Expansion of private industries

[rff1]

Does anybody know how this is controlled, and even better how to improve it ?

Private resources will usually expand when you start to draw heavily from them, but the best you can get from a private factory is 100% of its output. Nor wiil it accept incoming supplies once its stock is full, which may mean having a loaded train waiting to unload. And of course factory level cannot exceed the city level. But what actually happens is that there is a level 1 factory in a level 3 or more city; the factory is running at a steady 100%, and the dratted thing still does not expand. Sure, you can buy it and expand, but that costs money and if you knew it wasn't going to expand you should have bought it before it started producing and was at its cheapest: naturally, you did not know.

[Dray Prescot]

That is a particular problem in the Germany Scenario. Buying/Building Industries and cheaper upgrades of them is why I like playing as the Industrialist. Unfortunately, when buying a private Industry (or Resource Site), the price is very dependent on how busy it has been recently. Even for the Industrialist, building it yourself is still cheaper than buying it. It is even worse for the NON industrialist, when you have to go through an auction that the AI Players can/will (depending on the Map/Scenario conditions, etc) often use to drive up it's price.

I agree that it is hard to get private Industries to grow, and it is even harder to figure out what will trigger their growth.

If you are not trying to achieve Gold Ticks for 50% times, then building and improving them yourself, becomes a lot more reasonable, particularly for the Industrialist.

Another reason that I often build them myself on newly available lots is that the private investors will often build a different Industry than you want there.

If you want to grow your income, either expand your existing tracks/trains/Stations, add more resources and Cities and build the tracks/Stations to connect them, or start buying and upgrading Resources and buying/building/upgrading Industries. When it is difficult to expand geographicly (like in the Germany Patchwork Scenario) then the last option becomes more attractive. It is cheaper to buy them (Resource Sites and private Industries) before they get busy.

Once the Industry (or Resource Site) starts getting to close to full demand/production, I estimate that you can get close to, but less than, 1% of the build/buy price (depending on your Leader, technologies, and hired employees, and auction affects on price) as your weekly/monthly profit, i.e. 100 to 150 (or more) weeks/months (depending on timescale 20 vs 100 years). What reduces the payoff time is the additional haulage fees that the Industry brings in, as well as the larger Population in Cities which also brings in more revenue. Initial or starting industry levels do not produce much in the way of exportable goods for other Cities. If you want to use Industries to grow other Cities beside the home City, you will need to improve them, and even then, the production (from one upgrade) will get mostly consumed internally as the City grows larger to the 60k to 90k range. It can take 2 upgrades to get a reasonable amount of exportable goods, which is pretty expensive (and requires the City to be 60k in size) (3 upgrades require 90k City size, according to other players).

Sometimes the best way to get exportable goods is to build the Industry in a City that does not demand them for itself, and stays fairly small. But there are NOT a lot of cities available to do this in, and they have a tendency to grow to the point where they demand those goods.

So a lot depends on the task list you are trying to fulfill.

Looking at the investment return rates/times for various options, it is obvious that the Game Masters try to keep them in the same range.

Also think about other games, particularly Kalypso games, to get reliable and greater profits you need to control (own) more or all of the steps in the production, hauling, and marketing process. This is true even for RE.

added: One difference between RE and other Kalypso games is that in the other games you OWN what you are buying/building/transporting/selling and the PRICES can change depending on local supply and demand. These price changes can be substantial. RE does not see those price swings since you do not own the goods, possibly they affect the profitability of the local Industries.

[chaney]

While the AI does build completely inexplicable factories that are distant from both their infeed stock and customers, I really have not found Privately Owned Industries to be *that* bad in upgrade speed IF they are in practical locations. Yes, it takes longer than I want, but if you keep feeding them input material and taking away all the production, they do level up in most cases. That all fits nicely with player profit and City growth, just not as fast as we would like.

Hmm, maybe it's time for some testing to see how quickly or consistently things level up ... it is frustratingly slow, I admit, but I never thought of it as game breaking, more of a problem to manage by getting ahead of the problem to push the growth.

Originally posted by Dray Prescot:

Looking at the investment return rates/times for various options, it is obvious that the Game Masters try to keep them in the same range.

It is not obvious to me that they have succeeded. Good new routes >> buying an Industry (Factory or Rural) in terms of making money and rate of return. There are many examples of very low value opportunities in the game. A typical 20 year scenario can be completed in 3-5 years, and looking at some technologies they are terrible. The "get 10% more research" tech for example, at 200 cost IIRC, will take base tech production boosted by 4 a total of 50 months just to break even before it yields *any* net value, even ignoring opportunity cost. I'm long done by then. 20% off train personnel salaries? Shrug. 8% more freight pay? Awesome. Expanding (when not limited) is very close to true exponential growth with a company value doubling time significantly under 1 year. (About half a year is common.) Buying an industry has a value doubling time of a couple years, and upgrading is even worse.

[Thineboot]

Originally posted by chaney:

[...] While the AI does build completely inexplicable factories that are distant from both their infeed stock and customers, [...]

Originally posted by Dray Prescot:

[...] Another reason that I often build them myself on newly available lots is that the private investors will often build a different Industry than you want there. [...]

I've just finished The automobile (again) after loosing all my ratings during my sabbatical from RE. And thanks to chaneys endless missionary work I did it without any signalling control and it worked perfectly. So thanks, chaney, for not letting it go :)
The automobile is a perfect example for how the private sector is working. You can steer them to build industries where you want them to be build just by managing city growth accordingly. I've noticed it previously and used it this time deliberately to my advantage. Whether that's true for each and every scenario or mode I don't know. And there seems to be a small random factor still active. But as long as there is a demand for a good and no factory available on the map free spots for industries will be used by the private sector. And they don't care how far away the demand is or where to find the necessary raw materials. It's a big flaw of the game you can utilize to your advantage.

[Dray Prescot]

That implies that missing demands and available raw resources in locations not even under your control are important factors in determining what choices private investors make when building on a new lot, and when to improve an industry or resource.

That can be difficult to figure out when the AI Companies are playing in entirely different Regions like in the Germany Patchwork Scenario. You would need to keep track of things outside of your normal window into the game, and would have to be playing very slowly and with frequent stops to keep track of what is happening in those regions.

[chaney]

The suggested heuristic that available slots will be filled with a Factory that produces something that is in demand somewhere on the map and for which there is not already an existing Factory matches generally well with my experience. That there seems to be no weighting in selecting which type of Factory from the set of qualifying options is possibly the largest deficiency in the game that still has hope of being fixed. (Devs, if you would consider adding weighting functions to improve the behavior, just hint that such an improvement would be considered and we can discuss a few specs that would be trivial to implement :) (Ok, can't shut up ... lower tier goods should be generally preferred. Since viability and effectiveness are based on proximate demand for the finished goods and nearby supply of infeed stock, distances to those necessary locations should be used to build an objective function to evaluate the relative value of each possible factory option. Sum and average, for distance weights I like logistic functions, but linear, polynomial, or trig functions normalized to the map size can work well. Perhaps allow the player to pressure a particular choice by having the City filled with a good supply of particular infeed stock - either in the City's warehouse or in a player's connected Warehouse. ... ok enough of that tangent for now.)

I like the challenge of watching something far away and trying to work out how to use that information to improve the game result, but concede that most people probably find that an excess of tedium.

Thineboot, for the sake of everyone else's sanity, don't encourage me :) My question: did not using Signal Control merely work out, or did you feel it worked better than using Signal Control? (For those not familiar with my crusade, Signal Control is fine for medium traffic and reduces player workload in balancing traffic, but I don't like it in general because it is expensive and actually reduced Station efficiency when traffic is higher.)

[Thineboot]

Whoever is reading this has to make their own decision whether or not they're sane ;)

When using SC I split the whole network into p&m and food with goods in warehouses.

Without SC I could use one station and when necessary I've added a second one. Planing ahead included. In most stations the middle pair were used for city-to-city automatic trains and many still became express trains. Outside tracks were used for food and good deliveries, rural-to-city max 8 only. Few warehouses were necessary, less than usual.
Overall it cost less money. City-to-city spread out better than with SC. The urge to push everything into shiny warehouses was gone and still it felt smother.

Side note: while double track is a must for city-to-city you can save many rails knowing the demand. Either use single rails or just a few sidings. Especially helpful in early game when money is sparse.

I thought about using those walls they built in China, sorry, those maintenance stations but the Indians were quiet and so I voted against them unanimously.

[Dray Prescot]

I am moving several messages by me (relating to my new Germany game) from this thread to a new thread, since they are a little off the main topic of this message thread. This will lead to less confusion by new readers.

[chaney]

Originally posted by Thineboot:

Whoever is reading this has to make their own decision whether or not they're sane ;)

I don't think it is rational to expect people to accurately assess whether or not they are sane ... but we can choose to make rational, scientific, evidence based decisions - not that we will do it well :)

Thineboot, that is a beautiful description of your experience and mine!

Dray, that difficulty multiplier will be nice to have for sure, it compensates for a lot of green and those improved AI companies may really help with City growth. That approach sounds like a restricted conduct run to me, so I'll be happy to learn if it works out to give me some motivation to try the approach some time when I'm feeling brave.

[rff1]

Summary thus far :-

1) Keep a private factory well supplied with what it needs, consume or export its produce, and it should grow. But all too often it does not, or does so extremely slowly, and nobody seems to know why.

2) Most private factories are placed in totally unsuitable locations. That, we all knew.

3) Signal control has nothing to do with factory growth, other than its effect on traffic flow.

But there must surely be some factor, call it F, controlling the growth of private factories. If supply is insufficient, output stock is full,or factory level = city level, then F=0 , no expansion. Otherwise F>0, expansion is possible, and here I think the RNG plants its malicious and evil hoof to ensure that F>X occurs only rarely and then expansion is made. Moreover, I think that the effect of the RNG is weighted, somehow, affecting X so that some factories are slightly more likely to grow than others. What affects that likelihood? Factory type and/or level, city size, time of running at 100%, just luck ? How often is the value of F checked ?

[chaney]

Pure speculation, but based on how the other systems in the game work, it is likely to be something fairly simple, although maybe not clear and obvious. Maybe they grow after so much of their good has been taken away, or after so much time running at capacity - akin to Express Status growing toward gold on the meter. Or it could be some chance given a random try each month??? Not enough data to be confident at this point.

[Thineboot]

Lets assume expansion isn't random and lets further assume that expansion costs money and lets finally assume that intelligent design exists, not in a religious way, but economically speaking. In that case an industry, rural or city, has to make money. Note that some industries are auctioned because they are just not making money. Any industry has to cover its cost and only a small amount of the money we as a company receive from selling our products are considered profit. Running an industry costs money whether its producing or not. During these times said profit shrinks. Expanding an industry is a big investment. To justify such an investment the industry has to have enough savings to pay for it. We don't see these numbers but I want to believe that Gaming Minds Studios isn't just a shallow wording.

If the above has any meaning its up to us to make these industries profitable by hauling their products throughout the county. It doesn't explain every not expanding industry but at least this vision would make sense.


@rff1: I never said that signal control has anything to do with this. It's an open secret that chaney is advocating against SC and therefore I thanked him in the first place. He than asked me specifically to share my experience which I did. I'm sorry that this OT post offended you.

[Dray Prescot]

added: I moved part of this message to the other thread.

Your are also saying that playing on harder difficulty levels, which affects how much starting money and track building costs of the AI Companies as well as how aggressively they play and expand, could/will have significant affects on the behavior of the Private Investors in the game, i.e. what new Industries they put on new vacant Lots and what/when privately owned Resources and Industries get improved.

It explains why certain Resources and Industries either get frequently improved or neglected by the private invesstors in your territory , as well as what choices they frequently make (or do not make) for initial Industries on new Lots.

There is a lot to consider here regarding Player choices and plans.

It is also important to consider in choosing which Leader you use, as well as which Leaders you choose to play against (in the game setup where you can decide to restart the setup to get different Leaders to play against). I choose to play against Beate and Gustav in my current game. For many games (before recently) I had been choosing to NOT play against Beate, and those games may have been the same games where I did not get many "Promoters". There are other Leaders that I prefer to either play against or NOT play against when starting a new game. I usually try to play against Gustav so I can steal Techs from him. While I hardly ever play against the trickster or the mob leader.

It would be interesting if you could play against the same Leader type as your own (I think that this normally can NOT happen).

Possibly (probably) the choice of Leaders for the AI Companies as well as your own Leader, in the game can affect the probabilities of which types of employees apply for jobs at your Company (I am thinking about Spies and Promoters in particular, whose availability seems to vary from game to game). It would be interesting, but very time consuming (because of the many test cases needed), to try to keep track of this in your games.

The problem is that other things like tech choices (by you and/or the AIs) could also affect types of employee applications. We know that certain techs have an explicit affect on employees stated in the tech description of what it does, perhaps other techs can affect the employees and applications by potential employees in hidden (not stated) ways. Possible affects by AI choices will be hard to disentangle because you do not know what many of their choices were, or when they were made, in many cases (except in Newspaper accounts).

The best place to look would be in the game files that can be changed by various Scenarios and Game conditions as well as Tech properties, and things that can be changed by Moders when creating a Mod. It might give us some hints.

[Thineboot]

You just have to split one parallel track to make this work.

[Totemych]

Originally posted by rff1:

Does anybody know how this is controlled, and even better how to improve it ?

Private resources will usually expand when you start to draw heavily from them, but the best you can get from a private factory is 100% of its output. Nor wiil it accept incoming supplies once its stock is full, which may mean having a loaded train waiting to unload. And of course factory level cannot exceed the city level. But what actually happens is that there is a level 1 factory in a level 3 or more city; the factory is running at a steady 100%, and the dratted thing still does not expand. Sure, you can buy it and expand, but that costs money and if you knew it wasn't going to expand you should have bought it before it started producing and was at its cheapest: naturally, you did not know.

1) The city size is the most important factor in order to expand industry in the city
2) Industry move goods to eternal city warehouse and industry warehouse. it seems like 50/50 if conditions are met. but with industry size 1 you are very rare get goods for export if city size is 3 (maybe 2) or above.
3) Supply industry with goods until you fill eternal city warehouse then in month or two industry wil able to expand if it lucrative and again city size ... it means that you should transfer produced goods

The same :)

[Dray Prescot]

So size 2 private Industries are possible if the City population is over 40k, correct?
When are the size 3 (2 upgrades) private Industries possible? 60K ? as well as size 4 ?

Are the limits the same for controlled Industries? I did not seem to be able to improve an Industry in a small City (probably less than 40k). Is there a minimum size population before I can improve my own (Player owned) Industry to additional upgrade levels?