Why boats

[pat]

Since game documentation has gone the way of the slide rule, I can only ask here.

How are boats worth the trouble? I'm having too much trouble with trains to bother with them, but I just wanted to know if they're useful for anything other than cool looking. They're obviously restricted where they can go (unless there's a mod to put wheels on the bottom of them), and I have to assume they're slow. Even if they can carry a lot, I haven't seen a need for more than what a train can haul.

[akuarmoton]

Atleast the hovercraft is very good. It can carry only 15 people but is fast as f**k, and makes good profits.

[Flexible Games]

IMHO, boats are pretty useless. Unfortunately. They are _dead_ slow and as such your industry's tend to suffer. Unless, of course you have like 20 of them. But then, with that expense, why not just use rail? I can build a pretty sizeable rail bridge for the cost of a couple boats.

[BoNeZ]

I dont see the point in most things, i can make a huge profit etc from my first major set up with just Trucks, makes way more than Trains i found.

[Gameloop]

The boats look cool, except when they run into each other, or make a unrealistic U-turns on the spot.

[pat]

Different strokes for different folks. I like trains much more than road vehicles. Road vehicles can get tied up in traffic that you have no control over. Trains can haul MUCH more and go much faster over long distances. Road vehicles certainly have their place. I'm not going to set up a rail line to transport goods to a town a mile away.

Road vehicles are cheaper than rail, so they can be a more sensible option at the beginning when cash is short.

[kiedishaze]

I don't think it's boats overall that's the problem. I reckon the map size is far to small to even support boats (and planes for that matter). The boats in the game (especially late game) is what you'd expect to see out at see or massive rivers, not a tiny lake in the middle of the map. If the map sizes were to increase and we had vast amount of water (and land) I would see boats fitting more into the game. Another cool feature would be to add RO/RO ferries 😉 and also tourism...

[dogwalker1]

Boats are indeed slow, but they also have very low operating costs relative to the income they generate. ...I'm talking about early game boats at this point, I'll see how I feel about the late game boats when I get there.

If you have a river that crosses the map and, say, a farm near one end and a food processing plant near the other, putting a handful of boats to ferrying grain and meat to the plant then food to a port servicing a town in between can pay off over time. Moverover if you're fosussing your rail operations away from the river and don't have easy rail access to (say) a farm and a food processing plant, it's a way to get that particular product into your towns and grow them, which ends up benefitting your railways as well as they'll have a larger population base to serve.

[Trenomarcus]

Boats works good, low running costs and carry way more than any other mean. They are slow indeed, but the big bay compensate for it. The only thing that atm would improve them would be the ability to select 2 or more types of cargos to load... the automatic / single type behaviour currently there is not enough.

[akuarmoton]

Bit off-topic but someone talked about truck profits =). Just reached year 2020 with my truck only playthrough, approx 100 lines, 1400 trucks making 175M per year with all lines having upgrades at 25%. Also I didn't use bus stop waypoints to go round cities until 2000+ something. Could have made way over 200M I guess. (easy difficulty though)

[AdvancedFollower]

Originally posted by simtropbuggi:

IMHO, boats are pretty useless. Unfortunately. They are _dead_ slow and as such your industry's tend to suffer. Unless, of course you have like 20 of them. But then, with that expense, why not just use rail? I can build a pretty sizeable rail bridge for the cost of a couple boats.

Yeah, I just didn't manage to keep industry alive with just boats because they're so slow. The industry doesn't realize the carrying capacity of boats, because they prefer low capacity and high frequency. So most of the boats run near-empty while the industry complains that I need to "Ship more of X".

They also tend to bunch up because they are so slow at docking. If you try to upgrade the cargo harbor, then the river might be too narrow so the harbor blocks off the entire line.

I think boats are the biggest disappointment of this game. They should be able to form the backbone of long-distance cargo transport, but it just doesn't work.

[Ser_Bunnylot]

I think boats work pretty well. You just need to work around their limitations. They do transport alot but to get a good line going you're going to be running them mostly empty for quite a long time. When production ramps up and you have enough boats you'll be supplying the line with materials just as well as a single rail line. It's also cheaper to setup than a comparable rail line.

I had a construction material factory producing 5000+ construction materials and it was supplied only from one quarry by ship.

But I find the best use for them in transfer/hub stations.

Have a rail line with high frequency delivering to a hub port that's then in turn connected to a port in city with demand. For some reason if the rail line to the hub has a high frequency the factory sees that as OK and production goes up - even though the city gets goods with low frequency. (I've supplied loads of 250 food to cities with a demand of under 200, but the boat moves so slowly that the city gets fed only every two years - factory keeps producing though, weird)

If you have one city hub with a few resources like fuel, tools and food, and another city hub with the others like machines, goods and construction materials, the route will be extremely profitable if they transfer full loads between hubs.

Feels a bit gamey though - cause it's almost like cheating the demand/frequency system.

[Ser_Bunnylot]

Originally posted by JimmiG:

Originally posted by simtropbuggi:

IMHO, boats are pretty useless. Unfortunately. They are _dead_ slow and as such your industry's tend to suffer. Unless, of course you have like 20 of them. But then, with that expense, why not just use rail? I can build a pretty sizeable rail bridge for the cost of a couple boats.

Yeah, I just didn't manage to keep industry alive with just boats because they're so slow. The industry doesn't realize the carrying capacity of boats, because they prefer low capacity and high frequency. So most of the boats run near-empty while the industry complains that I need to "Ship more of X".

They also tend to bunch up because they are so slow at docking. If you try to upgrade the cargo harbor, then the river might be too narrow so the harbor blocks off the entire line.

I think boats are the biggest disappointment of this game. They should be able to form the backbone of long-distance cargo transport, but it just doesn't work.

Boats can have high frequency too. You just need alot of boats :P Doesn't really make sense to use them for supply unless you need to move thousands of items tho.

[ScruffyBamboo]

I like to try to use all the different types of transport I can. Because they're there, and it's a game.

Are ships maybe a bit less efficient than trains? Probably. But they look cool, and that makes me happy. I'm easily entertained, obviously lol...

Having said that, I've never lost money on a boat line yet. They don't make millions like trains do, but they're never in the red either. Every little bit helps :)