Food Plant refuses to produce more food for specific consumer

[Dessi]

Im new to this game and my frustration level is very high already. In this case (out of many things that dont work for whatever reason) i have a city where i want to ship food (90% blue buildings covered by train station) and a Food Plant that refuses to upgrade its production level for this specific city (other cities work fine) while having large production capacity and raw materials in stock.

The plant gives me "random" signals, like "supply more wheat" when there are 300 in stock, or "ship more goods", when the consumers (different cities) already have a high saturation of food (80% to 100%). I cant figure out whats going on.

Here are some screenshots make things clear:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963156361
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963156969
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963156913
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963156856

So is the error sitting in front of the computer or is it the game doing bs?

--- Edit
This food line has been running for ~5 years (and it plunges me into ruin)

[Nails Nathan]

It took me a long time to figure this out myself when I started playing.
Your Production has slowed down, because of the log jam you have at both the train station and Tuck station. The game has calculated that under your current delivery setup, this is all you can deliver in a One Year period.
When other cities start to backup at your stations, this causes a production slow down which can effect other cities then the backed up ones.

[gordon861]

It's a shame you can't set ratios for who gets what delivered.

I often find when I have a food train that takes food from the factory to three cities it will deliver the majority to the first city and have very little left when it reaches the third city which is crying out for more food. So you end up with a surplus at city one whilst everyone else just waits for more to be delivered.

The only way around this would to run a train for each city but that causes even more problems.

[Nelso]

That city only needs 47 food per year. You should use a much smaller train, which will be faster which the factory likes. It is probably sending less food because there are closer cities. You should perhaps send that city another item like oil, and set up a passenger line using the existing track if you can.

This mechanic is frustrating even after many hours of playing. Railroad Tycoon 3 had a much more simple and intuitive (and actually very fun) industry model where you could see the price of goods at any point on the map and you earned the price difference from shipping, and factories simply produced goods when they could make a profit. If TF had such a model there would be far less frustration.

[chrisasnyder]

This game is about buiding transport lines to satisfy demand. Money is earned based on the distance traveled by a product on each leg of the transport system. Train and trucks make no money running empty. Havng a single train run from the food plant to drop off at three citys, has several problems. First the frequecny will be too low. Demanded products need to reach the building before that building demands more, which will impact the buildings way at the end.

The single delivery train spends too much time running with empty wagons. Even if you could set ratios this would still be a problem. The train is only full to the first stop. Then runs partially empty to the second stop. More empty to the final stop. Then to top it off the longest part of the trip run completly empty on the way back.

A single train to 3 cities can make line balance difficult. Lets say the middle city has it's demand increasing. To address it, you need to add more wagons to the train. Doing so also adds that empty overhead to all the extra stops.

the simple soulution is to have 1 train for each city. This way each train has teh number of wagons needed for that cities demand. As the demand increases for that city alone, adding capacity is easy.

So let's say you don't want 3 trains. There are other approaches. Build a distrubution hub for the three cities. Place a train station centrally located and have trains drop product there and truck into the cities from the hub.


Another approach is to stop the delivery train from running empty as often. To do that you setup a product that can share the wagon type as a pickup at city 3. Goods for example. Then as the food train drops off food from 1 to 2 to 3, it gets a full load of goods at 3, dropping off on the way back to 2 and 1. Now the train has products in both directions. Or make it really intersting, add a tools and machines at City 2 in addition to the Goods at city 3. Then products are picked up and dropped off at each stop. This type of line balancing is hard. You have 3 different industries with different demand, different production cycles all sharing the same delivery line.

Personally I perfer challenge of the last scenario. The cargo hub setup is fun too.

[Dessi]

First of all, thx to all the responses. I didnt not expect so many answers in such little time.

Seconds, to make things more clear: i run one (food) train per line, one line per city. I already figured out that things like Procuder1 -> Consumer1 -> Producer1 -> Consumer2 lines are doing super strange things where the train keeps part of the goods at consumer1 for consumer2 instead of unloading everything.

Originally posted by fmccurry:

...

I dont really understand you answer. I dont really have backlog at at the station to the other cities. The trains to the other cities are long, up to 96 capacity. And the saturation is pretty much capped, thats why i dont add more transport capacity to those cities.

Originally posted by Nelso:

...

This makes partially sense to me. I might have more transport capacity than needed, but in this case the town should get 100% saturation, no? (or 90% because there are like 3 buidings not connected to the station). But the saturion is between 0 and 40%, which means it doesnt use the transport capacity for some reason. The used capacity of the train is ~16 "items" (i dont know how many times a year the train arrives, but anyway the saturation is super low)

[Nelso]

Originally posted by Dessi:

But the saturion is between 0 and 40%, which means it doesnt use the transport capacity for some reason. The used capacity of the train is ~16 "items" (i dont know how many times a year the train arrives, but anyway the saturation is super low)

You are right, it SHOULD work, that's the problem many of us have with industry. It will screw up when it has to make decisions like "how many of these do I send to these 4 places". If the game were smart, it would be re-route the goods sitting at the station. fmccurry is probably right, you want to add more cars to the trains being fully filled up, even though the towns are saturated - that will clear the backlog and the industry should produce more.

My suggestion, though, is to send products to only 2-3 cities. If a late game city demands 800 food, a farm still caps at 1600 can only supply 2 of them.

[Dessi]

Ok so i ran some experiments:


First Test:
I did nothing, to checke if the production level maybe automatically develops in the next 20 ingame years.
Result:
nothing changes, the said city has ~50 food saturation at max (after the unload at the station)


Second Test:
I removed all sibling food lines to the other cities to check if they might influence the one low production line.
Result:
Production recieved a big buff, City has now 93% saturation (not all houses are connected to the station so that seems to be a correct maximum)


Third Test:
I added some carts to every food train that go to the other cities.
Result: Same result as second test. food for "Bad Hönningen" now actually works properly. Saturation on the other cities is at maximum and sadly all my trains now carry dead weight which narrows the profits.
As a side note, the food plant station now stores much more goods than before http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963482032
I thought there might be a space issue in this station but, nah. It simply decided to push more goods for the specific line for whatever reason :>


Conclusion:
Game is BSing me. Still dont know whats the exact issue is or what it means for my future play and how to avoid this. Lets say after the next 30 years the demand increased enough to pass my trains capacities, will this again cripple other lines? Do i always have to have slightly more transport capacity than demand?

I might be able to figure out whats specifically causing this with more testing. But im already facing other situations where things dont make sense. And when i spend more time debugging why things dont work, than acutally playing, this game might have a problem here.

Anyways, thank you for the help.

[chrisasnyder]

Originally posted by "Dessi:

Do i always have to have slightly more transport capacity than demand?

The short answer is yes.

The reason, demand is not static. Every month it can change. It changes when you can't make timely deliveries, it changes when you do. It changes when buildings are created and destroyed.

The balance you want is to have trains run mostly full in at least on direction. In this way the line will handle the flucutations and small growth. Eventually you will need to add more capacity.

the other thing to remember is the line frequency is important to cargo. If you are moving products over distance the time it takes for the train to travel can cause the producing factory to shut down because no more orders are being placed. they are not being placed because everything that was ordered is still in transit.

There are some simple math formulas to calculate these things, but I tend to just watch what's happening. For example. Idealy you want a food plant producing for a line and placing it on the station's platform. Watch the plant output, if it stops adding more food to the lines platform, even though it has plenty of source material to make food, then the problem is the food isn't getting delivered timely enough. Setup the line frequency a train arrives to remove food, at just about the time the factory is going to stop producing. The train stops, takes everything on the platform and is 90-100% full. I find that once a factory is up and running it takes more than one train to maintain the frequency, especially on long lines.

You do something similar for the other side of the food plant, watch the stored livestock. When the production uses the last of it's internal storage, the next livestock train should be arriving with more. If the stored count is at 0 for too long, then you will have problems. The food plant will start dropping demand and will shutdown. this will ripple to the farm, and it shuts down. Eventually your trains will arrive, but the demand has ramped down too much and demand chain will start ramping up again.

[Nelso]

Yeah you're facing the same issue most of us do with industry, especially when trying more complex networks with hubs and shared rails. My suggestion is to just use your imagination, imagine the industry managers are retarded, or imagine the trains are always full.

Jokes aside, I'd really like some kind of response from the devs, either explain exactly how to solve these issues (which are very common), or try to make it smarter. The game is extremely good overall, but the issues with industry get very annoying. I had to quit my last map after a week because the only oil well was so far away from the refinery that the well would stop producing.

[Nails Nathan]

Originally posted by chrisasnyder:

Originally posted by "Dessi:

Do i always have to have slightly more transport capacity than demand?

The short answer is yes.

The reason, demand is not static. Every month it can change. It changes when you can't make timely deliveries, it changes when you do. It changes when buildings are created and destroyed.

The balance you want is to have trains run mostly full in at least on direction. In this way the line will handle the flucutations and small growth. Eventually you will need to add more capacity.

the other thing to remember is the line frequency is important to cargo. If you are moving products over distance the time it takes for the train to travel can cause the producing factory to shut down because no more orders are being placed. they are not being placed because everything that was ordered is still in transit.

There are some simple math formulas to calculate these things, but I tend to just watch what's happening. For example. Idealy you want a food plant producing for a line and placing it on the station's platform. Watch the plant output, if it stops adding more food to the lines platform, even though it has plenty of source material to make food, then the problem is the food isn't getting delivered timely enough. Setup the line frequency a train arrives to remove food, at just about the time the factory is going to stop producing. The train stops, takes everything on the platform and is 90-100% full. I find that once a factory is up and running it takes more than one train to maintain the frequency, especially on long lines.

You do something similar for the other side of the food plant, watch the stored livestock. When the production uses the last of it's internal storage, the next livestock train should be arriving with more. If the stored count is at 0 for too long, then you will have problems. The food plant will start dropping demand and will shutdown. this will ripple to the farm, and it shuts down. Eventually your trains will arrive, but the demand has ramped down too much and demand chain will start ramping up again.

What a great explanation.
Dessi follow this example.