Mind explaining import/export

[Weeping-pirate</JAG\>]

Heeey there ,

So ive tried to get my import/export as good as i can get ( based on irl exp) but to be honest, using irl exp in this game will get you nowhere!

After 40 hours in cities:skylines and 8 years of study/exp irl I would like to know how can i adjust import/export, its getting REALLY annoying.

Normally if you have to import lets say 90% of your plastic from somewhere else, making a plastic industry would reduce your import and if high enough boost your export.

CitiesSkylines: Whenever i start producing what i'm importing most i end up with ALOT of export AND import instead of reducing the import.... let alone have export?



I totally get that you can't have it realistic, but then please let me know how i can work around this, there are no tutorials that have enough indept for anything really let alone import/export....

[Ayidawedo]

yea.. I cant see that it affects my economy so I want to know what import/export does.

[Weeping-pirate</JAG\>]

Ive been reading up reddit and the forums alot yesterday, while i was directly testing. It isnt that hard to be honest.

http://i.imgur.com/F0CQHxY.png

*increasing your export makes alot of money , while you can keep import to a minimum to reduce traffic / cost.

[Ayidawedo]

okay. I was wondering cause I could not find anything about it in my economy tab. (no costs for importing stuff on expenses or any gains for export)

[Weeping-pirate</JAG\>]

They explained in one of the Dev diarys, when your export rises and your import lowers youll see that your industry will make more money.

PS: if you open your budget pannel and hover over the ! @ industry you will see a little bit more info which resource is making how much money.

[puduku]

Originally posted by Weeping-Pirate:

Ive been reading up reddit and the forums alot yesterday, while i was directly testing. It isnt that hard to be honest.

http://i.imgur.com/F0CQHxY.png

*increasing your export makes alot of money , while you can keep import to a minimum to reduce traffic / cost.

That is if the system worked. But it doesn t at all. It s an awful mess. Cities export stuff that they import. It says it exports a certain products but then it doesn t show any building exporting it. Adding specific industry doesn t reduce your import. And so on. However budget seems to adjust well. I was making 150k/week thanks to an import of 223. I expanded a bit and now I import stuff that I export and am down to 65k/week thanks to an import of 3482 while I export 8687. And that s not the data needing to be updated after a death wave or anything else. It s very stable long term.
Here is a screenshot to show all those problems:
http://lacroixdidier.com/temp/2015-04-21_00004a.jpg

[Lunfa Reo]

Originally posted by puduku:

Originally posted by Weeping-Pirate:

Ive been reading up reddit and the forums alot yesterday, while i was directly testing. It isnt that hard to be honest.

http://i.imgur.com/F0CQHxY.png

*increasing your export makes alot of money , while you can keep import to a minimum to reduce traffic / cost.

That is if the system worked. But it doesn t at all. It s an awful mess. Cities export stuff that they import. It says it exports a certain products but then it doesn t show any building exporting it. Adding specific industry doesn t reduce your import. And so on. However budget seems to adjust well. I was making 150k/week thanks to an import of 223. I expanded a bit and now I import stuff that I export and am down to 65k/week thanks to an import of 3482 while I export 8687. And that s not the data needing to be updated after a death wave or anything else. It s very stable long term.
Here is a screenshot to show all those problems:
http://lacroixdidier.com/temp/2015-04-21_00004a.jpg

It's not that the city exports what it has previously imported. The problem is the imports/exports UI in the game does not differentiate between raw materials and processed materials.

Depending on placement and resource availability specialized industry will import some raw materials of the corresponding type in addition of the raw materials it produces itself. And it will export excess processed materials it can't sell to generic industry in your city.
But import of raw materials and export of processed materials will be displayed with the same color and under the same description in the outside connections UI.

For example let's take a forestry industry district. You set it up in a forest. It will create both extractors and processor buildings. After a while the amount of forest in that area can diminish (even though it's a renewable resource its availability fluctuates) and your extractors will no longer be able to supply your processors, so you will begin automatically importing forestry raw materials.
At the same time your forestry processors will continue producing processed forestry materials. And if such supply exceeds the amount needed by your generic industry, you will begin automatically exporting forestry processed materials.

So you import forestry raw materials and you export forestry processed materials. The problem is they both appear as "forestry" and in green color in the imports/exports info view. But they are not the same thing.

[puduku]

Originally posted by Lunfa Reo:

Originally posted by puduku:

That is if the system worked. But it doesn t at all. It s an awful mess. Cities export stuff that they import. It says it exports a certain products but then it doesn t show any building exporting it. Adding specific industry doesn t reduce your import. And so on. However budget seems to adjust well. I was making 150k/week thanks to an import of 223. I expanded a bit and now I import stuff that I export and am down to 65k/week thanks to an import of 3482 while I export 8687. And that s not the data needing to be updated after a death wave or anything else. It s very stable long term.
Here is a screenshot to show all those problems:
http://lacroixdidier.com/temp/2015-04-21_00004a.jpg

It's not that the city exports what it has previously imported. The problem is the imports/exports UI in the game does not differentiate between raw materials and processed materials.

Depending on placement and resource availability specialized industry will import some raw materials of the corresponding type in addition of the raw materials it produces itself. And it will export excess processed materials it can't sell to generic industry in your city.
But import of raw materials and export of processed materials will be displayed with the same color and under the same description in the outside connections UI.

For example let's take a forestry industry district. You set it up in a forest. It will create both extractors and processor buildings. After a while the amount of forest in that area can diminish (even though it's a renewable resource its availability fluctuates) and your extractors will no longer be able to supply your processors, so you will begin automatically importing forestry raw materials.
At the same time your forestry processors will continue producing processed forestry materials. And if such supply exceeds the amount needed by your generic industry, you will begin automatically exporting forestry processed materials.

So you import forestry raw materials and you export forestry processed materials. The problem is they both appear as "forestry" and in green color in the imports/exports info view. But they are not the same thing.

And there is no way to adjust that specifically? If I understand correctly what the game displays is a general number from one category ( forestry for example) and in that category there is sub-categories which are completely invisible to us? So there is no way to adjust it?

Yesterday I tried to bulldoze all the buildings showing up as exporting industry. I had high hopes to optimize my situation back to where it was but it didn t change one single thing.
I was still exporting the same numbers. And afterwhile the new industry replacing the bulldozed one started exporting again without filling any import requirement from nearby industries.
So I ran out of ideas to fix it.
I checked some savegames from other people and seems like nobody is doing better.
Is it even possible to optimize that import/export past a certain point?
I think my city was doing awesome till a population of 120-150k. I had an import of 228 and export of around 7-8k. I kept expanding the same way for a while. But at around 200k population I had a death wave which messed up my industry really bad. After that I was able to get back my goods for commercial import back to 0 but no matter what I do now I still export way too much raw materials while I have to import a lot too (around 8k for both).
Losing hope in the perfect city here :(

edit: And by the way you mention it depends on placement. I find that to be quite true as the closer my general industry is to raw material industry the fewer import there is but it s a small radius. And it doesn t make any sense at all. It s still better to transfer raw material from one side of my city to the other rather than going out of the city to find it. This is not very logical.

[ggianfra]

I have done many tests on service import / export and I've read a lot about this topic in various forums, my conclusion:
the mechanism of import / export in CitiesSkylines must be subjected to a review by CO.

[Lunfa Reo]

I don't have enough information to say the import/export system is broken or needs review. I tend to think it needs review based on my personal experience coupled with those of others I read.

Yeah, it seems hard to balance imports/exports. The ideal situation would be to have 0 of both, because that would mean we collect taxes at every single point in the production value chain. But I don't think that's possible in the current state of the game.

Low imports and high exports is still nice, and 228 imports and 7-8k exports is pretty good IMO.

[ohener]

@puduku

If you zone farming industry directly on top of fertile land you are more likely to get farms and ranches that produce raw materials, if you zone farm industry away from fertile land you get processing buildings. The same is true of forestry and other resources.

[puduku]

Originally posted by Lunfa Reo:

I don't have enough information to say the import/export system is broken or needs review. I tend to think it needs review based on my personal experience coupled with those of others I read.

Yeah, it seems hard to balance imports/exports. The ideal situation would be to have 0 of both, because that would mean we collect taxes at every single point in the production value chain. But I don't think that's possible in the current state of the game.

Low imports and high exports is still nice, and 228 imports and 7-8k exports is pretty good IMO.

I would agree saying the system could use some work. Or at least providing us with better tools to deal with it. Right now it s really hard. And those numbers are not very good. 228 is very good but when you consider that to avoid any import I had to have an excess of 7-8k raw materials to export is not very satisfying.

Originally posted by ohenry415:

@puduku

If you zone farming industry directly on top of fertile land you are more likely to get farms and ranches that produce raw materials, if you zone farm industry away from fertile land you get processing buildings. The same is true of forestry and other resources.

That is a very interesting idea. Never thought of even trying to misplace special industry. I m going to start a new game right away to test that. Thanks for commenting. o/

[BonPadre]

And with the rate at which you exploit you raw ressources, you need to have the mod *unlimited ressources* to have a real influance, cause if not, you may extract oil for a very short time, but then you'll need to import...

Also, same as what has been stated with farms or forestry, you have to identify which building is extracting and which is transforming.

The annoying thing is that you can't choose extract or processing while you zone, unless you take a plopable specific building from workshop.
So if you don't want to use the plop ones, you need to zone, identify the extracting ones, buldoze the processing until you have what you want for extraction, and finally play with the extraction and processing balance with zoning and your imports exports overlay... But as you do that, try to do it in probably far smaller zones than what you're used to ? so you can better balance what's building or not ?

the fact you can create islands (read not road connected + only inner train connections, and outside loop may help you really force using what you produce over what you import...)

But honnestly even if I agree that you could have more advanced import exports (and we may see it in future developpements who knows, and I have seen far older game handeling that much better than this one) the game is not about import/exports... it's about a functionnal network (for me the game until now that has best met my expectations about in game extraction / production / imports / exports has been eveonline... if only a game that would not be a monthly subscribe would have that advanced buisness, I would play it for countless hours as well)

So my best guess is try to find plopable extracting buildings, instead of zoning (if they in fact exists...) and from that play around with your observations...

[ROB3342421]

I’ve a strange situation where my oil industry is importing resources while I have literal hundreds of tonnes in storage, is there anyway to refresh this to get it using that stuff again? It seems frozen, lost in time and spa...cities skylines!

[hippo]

There is an excellent guide on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=510401248&insideModal=0&requirelogin=1