformed before being exported.