can you share a truck's auto pilot route to another truck?

[SuperbDave]

^

[lpnlizard27]

No.

Each vehicle needs its own path set.

You can overlap routes easy enough but trucks have no collision avoidance. they will right themselves after they hit each other but will not actively avoid each other.

[SuperbDave]

Originally posted by lpnlizard27:

No.

Each vehicle needs its own path set.

You can overlap routes easy enough but trucks have no collision avoidance. they will right themselves after they hit each other but will not actively avoid each other.

so i have to manually drive each truck? grrr
thanks tho

[Tenebris]

Why would you ever need more than a single truck on a route anyways?

That would mean that you're consuming more than you're producing from wherever your truck is picking up from. Because all trucks really do is just cut out a bunch of belts, with your truck stations acting as a buffer. Fill up your receiving truck station a bit first before you start producing, and everything will work out fine, so long as you're not consuming more than you're producing.

[Grandaddypurple]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

Why would you ever need more than a single truck on a route anyways?

That would mean that you're consuming more than you're producing from wherever your truck is picking up from. Because all trucks really do is just cut out a bunch of belts, with your truck stations acting as a buffer. Fill up your receiving truck station a bit first before you start producing, and everything will work out fine, so long as you're not consuming more than you're producing.

You don't even have to fill up your truck station first actually
And adding another truck, like adding another train, would fix routes where roundtrip times are too high to meet high throughput
E.g a tractor being able to transport 2500 iron ore at a time must have a roudtrip time of roughly 3min and 13 seconds for the loading station not to back up if you're filling it at 780items/min
If your roundtrip time is 4 minutes, your throughput drops to 2500/4 = 625items/min. Adding another tractor would fix that by dividing roundtrip time by two, but right now you can't because it's humanely impossible to copy a vehicle route to the millisecond, so one will eventually catch up with the other until collision occurs (which I know is a non-issue when the offending vehicles are out of rendering range).
Anyway being able to share truck routes would be nice, along with assigning truck stations to specific vehicles to avoid unwanted loading/unloading

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Grandaddypurple:

Originally posted by Tenebris:

Why would you ever need more than a single truck on a route anyways?

That would mean that you're consuming more than you're producing from wherever your truck is picking up from. Because all trucks really do is just cut out a bunch of belts, with your truck stations acting as a buffer. Fill up your receiving truck station a bit first before you start producing, and everything will work out fine, so long as you're not consuming more than you're producing.

You don't even have to fill up your truck station first actually
And adding another truck, like adding another train, would fix routes where roundtrip times are too high to meet high throughout
E.g a tractor being able to transport 2500 iron ore at a time must have a roudtrip time of roughly 3min and 13 seconds for the loading station not to back up if you're filling it at 780items/min
If your roundtrip time is 4 minutes, your throuput drops to 2500/4 = 625items/min. Adding another tractor would fix that by dividing roundtrip time by two, but right now you can't because it's humanely impossible to copy a vehicle route to the millisecond, so one will eventually catch up with the other until collision occurs (which I know is a non-issue when the offending vehicles are out of rendering range).
Anyway being able to share truck routes would be nice, along with assigning truck stations to specific vehicles to avoid unwanted loading/unloading

This hits the nail on the head.

It's more about long truck routes than it is about sheer volume to be transported; and there's also the matter of that point in the game where trains (or even proper trucks) aren't yet available and the only option is to use tractors or belts.

In fact, I'm right at that point now in my current save; and seriously tossing up just grinding out trains largely by hand rather than dealing with a single tractor route to connect my main factory (default grasslands, around that coal deposit + single-source water pond a bit to the NW of the spawn) to my planned oil pit expansion. There is actually a very nice and pretty direct route for a truck/tractor to get through and the it's not like it's a very long distance; but the trip time between stations is going to be at least 4 minutes (i.e. 8 mins round trip) so that means that the pick-up truck depot will spend a little more than half its time with a full inventory (and yes I plan to be producing enough to fill it in that time.) The only other way to prevent that, which is a kind of "just dumb enough to be brilliant" solution, is to set up a "relay" system where one truck grabs products from the oil pit and takes them halfway, unloads at a station there, and that station transfers them to another station which loads them onto another truck to take them the rest of the way. The main hiccup there, though, is that the halfway point is on a narrow "bridge"/shelf of rock that hangs out over the void, so I'd have to build a large platform around/under the hand-off stations to provide turning circles for the trucks hahah! At that point I might as well just build a train or conveyor system; the lead-time and transit load (i.e. the number of items being carried on the belt) will be about the same.

Being able to copy/paste truck routes is a niche feature but a huge QoL improvement for those niche scenarios. And it's not like it's a "win button" to solve all truck transport forever -- you now have to make sure that your truck route can actually handle trucks going in both directions! In the example I have, it would mean needing to make sure that the trucks actually can pass each other on that narrow rock bridge, and needing to basically set up a "road" with lanes for each direction (probably even having to build out that bridge with foundations in some sections); so it's still a trade-off with trains. The difference is that with trains I can set-and-forget using stations and I only have to build 1 line, and don't have to manually drive each train along the route to set it up.

I'm pretty sure that trains > trucks in most scenarios tbh, but it would be nice to have the "less efficient but easier + cheaper short-term" option for when we want it. For a supposedly automated transport system, trucks are very fiddly to set up for anything much longer than what I'm already making do for with belts hahah!

[HuMaNgUtAn]

I agree it would be a nice feature to have - the way things are right now I wouldn't ever have 2 trucks on the same route as recording the route twice will always have inaccuracies, the trucks will fall out of sync and probably start colliding eventually. If you could copy/paste the route it would be easy to set up multiple trucks and keep them in sync.

[Tenebris]

The only reason you would EVER need more than a single vehicle, is if you SOMEHOW are able to consume over 24 stacks (48 stacks if using the actual big trucks) of whatever material you are transporting in the time it takes for a round trip to happen, but that would take a ludicrous amount of production to do with most materials

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

The only reason you would EVER need more than a single vehicle, is if you SOMEHOW are able to consume over 24 stacks (48 stacks if using the actual big trucks) of whatever material you are transporting in the time it takes for a round trip to happen, but that would take a ludicrous amount of production to do with most materials

Unless it's a long round trip.

As Granddaddypurple pointed out, it's easy to get the throughput of any given transport route; simply divide the capacity of the vehicle by the number of minutes in the round trip. Now, how long does it take to drive a truck from your factory to a mid-tier resource node like quartz or caterium or oil? Or what if you wanted to tap a bunch of starter nodes and collect them all up to a central processing location -- how long to hit every node on that route? And yes, you could say "but just use separate routes for each node!", but then you run into a new problem -- either you have a ton of truck stations burning power and have to do some complicated fuel inventory management to supply all those stations; or you have a single drop-off point and risk your trucks constantly colliding if two come in to drop off too close together.

Ultimately, there are cases where multiple trucks on one route will make sense; mostly on long routes but also on any "multiple pickups along a route since you're already going that way" type of scenarios. Since throughput sharply drops off with the time that the round trip takes, the current implementation means that trucks' ranges are effectively limited by their inventory size -- they have to carry enough to keep the factory fed during the next loop, and since their inventory is a set size, that means the travel time (and thus range) is all linked to the same restriction.

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

Originally posted by Tenebris:

The only reason you would EVER need more than a single vehicle, is if you SOMEHOW are able to consume over 24 stacks (48 stacks if using the actual big trucks) of whatever material you are transporting in the time it takes for a round trip to happen, but that would take a ludicrous amount of production to do with most materials

Unless it's a long round trip.

As Granddaddypurple pointed out, it's easy to get the throughput of any given transport route; simply divide the capacity of the vehicle by the number of minutes in the round trip. Now, how long does it take to drive a truck from your factory to a mid-tier resource node like quartz or caterium or oil? Or what if you wanted to tap a bunch of starter nodes and collect them all up to a central processing location -- how long to hit every node on that route? And yes, you could say "but just use separate routes for each node!", but then you run into a new problem -- either you have a ton of truck stations burning power and have to do some complicated fuel inventory management to supply all those stations; or you have a single drop-off point and risk your trucks constantly colliding if two come in to drop off too close together.

Ultimately, there are cases where multiple trucks on one route will make sense; mostly on long routes but also on any "multiple pickups along a route since you're already going that way" type of scenarios. Since throughput sharply drops off with the time that the round trip takes, the current implementation means that trucks' ranges are effectively limited by their inventory size -- they have to carry enough to keep the factory fed during the next loop, and since their inventory is a set size, that means the travel time (and thus range) is all linked to the same restriction.

If you're going literally across the map, then you should just use trains. Trucks and the like are a medium distance transport solution. The furthest I've ever had one go before was up to the mountains to get quarts and deliver it to the grassy start, and even then it only took a couple minutes because it was an Explorer

[WootHoop]

Just use trains.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

Originally posted by YetiChow:

Unless it's a long round trip.

As Granddaddypurple pointed out, it's easy to get the throughput of any given transport route; simply divide the capacity of the vehicle by the number of minutes in the round trip. Now, how long does it take to drive a truck from your factory to a mid-tier resource node like quartz or caterium or oil? Or what if you wanted to tap a bunch of starter nodes and collect them all up to a central processing location -- how long to hit every node on that route? And yes, you could say "but just use separate routes for each node!", but then you run into a new problem -- either you have a ton of truck stations burning power and have to do some complicated fuel inventory management to supply all those stations; or you have a single drop-off point and risk your trucks constantly colliding if two come in to drop off too close together.

Ultimately, there are cases where multiple trucks on one route will make sense; mostly on long routes but also on any "multiple pickups along a route since you're already going that way" type of scenarios. Since throughput sharply drops off with the time that the round trip takes, the current implementation means that trucks' ranges are effectively limited by their inventory size -- they have to carry enough to keep the factory fed during the next loop, and since their inventory is a set size, that means the travel time (and thus range) is all linked to the same restriction.

If you're going literally across the map, then you should just use trains. Trucks and the like are a medium distance transport solution. The furthest I've ever had one go before was up to the mountains to get quarts and deliver it to the grassy start, and even then it only took a couple minutes because it was an Explorer

So you're just going to skip over the part about early-game (pre-trains) uses? Or the whole paragraph where I acknowledged that trains probably work better than trucks for anything a truck does currently, but that trucks could work a lot better with this tweak? Or the part about how one of the most useful scenarios for truck "platoons"/followers is when the tractor has only just been unlocked?

"Just use trains" doesn't help me much in my current world where I'm working to unlock trains and want to automate deliveries of oil products to help do it -- that's kind of the whole point, trucks just don't work very well as a bridge between belts and trains because they're missing this functionality that would allow them to actually surpass belts both in terms of sheer throughput and in terms of convenience. As it is, belts are competitive with trucks for any distance up to where you'd just go straight to a train anyway; and the fact that they don't need power/fuel AND they create a natural buffer of storage (useful if the thing you want to transport is, say, fuel for a generator -- even if your network goes offline, once you throw the switch you know you'll have fuel coming in straight away so you don't have to go power your coal miner or fuel packager with biomass in order to get things started up again) means that they're just better for a lot of applications. Trucks have all the fragility of trains and belts, with none of the up-sides; the only thing they have going for them is that you don't necessarily need to lay down a track for them (although you often will want to build a road just to smooth out the journey), and that is immediately undercut by the fact that once you've invested that effort to build a road you can only use it for one truck.

[Grandaddypurple]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

If you're going literally across the map, then you should just use trains. Trucks and the like are a medium distance transport solution. The furthest I've ever had one go before was up to the mountains to get quarts and deliver it to the grassy start, and even then it only took a couple minutes because it was an Explorer

As YetiChow said there's a window where you need to scale up your logistics and have little to no access to trains. More specifically, depending on how you play, you don't have the materials to build trains when you have to complete Assembly Phase 3 (which is quite the production lines).
But even when you have access to trains. I'm all about solving logistics problem and trust me I enjoy doing that. But it's also a sandbox game. If I occasionally want to use vehicles over trains just because I think they look cool, they take less space and they bring so much life to a factory, I should be able to. Vehicles make for a very good logistics solution even late game. Distance shouldn't be a limitation if you solve the fuel issue. And the remedy to that would be to be able to assign vehicles to existing routes.
Now I can't disagree with what you said earlier, the application cases aren't that common and I don't think it's a priority for the devs to add that feature. But it would be SO nice

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by Grandaddypurple:

Originally posted by Tenebris:

If you're going literally across the map, then you should just use trains. Trucks and the like are a medium distance transport solution. The furthest I've ever had one go before was up to the mountains to get quarts and deliver it to the grassy start, and even then it only took a couple minutes because it was an Explorer

As YetiChow said there's a window where you need to scale up your logistics and have little to no access to trains. More specifically, depending on how you play, you don't have the materials to build trains when you have to complete Assembly Phase 3 (which is quite the production lines).
But even when you have access to trains. I'm all about solving logistics problem and trust me I enjoy doing that. But it's also a sandbox game. If I occasionally want to use vehicles over trains just because I think they look cool, they take less space and they bring so much life to a factory, I should be able to. Vehicles make for a very good logistics solution even late game. Distance shouldn't be a limitation if you solve the fuel issue. And the remedy to that would be to be able to assign vehicles to existing routes.
Now I can't disagree with what you said earlier, the application cases aren't that common and I don't think it's a priority for the devs to add that feature. But it would be SO nice

You couldn't have possibly exhausted every local resource before you unlock trains.

All I'm saying is that there's no reason for you to make truck routes that go across the entire map when resources most certainly exist closer.

Say you're transporting, for instance, coal. You would have to be using over 2400 (max coal a tractor can transport, this goes up to 4800 with a truck) coal/round trip. And because Belts are capped to.... Let's go with Tier 3/4 belts, 270 or 480/minutes, you can only possibly use that much. So with the mk 4 belts, you would have exactly 5 minutes (2400/480) for a round trip to happen (or 10 with a truck). You can get a very long distance and back in that time. I am simply not understanding the problem. Unless your route literally goes from the Grassy Planes to the Dune Desert, or a similar distance. This timeframe is even longer (close to 9/18 minutes) with mk 3 belts.

On top of all of this, by the time you unlock mk 4 belts, trains are right around the corner, literally in the same tier.

[Grandaddypurple]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

You couldn't have possibly exhausted every local resource before you unlock trains.

All I'm saying is that there's no reason for you to make truck routes that go across the entire map when resources most certainly exist closer.

Say you're transporting, for instance, coal. You would have to be using over 2400 (max coal a tractor can transport, this goes up to 4800 with a truck) coal/round trip. And because Belts are capped to.... Let's go with Tier 3/4 belts, 270 or 480/minutes, you can only possibly use that much. So with the mk 4 belts, you would have exactly 5 minutes (2400/480) for a round trip to happen (or 10 with a truck). You can get a very long distance and back in that time. I am simply not understanding the problem. Unless your route literally goes from the Grassy Planes to the Dune Desert, or a similar distance. This timeframe is even longer (close to 9/18 minutes) with mk 3 belts.

On top of all of this, by the time you unlock mk 4 belts, trains are right around the corner, literally in the same tier.

Point taken about unlocking mk5 belts however you're exaggerating about the crossing the whole map thing
Once again this is a sandbox game, if I start on the grassy field and for some reason decide to use the closest coal nodes for power and want to use the Crater Lake's node for steel production, the logistics solution hauling that steel back to the grassy field is vehicles (besides just belting your way back of course). And the roundtrip time for that is more than 5 minutes. And trucks are unlocked later
Sure this is a sandbox game so there will always be workarounds amd that's why this suggestion would fall in the QoL. But there is no denying the automation of wheeled vehicles need some love

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by Grandaddypurple:

Point taken about unlocking mk5 belts however you're exaggerating about the crossing the whole map thing
Once again this is a sandbox game, if I start on the grassy field and for some reason decide to use the closest coal nodes for power and want to use the Crater Lake's node for steel production, the logistics solution hauling that steel back to the grassy field is vehicles (besides just belting your way back of course). And the roundtrip time for that is more than 5 minutes. And trucks are unlocked later
Sure this is a sandbox game so there will always be workarounds amd that's why this suggestion would fall in the QoL. But there is no denying the automation of wheeled vehicles need some love

I am not arguing that at all, I am a vehement supporter of wheeled vehicles, they 100% need buffs/tweaks so that they aren't just systematically worse than just using belts or trains.

But going back to your point of coal allocation, if you are a newbie at the game, don't know map locations ad the like, and use the close coal nodes by grassy for power instead of steel, then at that point, you should just take the path of least resistance and retool your setup.

That's what I'd do, that's what I DID do in my first playthrough, actually.

Sure, it's a bit of a pain to reallocate things like that, but it'd be MORE of a pain to have to truck that coal around the cliff by the lake (ESPECIALLY if you were using Tractors, which have as much uphill torque as my grandma)