Put Cloth and Clothing in the same city?

[Dray Prescot]

I am uncertain about whether you will make more income by building two Industries such as Cloth and Clothing in two different Cities and then hauling Cloth from one City to the second City

versus putting the Cloth and Clothing producing industries in the same city so you do not have to haul the Cloth.

My natural inclination is to put them in the same City, like I would in Patrician/Port Royale/Rise of Venice, but I am not sure that this is a good idea in RE. I suspect that I may lose the freight income and not get any increased profits at the 2nd industry (Clothing) to make up for being in the same city, and not having to haul the Cloth.

This question applies to other production chains as well.

The only advantage may be in reducing traffic congestion for when my cities start getting big enough to be very busy hauling in goods to them. (?)

[Thineboot]

If you would have only A city you care why bother hauling cloth from A to B and clothing from B to A when there is no need to haul anything to B...
Traffic for hauling cloth & clothing from A to B: 0%
Traffic for hauling cloth & clothing from B to A: 0%
Income from freight: x%

What if A and B need or will be needing cloth and clothing:
Traffic for hauling cloth & clothing from A to B: 200%
Traffic for hauling cloth & clothing from B to A: 0%
Income from freight: 100%

What if B produces clothing:
Traffic for hauling cloth from A to B: 100%
Traffic for hauling clothing from B to A: 100%
Income from freight: 100%

On the first glance it's obvious, produce in both cities.

When you add other production chains (that use more than one industry) within the same city cluster this will change as you will shuffle goods between the cities anyway.


A short test reveals that you gain 0 having no meat industry as expected. Buy one, for instance in a free game settled in Toledo, and the bucks are dripping in slowly. You may run a real test and share the results with us revealing the exact x% I mentioned above.


If you're going for A big city and B, C, D smaller produce the lesser goods in A and the higher goods in B, C, D. Not for financial gains but to reduce and/or speed up traffic. This may sound counter intuitive but in such a setting your traffic problem most likely outweighs your financial problem.

Otherwise I wouldn't care too much. Most likely I'd fill in the spots the AI has missed cause owning and expanding every industry is as you well know impossible til the point when money is no problem anymore at which the question becomes obsolete ;)

[chaney]

The way the question is posed, it sounds like it is asking about the situation where the player would own both Industries. In that case the player gets ZERO for hauling the freight and pays the expense of operating the train carrying Cloth one direction and Clothes the other direction. There is no advantage to splitting the production, put them in the same City.

There is the possibility that the goods needed to be hauled to the other City will work well with a train to do that and return with some other goods, but the question now becomes one of balance and proportionality.

Another issue is maintaining constant maximal production. If the two Industries are in the same City, and the more basic Industry is well supplied, the secondary Factory will likely have a steady supply of input goods. If the feedstock needs to be brought it, the supply may lag. If you can sell all the final goods, you want to maximize production for maximum profit rates.

I agree that by the time you are in this kind of position, cash will be coming in rapidly, but for those of us who want to optimize, it is an interesting question. I'd go with placing them in the same City if you will own both. If you own neither, you have no decision to make. If you are building the second and Private owns the first, you need to consider the situation based on your ability to expand.

[Thineboot]

Best point for using the same city is the steady flow between both industries. As soon as rails are involved a random breakdown can stop the flow.

[Dray Prescot]

I am thinking in particular of the situation where you own both or least one (probably the second one) of two industries: Cloth and Clothing, or Lumber and Furniture, or Steel and Tools (or Canned Goods (Coffee/Fish/etc.) ) with other examples possible.

You DO get paid the transport fees for delivering the Wool to Cloth and Cloth to Clothing (IF it is in a 2nd City). My question is do you make the same money from a greater income of the 2nd Industry (that YOU own) if you put the 2nd Industry in the same City as the First Industry (which you own (normally)). i.e. are you cheating yourself out of net (total) income by having both industries in the same city? Since you are no longer getting the delivery fee for Cloth to Clothing.

Of course you still get the delivery charges for Clothing to final consumption where ever that is.

A related question: Do you lose any potential income from the sale of the Clothing to the city where the industry is located, because you did (COULD) NOT deliver it to that City. You should NOT get paid for NO delivery, BUT INSTEAD the industry (Clothing) (that you OWN) should make a LARGER Profit because it does not have to pay for transport of its output to another city, and that larger profit should compensate for not having to pay the delivery charge.

So is it better to keep the Industry (that you OWN) in a city that is too SMALL to demand that good, in order to maximize your delivery charges for delivering that product to another (larger) City? The problem of course is that cities grow and start consuming that output anyway.

IF you do NOT own BOTH Industries, then the answer is OBVIOUS, you want the industries in separate cities to get more haulage fees. The problem comes when you mix in ownership of the Industries and how the RE game program handles industries that players OWN.

In games like the old (close to 20 years old) game "Trade Empires" where you had to sell the output of the first industry to local city market where your 2nd industry would then buy it, followed by selling (again) to local market where your Merchant would buy the goods to haul to sell to the final consumption city/market. The problem that you had to protect yourself against, was that AI Merchants could step in and buy items from the local market (at the production site(s)) (possibly at really cheap prices) and grab the profit for himself. So I would delibrately drive up the prices there, after all the money just comes out of my right pocket and then go into my left pocket. What matters is the final sale price to the consumer.

There were several problems with "Trade Empires": the biggest was that the price to buy more merchants to haul goods kept going UP "RAPIDLY" in price (so you could not hve a LOT of merchants), another problem was that there was no warehouses at sites where merchants would change from being a land trade (wagon) to a ship to back to being a wagon again, and every time you changed transport modes (wagon to ship to wagon) you had to sell the old mode (at a substantial LOSS) of transportation in order to buy the NEW mode. So every round trip for a merchant had losses every time it had to change transport modes.

The problem is like the difference between "Patrician" where you own a local Counting House (and Warehouse) facility and you could keep the goods at various stages of the production chain there versus "Grand Ages Medieval" where there were NO Counting Houses and everything goes through the local market at every step, and other AI player controlled merchants could buy at that local market and cheat you out of your profit, whenever the local prices got distorted to being too cheap. Because you were producing too much for the local market to buy (in order to sell them at other cities) and your merchant(s) doing the buying was not currently in the city.

In games like "Capitalism" (Pro, Two and Lab versions) the program is designed to handle the book keeping properly at every stage in the production chain, tranport, and retail sales. In games like RE, the game producers are making simplifications of the economic/sales model that can hurt you when you mix multiple modes like railroads and industries.

[Dray Prescot]

I think RE would work better if the Player could NOT OWN any resource sites or industries, but had ways to tell the program, i.e. the local private investors, that you would LIKE (want) to have THIS Industry in THIS city. Plus some way to tell the owners of Resource Sites and the local Industries that they need to expand their output. BUT get RID of the present system of production lot limitations on industries.

Instead the (human) Player could offer INCENTIVES (as discussed above in this discussion thread) to the private investors to build something at a particular location, instead of the present system of very limited number of production lots in each city. As well as incentives to the owners of Resource sites to expand. The RE program would calculate whether or not the local private investors would respond, and how long it would take them to respond.

The economic model they are using in RE is not really properly designed for player (including AIs) ownership of NON Transport, i.e. Railway, entities (industries and resource sites).

RE is NOT supposed to be a game Like Capitalism. RE is supposed to be about Railways (Railroads) ONLY. It is NOT a Robber Baron type of game that owns many different types of entities. ((is there any game called "Robber Baron" or something similar?)

Other Games to compare RE to would be Victoria 2 and Pride of Nations when considering what to put into and NOT put into it's game model.

[chaney]

I stand corrected, I was thinking of another game. RE runs all goods - inputs and new products through the City warehouse first. So separating the two Industries provides an opportunity to gain an extra fee, which is somehow magically absorbed by the market?!? I never looked at industry profit/cost closely.

I guess if you have bandwidth to run the extra transfer at a profit, as long as it doesn't bottleneck production that would be an extra income source on track that probably already exists, so the only cost is the locomotive. Of course congestion may make this a poor choice, but otherwise, yeah, that seems to be extra money for a small investment.

[Dray Prescot]

Does my Clothing industry (that I OWN) make any more profit by selling to the city it is in, because it does not have to pay a haulage fee? I DOUBT that happens.

added: This question applies even when the Industry is buying it's inputs because it is the first in it's production chain in that city.

I mean: do I make any more money from the Industry itself if no haulage is needed for sales to the same city the industry is in? I (no one/RR) is not being paid a haulage fee, so therefore the Industry SHOULD be making additional money on those particular goods. If the industry is private investor owned, then the private investors got paid and we never see that money. IF I own that industry, then I should be paid (as the owner) the saved haulage fee (although maybe I do not own the retail store selling the goods).

[gardlt]

This game is high volume and easy money. In general it's best to minimize volume wherever possible, especially as lower volume = larger sustainable city size with a limited amount of infrastructure. However, there is a strategic reason to purposely split production between two cities: a task to haul freight.

[Dray Prescot]

The biggest simplification used in Trade Empire and Grand Ages Medieval was the lack of a warehouse. This simplification badly distorted the economies of the game in order to"simplify" the game for a human player.

We see a similar problem in RE because Players (human and AI) do not own the goods they transport. This delibrate game design choice causes problems when the player controlled Companies start owning Resource Sites and Industries and getting income from them. The problem comes from handling the book keeping for costs and profits (im)properly (as discussed earlier in this thread). The two different models for making money are not completely consistent with each other, because of the simplifications built into each model as programmed into the program for RE.

[Thineboot]

Try this, Dray:

Originally posted by Thineboot:

A short test reveals that you gain 0 having no meat industry as expected. Buy [own] one, for instance in a free game settled in Toledo, and the bucks are dripping in slowly. You may run a real test and share the results with us revealing the exact x% I mentioned above.

The setup is as simple as possible: do not own anything except the meat industry. I've seen only increase in cash. There is a profit for converting cattle stored in the city warehouse to meat. Yo could do the same with breweries. Just run each test with a single industry only.

[rff1]

As I see it, Cloth and Clothing both in city A means no train Weavers to Tailors, and no train Tailors to A. So less trains, less congestion, and unfortunately less income. Nor is it suitable if you are tasked to deliver either Cloth or Clothing to A, in which case you must not have the relevant factory in that city.

[Dray Prescot]

Early in the game, unless you are willing to buy and tear down an existing start industry in a city, you are NOT going to have Cloth and Clothing production (Weaver and Tailor industries) in the same City. You simply do not have the cash to waste doing it. However, see below.

By the time you get to 90K population in a city and have a 3rd industrial lot available to build a Tailor on, in the same city as a Weaver, you (or the private investors) will have built a Weaver as a 2nd Industry in a different city.

Only when you are well developed and have a lot of income coming in, i.e. mid to late stages of the game, will you be able to afford buying and destroying an Industry to replace it with a different Industry.

On the other hand, most maps with early start dates (not later start dates), will normally have ONLY two different possible industries starting in small cities, i.e. less than 40k populations. And since you are probably going to have MORE than 2 Cities in a game, you are going to end up with multiple copies on the same starter Industries, such as Beer (drink) and Meat. So at some point you may/will end up replacing some of those duplicate industries, at which time you will consider things like Cloth and Clothing in the same City.

Games with later start dates may be somewhat different.

In practice, the question will probably normally come up with later in the demand list (either because of size or availablity dates), such as Lumber and Furniture, or Paper and Newspaper, or Steel and a product that uses steel.

The real problem that requires forethought and trade off decisions early in the game is growth of at least ONE City large enough to demand a new industrial product, so you can build it in one of your (other) Cities as the 2nd industry after that City grows large enough (40k population) to open up a 2nd industrial lot.

I find myself manipulating the growth of Cities past the 40k threshold to happen in a particular order, so that I (or the private investors) can/will build the right 2nd Industry in each City, and avoid the private investors building the WRONG Industry as the 2nd Industry in my various Cities. With some care and luck the private investors will build the right 2nd Industry for you and save your capital (money) for other investment needs

These decisions get made more difficult by availability dates and having access to the necessary input resources/goods.

The problem you (I) can run into is that if you are planning to tear down an Industry to replace it at some future date, IF you wait to buy it, the private investors may/will have expanded it, possibly several times, making it much more expensive to buy. On the other hand, when you could have bought it cheap you may not have had the available cash to do so.

[Thineboot]

Everything you've said is true. And I assume each one of us (five) knows this. Correct me if I'm wrong what you're saying is, that it's to much randomness, good or bad luck, and too little depending on player decision which is precious to the devs as they stated. And I agree, that randomness has a high impact on any game, a higher than any random event should have.

[Dray Prescot]

In general all of us know these things, but it helps sometimes to sit down and write things out, sometimes you will see details that you missed or left out.

Also, Hopefully, other newer players may someday see this discussion thread and find it helpful.

As well, other experienced Players may have a different perspective or a different order of priorities, and discussions like this can expand how we see RE (or lead to suggestions and/or problems to send to the GMs).

In fact, I often start a new game out to try out a different priority order to do things in, as well as different geographic paths to take on the Map.

[chaney]

A point on the too expensive to buy later industry problem: if you starve them of infeed stock or don't take their products away, they stop working, which brings the price to buy them down. This is easy to do if no AI competition is in the City and the City itself doesn't consume the good. This also works for Rural Industry: give them no demand for a while and they get cheaper.