Suggestion: Cargo 'compartments'

[hekkensnatser]

Right now, vehicles and carriages can only take one type of load.

For instance, a train with a single boxcar arrives at a station. The boxcar has space for 4 items.
Two different types of load are waiting at that station, let's say Tools and Machinery. There are two of each load waiting there. Because of the way the game works right now, the train will only take one type of load, leaving the other behind. This is not that bad with trains, because they can load multiple 'compartments'.

So with a train, this is not a problem, but that rule makes boats highly inefficient. Imagine the same situation I described before, but with a boat that takes 100 items. 50 of the items waiting on the docks are Tools, 50 is Machinery. Now it will take only half the load it is capable of taking, so it has to make two trips instead of one.

Thus, my suggestion is that vehicles can take multiple types of loads at once. Of course, with things like ore cars and tankers, that wouldn't be possible, because you can't mix fuel with oil. With things like boxcars, there shouldn't be a limit, because loading tools and machinery together won't cause issues, but things like fuel and oil will. A boat with space for 100 things and 2 compartments would have space for 50 items of the same type, so 50 oil and 50 fuel, 100 oil or 100 fuel.

TL;DR Vehicles should be able to take multiple cargo types at once.

[SBGaming]

If I'm not mistaken, the recent patch adds cargo compartments to ships, so a ship can now take both Tools and Machinery if it has more than one compartment. With that said, if you're playing a save game which has cargo ships from prior to the patch, you will have to sell off any of the old ships and buy new ships to get the ability for them to haul multiple goods.

[canophone]

FYI, boats have been updated to already take 2-4 cargo types. If you're suggesting it's realistic to allow multiple loads on other vehicles, I'd mostly disagree. I believe, except for end destinations (in cities) that truck loads are often not different products! But in the end, today's world works with containers a lot.

[hekkensnatser]

Oh. They were ahead of me, I guess! I haven't been home for more than a week so I haven't been able to play the new update. I've had it in my head for a while but I kept forgetting to suggest it...

[larry_roberts]

I'd really like to see containers in the official game, even if they only carried one type of cargo e.g goods, it would be nice to see container ships and trains and working container marshalling yards!.