About resource leveling.

[RajaAgni]

I am utilizing some resources at 100%. They are all at level 1. How long does it take for them to level up to 2 and more?

[bellwoody]

Keep that resource at 100% for long time, it will level up by owner.

Or, if you have enough money, buy it and level up it manually.

[RajaAgni]

Yes but how long does it take for the owner to level the business up?

[Totemych]

Originally posted by RajaAgni:

Yes but how long does it take for the owner to level the business up?

there is magic value 60% everywhere or provide industry for 200% of required goods. and city size play its role too. you may bring a lot of resource but city will never grow to new level too

[RajaAgni]

No, I mean a grain farm or sugar place and the like. I need them to level up so they produce more. This has nothing to do with cities.

[chaney]

I'm not aware of anyone reporting/testing this. I think I've had heavy use rural industries level in a few months, but others seem to complain about no level change for perhaps a year? This is for the 20 year games.

[RajaAgni]

This is for campaign #3, toward the beginning. All the farms and such are at level 1 and they don't produce enough to grow the nearby cities. But I only ran this for some 4 months.

[mbutton15]

There's no hard science behind what I'm about to say, but the feeling I get is that if a single rural farm is supplying multiple cities then it will level up quicker than if it supplies just one city.

Maybe that's due to more trains rather than the sheer quantity of loads being picked up, I don't know. The busier a farm is the quicker it will level up. But they rarely level up as fast as you want them too !!

You could try to 'fool' the game and have many trains, but limit each to 4 carriages. Most cities early game don't need a full train load at a time. So by limiting carriage size can allow you to spread the resource over several cities.

[mbutton15]

So, the above was just a theory. I've just looked at my recent 'Chapter 3' run (Over the Mississippi) and quite surprised by what I found. I completed the tasks in 23 months - using 36 trains, 9 cities and 14 rural farms. Most of the early farms I connected finished at level 3. One cattle farm was at level 4 !! But they all had only 2 trains using them at most.

As I say, I'm really quite surprised by the farm levels compared to their usage. It's actually hard to say what caused them to reach level 3 as I really wouldn't have expected that given most only had 2 trains using them.

Sorry, I know that doesn't help.

[Dray Prescot]

If you want them to grow a lot faster, BUY them yourself and upgrade them yourself. I have noticed that as a rough rule of thumb, that most Economic entities in RE have a weekly (or monthly in 100 year games) have a rate of return on investment of 1% or LESS. This depends greatly on how much prices get bid up in auctions. Also try to choose Leaders and techs researched, for advantages in buying and building things.

The best time to buy a resource site is while it is unused, i.e. before any RR builds a Station to use it, particularly very early in a new game.

[mbutton15]

With this particular campaign I think I was able to buy-out both competitors before laying a single mile of track !!

Therefore all auctions are won at opening bid price.

[ElPrezCBF]

One thing that I wonder about is whether it's always a good idea to buy up rural businesses before they grow more expensive. The reason is that once you control them, they will never scale up production to meet demand until you upgrade them. Which means you do not know exactly when you need to upgrade them. I believe that there's a fraction stat in the rural business screen showing weekly demand out of total capacity, but even that seems to fluctuate. It seems there's no organized way to plan for this and the only thing you can do is upgrade arbitrarily every time you connect more towns to the rural business.

[chaney]

The industry needs to be upgraded when it doesn't produce enough to meet demand. When you select the industry, you'll see their stock and production rate. If stock on hand is dropping, that indicates more demand than supply. You can pretty easily guess when upgrade will be needed by watching the stock on hand, paying some attention to trains that just left or will soon load up there.

Production will operate at 100% until their local stock on hand if full, then stop. They display some kind of recent average operating capacity, and cost much much more when that is high than when it is low. Because of that variable cost (to buy the business) if you MUST buy a business and can buy it when production percentage is low, you'll save a lot of money. Buying a rural industry that isn't connected to anything (by train or invisible horse-cart) after it has sat idle for a while can be a bargain if you need to buy it. Once connected and busy producing goods, well, you might stop drawing goods for a couple of weeks to see if you can drive production down and save a buck.

I try avoiding buying industries. They are expensive, and very expensive to upgrade. Their rate of return is quite low compared with expanding and saturating your network making lots of deliveries.

Industries you don't own don't upgrade as fast a you might want most of the time, but they don't cost you anything. You have to balance the need to upgrade right now against the high cost. There are sometimes tasks that require you to produce particular goods, or deliver huge quantities. In the first case, you MUST buy the industry. In the latter, you can typically do fine without buying ... take ALL they make and they will upgrade themselves, but some patience is needed.

[RajaAgni]

Thanks to everyone for all this info,it is all very useful.

Someone mentioned about buying both competitors out at the very beginning before laying any tracks. I tried this and one of them require over $3 million and I only start with $2 million. But the other one I could buy out and liquidate and end up with only loosing $56,000 or so from the $2 million. Interesting approach.

There is no way I can afford to buy a business right now. I simply do not have nearly the money. I did create a Beer business in Grand Rapids though. Since I am a noob and only did the first 2 campaigns I am using pause to set things up from the beginning. This is a screen shot of the 3rd campaign at the very beginning. It has 2 warehouses. All connected rural businesses are operating at 100%.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997776324

[chaney]

The rural businesses shipping to those Warehouses might be temporary. If the City demand doesn't keep up with a particular good, the Warehouse will eventually fill with a glut. You don't earn any money shipping to a Warehouse like that, only when the goods get consumed.

So, apart from improving apparent demand for the rural industries, do you think you're getting good value for building the Warehouses? They are expensive compared with just directly delivering to the Cities. There is a tendency to want to operate like "the real world" where things like Distribution Centers and Spoke and Hub networks sometimes make sense. Those methods don't always work so well in the game :)

[RajaAgni]

Although I've only ran this for 3 months, every rural business has been drained AND the warehouses have been drained except for veggies. The 2 cities have used up most of this.

But this is my first setup, no warehouses.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997828046