What happened to the goods.

[emirfassad]

I had bottleneck at a truck stop that had accumulated over a thousand food & goods for delivery. As a test I removed the stop from the delivery line. All of the food & goods vanished. I had expected that.

I then reconnected the truck stop to the distribution chain. The food and goods did not reappear.

My question is, "Where did they go?".

They weren't distributed among other nearby truck stop nor to the adjacent rail station.

They don't seem to have been disrtibuted to users within the truck stop's catchment area.

Certainly the demand for them did not vanish.
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This is how I visualize the supply chain in TF:

City sector C has a demand for consist X

Some transport line L collects the demand ticket and posts it to a distribution location, T, that is linked to a source of C.

If Distributer T is not a direct source of item X it posts a request to the next link in the chain of distributers and carriers to a source of X.

When the request finally reaches a source a quantity of item X is created, to whichever distributer/carrier placed the proximate request. As the cosist of item T is passed up the supply chain itrs ownership is set to the its next carrier/disgtributer until it reaches distributer T. Here its ownership is assigned to the line placing the initial request, transport line L.

The consist is held at the distributer until a carrier from line L arrives whose destination & load matches that of the original requester.

There is apparently some hierarchy of choice that is not simplly FIFO neither is it "Fisrtest Takes The Mostest" If it were either of those then thousands of one item would not accumulate while smaller quantities of other tiems are distributed.

Now comes the natsy part. When a distributer is removed from a line apparently any consists it has htat are assigned to that line are set to NULL. As a result the items are not delivered. Demands are not met. City growth falters. The game takes a rather silly turn.

One solution is to assign consists to ldistributers not carriers. Assign demands to carries and users. Deploy consists "fFrst Come First Served Always Take From The Largest Stack You Can Deliver".

[chrisasnyder]

Cargo and passengers alike do not make choices when the travel. When an item chooses to use your transport system, to reach a destination, all points are pre-determined when they leave. If you remove one of the points along the line, any thing traveling using that point is removed. Think of as a penalty or cost of changing a delivery chain.

Items and people do not re-route themselves.

There are lots of threads complaining about this, but I think it's fine as far as a game is concerned. It's a system that rewards good planning and layout of a delivery system and creates a penalty for one that isn't.

[Kimmaz]

Yea like if you upgrade a station to high speed or electrify it,, all passengerss dissapear,, but itss not that big of a deal

[emirfassad]

It seems more a system that penalizes discovery, growth and inhibits change. How is the player to develope a superior transportation system when the game punishes him for innovation.

Instead of rewarding growth it rewards stasisand _good enough_. So in a moral sense it is kind of a big deal. That's neither here nor there.

The greatest problem is that the system doesn't provide clear feedback for a player's choices.

For instance, I have a truck stop with over a thousand food that is not being distributed. What choices do I make, as a player, to optimize distribution if each change removes the items I am attempting to manage? Do I make a change , then wait for the queue to become stuffed again hoping I will remember the previous state of the system and whatever changes I might have made?

I have two dozen trucks distributing resourcs from that same truck stop to a sector of commercial consumers with a couple industrial building somewhere inside. How can I ensure that the trucks will deliver the one thousand food to the commercial consumers instead of repeatedly carrying fuel to the ndustrial siphon if my choices turn the problem invisible?

[Vimpster]

If you have over 1000 food piling up at a station (is that even possible?), than in the vast majority of cases no alterations that would result in the deletion of the product needs to be taken to correct or alliviate the situation.

In most cases it is simply a matter of needing more, larger, or faster vehicles on the lines you have in order to move the product more quickly so it won't pile up so much. The product is not stuck indefinitely or it would not have gotten to where it is in the first place. It can not reach a dead end along it's route. You can even make optimizations such as routing your lines differently, while still maintaining the same pick up and drop off locations, without any of the product disappearing. Only when you either delete lines or delete pickup or drop off stations/stops that the product was planning to use, will you lose the product tied to those lines/stations/stops. And, as you know, when upgrading a station that has product stored at it it will delete that specific product that is stored there.

If you want to completly overhaul the lines in question but not lose all that stored product, then I would recomend first dealing with the product in one of the ways I mentioned untill the product is no longer piled up so much. Only then make the big changes you want to make that require deleting critical points.

[killakanz]

Originally posted by Vimpster:

If you have over 1000 food piling up at a station (is that even possible?),

Train Fever had station capacity limits. Transport Fever does not, so it's possible. But having that much piled up is a very clear sign that your routes don't have enough carrying capacity ;)

[vpitt5]

Originally posted by killakanz:

Train Fever had station capacity limits. Transport Fever does not, so it's possible. But having that much piled up is a very clear sign that your routes don't have enough carrying capacity ;)

Isn't there a limit on cargo at a station? I know for sure that train stations have max cargo depending on platform length

[Vimpster]

I do not know of whether there is a limit on station capacity anymore, like killakanz mentions there certainly was a limit in Train Fever, but that limit is obviously removed or increased substantially. However, in my experience, a factory would have long since stopped production if you had anywheres near 500, nevermind 1000, of the same product piling up at any station. But maybe he is playing with the time modification which makes the production numbers, and undoubtedly the amount that can pile up before production stops, to be much higher than normal.

[chrisasnyder]

For some reason I think the limit is 4x the station limit. Which will only matter for short stations since factories will quit before long ones fill to full

[emirfassad]

All of the above may be true for vanilla but I have severalmany mods installed including GX Industries,, time slower and Consumer Conglomerate.

There are a dozen freight trains hauling goods from a factory complex to the central city, Jersey City in this case, which has a population of about 6,500. It feeds five other cities with populations ranging from 1,500 to 4,500. Each with two or three freights and up to four passenger trains. The network generates about 200,000,000 per annum.

With a demand that large there seems to be no way to prevent goods from bottlenecking at road distribution. Truck stops frequently stack 500 to 1,000 resources, yet Jersey City remains in the 12% to 18% range for all demands.

I'm experimenting with "Everything Comes from Chicage" (hub & spokes). Trying to scope out the economic & the distribution models from within the game. And lookng for what's broken and what's not.

I've tried sector distribution and resource specific distribution. Neither has been successful. It's common for some consumers to be at at 250% of demand while an adjacent consumer is at 5% of demand. That suggests to me that there is a problem at consumption. Just not sure what it is,

I don't know what maximum size the Devs set as a target. Perhaps I'm approaching it.