Can we do something about the gridlock?

[ThePiachu]

I've recently been playing the mission where you're supposed to build the large monument and on multiple occassions the whole road network ground down to standstill because of a large gridlock. I had no choice but to delete my paved roads and rebuild them to unclog the things. Thing is, I had multiple ways around the gridlock albeit with longer routes, but my goods decided to take only the most direct route rather than trying to avoid the gridlock. Perhaps it would be nice to increase the capaticty of the flags or give us something akin to Settlers 2's "donkeys" to help with the issue?

[Gob]

Yup I agree. The path finding is not quite there yet for the late-game.

You can have multiple available routes but only one will be used even though it is completely clogged up.

[hyoufuu]

it is possible to set a black and white lists on flags.

[Handbanana]

Originally posted by hyoufuu:

it is possible to set a black and white lists on flags.

Doesn't matter if the AI is ♥♥♥♥. It needs to be fixed.

[Cleril]

Originally posted by hyoufuu:

it is possible to set a black and white lists on flags.

Not that great of a solution or a game mechanic. Turns into micromanagement you can't easily keep track off. Would rather they let us build roads without having to start from a road (allowing proper veins like in cities skylines) and have bots avoid full routes.

I think a big issue is the fact resource pathfinding is only given when a building demands something and not inbetween (AI doesn't 'tick' that much). Suddenly if you have a bunch of buildings requesting resources on the same road network bam gridlock. And planning building placement to avoid that is either impossible or absurdly tedious and unfun.

[ThePiachu]

Okay, the issue can really get even worse once you add harbours into the mix. Once you gridlock those and start deleting roads / harbours, you can end up with a lot of boats stuck, resources in other harbours stuck and so on. Once you place a water transport route, you best not mess with it or else...

There are also other inefficiencies in water transport, like boats waiting for nothing once they load their cargo.

Add to that some frankly bizzarre routes some cargo takes and you have a recipie for disaster. I saw some islands ship silly stuff like water, or even have an harbour load cider onto a boat to ship out only to have THE SAME BOAT unload cider from another island for consumption here.

We seriously need optimisations in this area, otherwise later levels of this game will grind to a halt...

[marcimat]

Agree. All boat’s, harbours, and partially roads are blocked in my Level 3 game, and I don’t understand clearly why.

[Lelouch]

TL:DR at bottom lol.

I just blacklisted resources at flags, specifically for energy, to create a closed loop in a small area for meat, fish, water, cider etc, that helps quite a lot since other workplaces wont use the items from a different area.

But the problem I encountered was being unable to create black/white lists on harbors.

So trying to use multiple harbors on one island to control what is brought to and taken from there doesn't really work.

Sure you can set rules on the flags so that nothing will go out from any sites on that island to the harbor and nothing will be requested in for the island through that harbor.
But it doesnt stop ships from taking resources from harbor(A) to harbor(B) that you dont want a resource at, and then ferrying it directly from that harbor(B) to another(C) that has a connection.

Causing the inventory of the harbor(B) to fill up on supplies that either cant be moved from it due to rules on the flags or the supplies not being used on that island until another boat comes and takes those items away.
I believe this is also freezing the ships that are trying to move resources onto the harbor because there are no free slots on the harbor for the boat to unload to, and thus permanently blocking that harbor so that resources cant even be taken to make space. requring you to manually delete items directly from the boat until its inventory is empty at which point it moves on allowing, hopefully, another boat that wants to take some resources away, otherwise you have to delete the resources again until they do
(it seems this works best since it doesnt seem to care if you delete resources from the harbor, the ai still dont seem to unload from the ship, probably from the way the ai is designed to be told there is work to be done, since it also seems to affect other buildings with deleted resources)

So having the rules enabled for the harbor could fix all that mess, its nasty to try and play around.
Something else I noticed in regards to the gridlocking while trying to fix my boat issues. the items that are delivered to a flag dont seem to have a proper queue? i went through manually deleting items from one flag(C), and when the bots moved something from (B) to (C), items were then moved from (A) to (B), before (C) again. but the bot for (B-C) seemed to pick up the latest item that (A) had delivered to (B), not sure as to the reasoning of this, but i think it would be better if the flags had a first come first served system so that some resources dont get stuck at a point for extended periods of time.

TL:DR
Love the game, good old settlers feel, but new!
***Harbors would benefit from having their own Whitelist/Blacklist rules
***Harbors could have possible inbound / outbound specifics for routes to other harbors, so that boats can be told to only deliver to or from a specific harbor and not take any resources the other way
***flags dont appear to have a proper queue for resources to be taken from and delivered to the next point, which i feel should be first come first served
***AI "Work to do / idle" could possibly do with some improvements for when resources are manually deleted

***Resources being assigned for a specific use, eg "These logs to build that logcutter," does have its pros and cons. but in terms of gameplay logistics, can clog things up a bit in certain situations;
for eg. harbors with multiple island connections. If the harbor has many boats and a full inventory, then a boat that stops and is waiting on any resources that are currently not in the inventory of the harbor will leave without any cargo, preventing work from being done where the resources are needed AND blocking the grid with the items that are now waiting for the next trip.
Sure that situation could probably be prevented by having all boats at a harbor taking the same routes, but that requires space for separate harbors to be built for each route.

It could possibly be fixed by encapsulation resource requests per island. So two islands request stone, they go to the harbor and request, of connected routes, that stone, another islands harbor takes the job and requests stone locally, which is then assigned the job of being delivered to the local harbor. As soon as a boat arrives from either island requesting the stone, it requests and takes only from what the harbor has or gains while the boat is waiting.
This method wont fix issues for large quantities of many different items, if for some reason that was the case, but it certainly will take care of the issue for building materials like stone and planks

Sorry for the long post

[XartaX]

They need to fix a couple of things:

1. If there's a direct harbor route from island A to island B, the shouldn't ship it to island C and then to island B. This just adds a ton of congestion that's not necessary.

2. You need to be able to ban certain goods from passing through certain harbors. Blacklisting road posts does not work for harbors. Having my precious throughput congested by fish isn't exactly ideal.

3. There needs to be a solution to deadlocks. If a harbor is full and a ship is waiting to unload. But the harbor isn't being emptied because there are no outgoing routes available, it'll just be stuck there forever forcing you to blow things up. I'd suggest just making road posts hold twice the amount of resources (8 total), but only 4 each way. So it's like a two lane system as far as goods traffic is concerned.

Also, it'd be nice to be able to upgrade a harbor to let multiple ships dock at once without increasing it's size (maybe from building a pier). Possibly increasing it's storage capacity too.

[Cleril]

Originally posted by XartaX:

3. There needs to be a solution to deadlocks. If a harbor is full and a ship is waiting to unload. But the harbor isn't being emptied because there are no outgoing routes available, it'll just be stuck there forever forcing you to blow things up. I'd suggest just making road posts hold twice the amount of resources (8 total), but only 4 each way. So it's like a two lane system as far as goods traffic is concerned.

I like this idea a lot.