Distributing items around a town

[Deadman]

I have one train station with 4 lines, that is receiving construction material, machines, goods, fuel & tools on the outside of a town.
I have two truck lines, one setup going from a truck station next to the train station and delivering to a bus station in the commercial area, and the second truck line going from truck station next to the train station and delivering to a bus station in the industrial area.

Are there any tricks that I should use, to increase the delivery in the town?
Do I need multiple bus stops in the commercial & industrial areas?
Is one bus stop enough?
Is there any advantage to use truck stops vs bus stops for freight?

Is there a way to speed up the time take to load a lorry? Often there are 10 or more lorries waiting to load...

[Vimpster]

If I were trying to deliver all 6 cargo items to a town through a single train station, I would build 3 truck stations just outside the train station. Each one would handle 2 of the 6 items. I would also try to make sure each truck station outside the train station are on a different road so that they aren't all piling up on the road.

For the receiving end I would use bus stops. I would use as many as is needed to reach the vast majority of the appropriate buildings. If one bus stop covers 90% of the industrial area than I would be fine with just the one bus stop for each of the 3 cargo items being delivered.

[Falconbuck]

Indeed multiple truck stations at your train station and as few bus stops you can use to deliver into town. Just compare the catchment area with the supply/demand of the town. If you can deliver 50% of the demanded fuel, then a catchment area of let's say 60% of the industrial area could be enough. In the early stages of the game you can most of the time reach all industrial buildings with 1 or 2 busstops. If you use 2 busstops, I would send the line like this: train - busstop 1 - train - busstop 2. It will load both times at the train station.
Make sure all trucks can load to full capacity, otherwise they will wait 3 minutes standard to get fully loaded and trucks get jammed at the truck station. You can shorten this in the vehicles tab on the bottom in the specific line screen. Personally I prefer to use only 1 line for every truck station.
Important tip: Goods will 'jump' from truck station to truck station within the catchment area.
Example: Line 1 delivers food to truck station 1. Line 2 picks up this food at truck station 2 as long as truck station 2 is within the catchment area of truck station 1. No truck is needed to transfer this food from station to station. This can drastically shorten truck waiting time if done right. You can keep trucks out of each others way, which is important especially when frequency for trucks is under 15 seconds (or any other traffic jam).
Only advantage for truck stops over bus stops is that you can pick up goods at truck stops. So if you only deliver, ALWAYS build a bus stop, even when it's in the middle of nowhere.
So same example as before but with bus stop: Line 1 delivers food to bus stop. Line 2 picks up this food at truck station as long as truck station is within the catchment area of bus stop.
Waiting time of a truck is drastically shorter at a bus stop since it only delivers and does not wait for goods to be loaded. And you can place a bus stop practically everywhere.
Hope this helps a little. Good luck!

[Deadman]

Great comments thanks.
I like the idea of train>busstopA>train>busstopB... I usually go Train>A>B and get strange results and lots of half empty trucks..!

Will also try breaking the deliveries into several truck stops.

Do you leave the lorries to carry any items, or make them specific?

[Deadman]

Is there a way to control the route lorries take? i.e. way points for road freight? I have tried using bus stops, it kinda works, but again you can get half empty trucks and it slows the frequency down

[Metacritical]

all vehicles use the shortest possible route, i usually just upgrade the roads that the trucks use to speed things up. it destroys a few buildings but they grow back. the lack of ability to control which route trucks take is annoying, this is why i only use trams for within-city transport.

[Falconbuck]

I have 1000+ trucks in my current game and 0 of them carry specific dedicated goods. 80% carry 2-way so I can't set specific goods. Other 20% is way to obvious what to carry. Only specify when you encounter longtime problems. Trucks are handy because of the versatility; I don't want to undo that.
Personally, I especially hate it when busses and trucks use the same intercity road so I build my main passenger hub on the other side of the city then the 'trade' truck station. I then lay 2 parallel roads to the other city so bussen use the slightly shorter one, and for trucks the other is slightly shorter.

[vilandesch]

My standard setup is:
2 Cargo Lines
1 drop off point for each line
Underground 100 km/h roads

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=869945736

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=869945904

[Deadman]

I set up my truck routes to go train station > bus stop A > train station > bus stop B but I get strange results. I.e. The trucks don't empty at busA they leave 1 or 2 items in the truck and return back to the station.

To solve this I set up two different lines train > busA and second line train > busB.

Anybody else see this behaviour? Or is it just me?
But this means I now have at least 6 lines delivering items on trucks in each town!

[Falconbuck]

Never noticed that, but it might happen. I only look at the number of goods in the truck station that are destined for the local lines. I don't mind adding a few extra trucks to cover this inefficiency. The goal of this line is to transfer the goods around town, not to make money.

[clixor]

Originally posted by Deadman:

I set up my truck routes to go train station > bus stop A > train station > bus stop B but I get strange results. I.e. The trucks don't empty at busA they leave 1 or 2 items in the truck and return back to the station.

To solve this I set up two different lines train > busA and second line train > busB.

Anybody else see this behaviour? Or is it just me?
But this means I now have at least 6 lines delivering items on trucks in each town!

Having multiple dropoff points on the same line can cause this behavior. What happens is that on the first pickup cargo is or could be picked up for the second dropoff. To our logical minds this doesnt make any sense, but we simply can't tell the AI what cargo has what priority.

So overall it's better to use seperate lines. When starting out this seems stupid, but when you are starting to deal with larger cargo quantities it actually makes managing capacity on lines easier.

[chrisasnyder]

Originally posted by Deadman:

I set up my truck routes to go train station > bus stop A > train station > bus stop B but I get strange results. I.e. The trucks don't empty at busA they leave 1 or 2 items in the truck and return back to the station.

This type of line setup is trying to give the AI more logic than it actually has. The cargo pickup is pretty simple. Truck enters station, what's the largest quantity of items the on my line, take those, go. What stop that cargo is destined for is irrelevant in the decision to pick it up, only the amount.

The model setup Deadman used, makes sense for when using a single truck to cover the whole city, but as soon as there are more trucks create a line for each.

My recommendation is one truck, one line, one stop. This allows control over how many trucks are really needed as city demand grows. Not every drop off point in a city will need the same line capacity.

One other issue to be aware of because of the simple station pick up logic, if you have a high volume product coming into a city, thru a distribution tuck stop, and you try to startup another industry chain, that new chain may fail because final stage delivery gets starved.

For example, CM is rolling in at 1000 per year, and truck lines run full, just barely clearing the station before the next big train load arrives. Then you try to startup fuel, initially 50 per year, it will get delivered to the truck station, but won't ever get shipped out to the city on the yellow line because the CM dominates that line. This causes fuel to shutdown, because products are not getting delivered.

How do you solve this? I find the easiest thing is to add a fuel only truck to the line, to ignore the biggest stock of CM and always take fuel, then once the fuel supply coming in gets on the same pace as the CM, you re-balance the truck count and the specific fuel vehicle can go away.

[clixor]

Originally posted by chrisasnyder:

Originally posted by Deadman:

How do you solve this? I find the easiest thing is to add a fuel only truck to the line, to ignore the biggest stock of CM and always take fuel, then once the fuel supply coming in gets on the same pace as the CM, you re-balance the truck count and the specific fuel vehicle can go away.

Even better, you can if you want use a seperate truck platform to pickup the fuel only. Then you avoid traffic jams at the CM truck stop.

One note though, cargo is not picked up on the basis of the highest available volume waiting. In my current game i had over 1500 goods waiting while the other items were picked up nicely.

I believe the game, if given a chioice, prioritizes cargo on the listing you see in the city details screen.

[chrisasnyder]

Originally posted by clixor:

I believe the game, if given a chioice, prioritizes cargo on the listing you see in the city details screen.

Now that you metion it that's correct. I was thinking through the example, which CM is listed before fuel.

There is one other condition on pick up that I now remember, the trucks look for which ones will give them a full load. So if the first item listed doesn't fill the truck, and the second will, it takes the second item. This matters in the later game wth the 18+ truck carry load.

[6000 Chipmunks]

Using bus-stops for deliveries is fine, until traffic becomes an issue. I like them, but the depots are set back away from the main road, and therefore don't hold up buses, other trucks, and traffic, while making deliveries. This problem will still rear its ugly head, later in the game when truck traffic and size change. So, back-ups onto the main road may still cause traffic-jams, unless your really good at managing...everything. *The fact that everything gets re-routed every ten mins, also helps...NOT! (Face-palm!).

[clixor]

Originally posted by Out-There Dave:

Using bus-stops for deliveries is fine, until traffic becomes an issue. I like them, but the depots are set back away from the main road, and therefore don't hold up buses, other trucks, and traffic, while making deliveries. This problem will still rear its ugly head, later in the game when truck traffic and size change. So, back-ups onto the main road may still cause traffic-jams, unless your really good at managing...everything. *The fact that everything gets re-routed every ten mins, also helps...NOT! (Face-palm!).

I also prefer the depots above bus-stops. For the same reason, it holds up traffic. However, you could also place a bus-stop on some side-street made for that purpose with enough space for some buses to 'park' for a while.

The main problem with traffic though is that on each intersection the traffic stops. Using a truck-lane won't help in that department either.

But whatever the case. Another down-side of a bus-stop is that the catchment area is actually too big for developed cities. Early on this exactly is the advantage, but i find that i can manage traffic better with a multiple lines moving less cargo per line. Another aspect is that, with many cities connected, it gets a bit hard to remember where you place what. A truck depot for me is also just a visual reminder how i setup things in that particular city.