Insane Transportation costs

[Bullet Magnet]

Transportation costs are insanely high, around 1920 they are easily 10-15% of all costs, or sometimes even 30%.

I even put all other continents to their own marquees and separated them to get to single continent, even after that they are still 10-15% of all costs suddenly with just North America having branches + factories.

This always pushes my company to the red, and my earlier game i had to end because micromanaging production to keep transportation costs in check was just way way too much.

This cost skyrocketed after ~1916 on this game, from about 500k $ to 10mil $ after building out Australia (+making factory there) and even after separating those transport costs remain at around 6mil $ while total sales volume is only about 50mil $.

How do i find out how the F# it gets this high, and what to do about it?
Unit volume wise my company is about middle of the road, not cheap nor expensive but looks like only my luxury vehicles can make a profit.

[Eric.B]

Email me your save game and I'll give you tips. Most likely the prices of your vehicles are too low, or your factories are not spread out, or you misconfiguring the auto production system.

http://wiki.gearcity.info/doku.php?id=troubleshooting:steam_savegamefile

Beyond that, yes, shipping is expensive pre-WW2. It gets cheaper as time progresses.

[Bullet Magnet]

sent the save.

I managed to drop significantly transport costs by sticking to north america only and dropping other regions to their own marquees. Most of my cars are super expensive, but i have some cheaper ones which sells in rather high volume too. Essentially profit at 4x company size is much lower now.

[Eric.B]

Thanks for the save file. I checked the second one you sent. I ran a turn to generate a report.

The transportation costs are $5,814,003. You sold 33,816 vehicles. You're paying $172 per vehicle, which is a little high. But not outrageous.

Anyway, you want to lower it, so let's look at which cities are costing you the most.

Open up the Branch Operations report. Reports->Operations->Branch.

Click the Transportation Cost header in the table. (May need to click it twice to sort it in descending order)


New York, Chicago, and Philly are the two cities which are giving you the most transportation costs.


Now let's look at your factories. You have no factory in New York, even though it's taking up most of your transportation costs. Ditto with Philly.

You have a couple large factories, meaning that things will have to be shipped across distances if all production ends up at one factory.

Building a factory in New York should cut down on your expenses there. Building a bunch of small factories around instead of one mega factory is also another way to spread production around locally.




Building 5 line factories in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, and a 10 line factory in New York, then idling all factories so Autoproduction recalculates all factories, cut your transportation costs down to $4,128,695, for 28,819 units, or $143/unit. A few more smallish factories like this, around the cities with the highest transport costs can cut it down some more.

Summation: Your transportation costs aren't that high. But if you must optimize it, In the early years, it costs a lot to transport vehicles, so you need to build locally. Especially in cities that have the most sales volume. Smaller factories will spread your production around rather than having big centralized factories building everything. In all likelihood, you have a factory in LA buying vehicles for New York.

The Autoproduction system will not remove vehicles from production unless sales change, so after you build a factory, if you want the system to recalculate itself, use the Idle All Factories Autocommand in the Mega Menu.

[Traksimuss]

He is correct in many ways. Transportation costs do decrease each year, but until WW2 they are high. So making local factories with 3-4 lines is better for costs for a long time. You can even upgrade them once with extra 3-4 lines if there are a lot of customers. Also do not put technology slider too high, I usually put couple of factories to 70 per line, and later 100 per line. I build couple of mega factories for roaring 1920ies but not before.


When depression in 1930ies hit, you have to close 80% of factories anyway to cut down costs.

[Bullet Magnet]

I had managed to cut down to half the transport costs by that save tho. They were 10-11mil range just prior. Then i cut off to a marquee my australian branches + factories to cut it down.

I had somehow missed that report, thanks! Helped tremendously, also the idle all factories -> dropped 40% my transport costs.

[Eric.B]

Originally posted by Bullet Magnet:

I had somehow missed that report, thanks! Helped tremendously, also the idle all factories -> dropped 40% my transport costs.

Yes, if you have built several factories since the last time you won a contract, had a war, etc, then it is wise to use the idle factories button to reset Auto Production and let it recalculate all your vehicles using the new factories. Otherwise, your new factories will only be producing new vehicles designs unless you had a surge in demand.

Glad you got your costs under control.