Supply and Demand

[City Builder]

It's probably just me, but... I'm having a total disconnect on the numbers in the game.


How many vegetables or fish do I need to send to a farmers market to fully stock it and how many trucks would accomplish that, and then how many water trucks from the wholesaler do I need to send to the berry plantation to fully supply it with water but not overload it with water, how many forester buildings do I need to supply the lumberyard with enough wood to supply a papermill but not get a constant destination full message and how many trucks of water do I need to send to a papermill to fully supply it so that it can supply enough cardboard for the town of Winchestertonfieldville Ohio and how many trucks loaded with cardboard to I need to send to Fufufufuville to supply it's hardware store with cardboard but not overload it and how many fishing spots do I need to supply fish to the truck depot that is supplying fish to the farmers market in Winchestertonfieldville Ohio so how many trucks would i have to dispatch to the farmers market to keep it fully supplied but not so supplied that the price drops.

(I could go on and on with all the products but maybe you get the picture)

Does the above paragraph seem confusing? That's the way that I feel with regards to supply and demand in ROI.

By the way, I'm not really looking to anybody to answer that insane paragraph above, it's only an example of how I feel about the supply and demand in the game and how it's not connecting in my brain on what is needed.

[InvalidSelection]

The needs fluctuate, so one month it may need more than others. As for your own production lines - Each input good can stack up to 50, and does not affect other input goods or the output storage. This is the case on all production locations, so load them up (but build a water collection center, stop buying water)

[BonPadre]

It's really a try and error based...
Because while a berry field (or whatever farm that is) need 1 water PER FIELD per cycle, IF your water collection is close by your farm, you may need only 1-2 trucks to supply them, because water production has a way shorter cycle than berry production.
On the other hand, if you are quite some distance of it... you may need 4-5 trucks to fully complete the needs for the same berry cycle...

So take a close look at what speed/rotations, your trucks are able to deliver to the farms / industries.

Now, also, I know many always want to min-max all... in my case, I mostly try to supply 1-2 items per cycle.
So if a city is asking for 2 berries, I may set up only 2 trucks out of the 3 fields of berries, or maybe only set 2 berries field...though... for me berries are an end game thing as I play career... so with the last berry I send it to a painting manufacturing plant.

If a city is asking 5 apples per cycles, I may send only the 3 trucks of 1 farm [3 fields] (or 5 if I have unlocked 5 fields) I may definitely NOT build a second farm just for that. (but that's my playstyle)

lastly, for any 2nd or higher tier pruduction line (cartons, paints, orange juice, etc) it takes between 12.5 days to 15 days to pruduce it... so usually a truck should be able to complete that back and forth trip, if you placed your industries close by...

Now IF you don't place industries close by for whatever reason, THEN you may consider using warehouses to send your primary products from farms - gathering to there and then sending the warehous trucks into your industries (that then needs to be closeby your warehouse)
1 warehouse having 5 possible trucks destinations, you may feed a high-end industry that needs 3 components, and a second one that could need only 2 (like a soup indusrty, and an orange juice industry)

Again, with those I never really try to min-max what the city needs... and I never struggled with money. and those cities have grown and evolved.

Now, don't get me wrong... took me quite some tries to setup things... and i also have some places where I overflow currently and need to re-work some areas... but usually when I overflow... usually was early places where I sent 3 water trucks for 3 fields farms....

You can always :
- dismantle a gathering unit
- turn off temporarly a gathering main building to let your secondary industry use it's stockpile, and monitor it when you turn it on to fine-tune your trucks
- upgrade (if not done ofc) your industry (like farms from 3 fields to 5 fields) to again use that stockpile

It's really a micro-managing thing with some feelings currently. I like it beeing a bit more on the "improvising" side than pure set number thing... due to those trucks driving time

[Jack Burton]

Fully supplied is usually 4-6 of a kind, but you can go more. There's no hard rule really. As the town grows their needs also grow.

[airbag]

I find that it's honestly not something I think about. At the moment, cities grow when you start supplying a new product, regardless of whether or not you fulfil its entire demand. So I'd just worry about supplying as much as makes economic sense to you. Don't bankrupt yourself trying to build enough factories to make eight chocolate cakes or whatever per week, just because a diner says it wants that many. Supplying one or two a week will make you plenty of money regardless.

My only concern is to avoid oversupplying- if you do that you'll obviously start driving demand (and prices) down.

[Agathorn (SH)]

> how many trucks would accomplish that

Controlling resource amounts by truck load sadly is rather inaccurate in the game the way it currently works.

The amount of trucks needed to meet any given requirement will vary by factors such as distance traveled, road types, modifiers, etc. Often one amount of trucks isn't quite enough but the next amount up is too many. I find I'm constantly twiddling with the dispatches.

[Avantgarde]

I have a different approach to the whole truck issue. I'm not trying to control the supply by the amount of trucks I send but by making sure I'm not overproducing in the first place. I can then assign as many trucks as I want because they have to wait for the factory, farm or gatherer to complete a cycle. This is also fine financially since trucks currently don't have a running cost but only a dispatch cost. It makes no difference if I send 5 trucks at once or one truck 5 times as long as the one truck can make the trip in time of the production cycle.

To find out how many factories I need I do the following calculation:

( Production Time / 7.5 ) x Demand

I'm using 7.5 for the number of days per week so I get nice round numbers as result since all production times are multiples of 2.5

Be aware that if the calculation is for a farm or gatherer the result is the amount of fields or harvesters and not the number of main buildings!

An example: A town needs 3 Apples per week. The Orchard has a production time of 20 days.
-> This means I'm going to need ( 20 / 7.5 ) x 3 = 8 fields to fulfill its demand

You should of course not send all 8 apples to the market at the same time as that would oversupply it for one week and undersupply it the next two weeks. So assign just enough trucks that all apples get shipped in the 20 days. I read somewhere from the developer that we are going to get a metric that shows us the time it takes to make a trip somewhen in the future.

Also: If you are dividing the production times by 2.5, you can get some easily readable values for the production ratios. Let's take the example from above:

An apple orchard field needs 20 days for 1 apple: 20 / 2.5 = 8
And a water syphon harvester needs 7.5 days for 1 water: 7.5 / 2.5 = 3
-> So you have a ratio of 3 to 8 or in other words: For every 8 fields, you need 3 water harvesters

I hope this helps if you have no issues with doing some math

[Dizzy]

Originally posted by Avantgarde:

Also: If you are dividing the production times by 2.5, you can get some easily readable values for the production ratios. Let's take the example from above:

Can I run something by you?

I have calculated the ratio for gift wrapping and come up with the following numbers.

Gift wrapping papermils: 12,5/2,5 = 5
Cardboard papermills: 15/2,5 = 6
Paper papermils: 15/2,5 = 6

If I then need to calculate the number of wood harvesters and water harvesters:

7,5/2,5 = 3 per 6 papermills? So I have 12 papermills in total and I'll need 6 harvesters each?

If I made some mistakes I'll be thankful you point them out to me :D

[FelixSylvaris]

Most shops have demand in per week value, startung from 2/w but sometimes it is even 6/w, so month is *4 that.

It would be great to be able to limit how many pieces a month i want to move to target max. Like i asign 3 trucks to move max 4 timber a month to papermill.

Other useful feature would be one time shedue. Like i want to send only 50 piece of wood to factory, and it will take some time but after completing it will swich off.

[Sardaukar]

I thing It a would be a great idea to sell stuff like coal and wheat etc to direct supply IA factories

[Avantgarde]

Originally posted by Dingenus:

7,5/2,5 = 3 per 6 papermills? So I have 12 papermills in total and I'll need 6 harvesters each?

You actually need 9 harvesters since cardboard requires 2 wood per item and paper 2 water per item. So you need:

3 water harvesters + 6 wood harvesters = 6 cardboard factories
6 water harvesters + 3 wood harvesters = 6 paper factories

It's easy to overlook that part but don't worry to much about it, I've made that mistake before too.

Also don't forget to multiply these ingredient ratios down the line! For example: Plastic Furniture needs 2 plastic which also needs 2 gas per 1 plastic. So you get:

20 (gas production time) / 2.5 = 8 x 2 x 2 = 32 gas pumps for every 12.5 / 2.5 = 5 plastic furniture factories

If you just want to have a spreadsheet to look these values up, a user named Elentaria on the discord server made one for all products:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cn5XeBWArsvtEQ3i3lOs7VBV7v8ukhJX6FKNSeFd7zQ

[Dizzy]

Originally posted by Avantgarde:

You actually need 9 harvesters since cardboard requires 2 wood per item and paper 2 water per item. So you need:

3 water harvesters + 6 wood harvesters = 6 cardboard factories
6 water harvesters + 3 wood harvesters = 6 paper factories

It's easy to overlook that part but don't worry to much about it, I've made that mistake before too.

Also don't forget to multiply these ingredient ratios down the line! For example: Plastic Furniture needs 2 plastic which also needs 2 gas per 1 plastic. So you get:

20 (gas production time) / 2.5 = 8 x 2 x 2 = 32 gas pumps for every 12.5 / 2.5 = 5 plastic furniture factories

If you just want to have a spreadsheet to look these values up, a user named Elentaria on the discord server made one for all products:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cn5XeBWArsvtEQ3i3lOs7VBV7v8ukhJX6FKNSeFd7zQ

Ok yes I overlooked that, derp =D Thanks for the correction!

And thank you (and Elentaria) very much for the spreadsheet, that's an amazing tool!