Transporting food to your shopping centres

[Hanti Hut]

Its now a lot easier when we talk construction to manage all the vehicles. But I find myself with a problem due to transporting food from my storage with food to 2-3 shopping centers.
Problem is that my 5 trucks does not fill their truck up - they only fill up with food 1,2 or max 3 out the 6,5 tons available in each truck - why dont they fill up?
The route is:
From food storage to shopping center to SC 1 to SC 2 (and back again to the medium distribution office).
I have tried to set the percentages to almost everything from 0 - 90 for both load and unload.
How do I set it up to work most efficient, meaning with only filled up trucks?

[veyder]

I don't use DOs with the shopping centers, I experience the same behaviour.

What I usually do is a "regular" line:
1. Load 100% at a food storage
2. Unload 100% at a warehouse attached to the shopping centre, wait until unloaded

I do the same for clothes and electronics. Meat is a bit trickier as I tend to get some "transfer" issues (i.e. people complain about lack of meat in store, even though the meat storage is full) so I usually send a freezer truck directly to the store instead, it does still happen but less frequently than with a meat storage.

[Hanti Hut]

Okay Veyder, same problem - well do you use a depot then, and set a route up per vehicle? I know that works from before the update or
do you still use the distribution office just with one route per office?

[TheAmishStig]

The most reliable is to have a boatload of dedicated trucks, but that gets expensive. Shopping Center + Road Cargo gives you enough space for each type of cargo to have a dedicated parking space, so you can do 'wait until unloaded' and trust the stocks to last while the truck runs back for more...unless the distribution center is ages away, or it's a big shopping center that's constantly packed to the gills [in which case use those factory connections to double up, or go center -> storage buildings -> cargo station to give a bigger buffer], you shouldn't have any issues.

I need to get back up to speed on the DO mechanics, I've been away for a while...but as long as they're not overwhelmed, and have enough trucks, they should be able to work just fine with a reasonably high 'dispatch when' setting, like 70% or so. When they were in testing, I had a Chemicals / Clothing industrial park that was being serviced by one.

[Majkl]

The thing is that truck decides how much to load on the beginning of the route. so if your storage capacity is 3tons and you set % to 50%, truck will olny pick up 1,5 tons. At least this is how it was when i last played. I hope devs will improve this feature. In the meantime you can make sure that your food/meat storage is close to your depo and also you can change storage % in the shopping centre. you can even set it 60-70% food. it will make a difference.

before they implemented DO's, i was thinking about how it would be great if you could assign some truck to the factory (with wearhouse), and truck would just wonder around full of food, delivering it to the shops. but... we have that.

[Storpappa]

I use hub and spoke
I continue the same was as before DC

Factory -> warehouse
Warehouse -> trains -> Food Distribution Center
FDC -> trucks -> local shopping center RCS

Trucks at FDC are wait till full
Trucks at RCS are wait till empty
The cost of a vehicle is change compared to needless traffic or a hiccup that causes escapes

[Questlove]

Originally posted by Hebmann:

Its now a lot easier when we talk construction to manage all the vehicles. But I find myself with a problem due to transporting food from my storage with food to 2-3 shopping centers.
Problem is that my 5 trucks does not fill their truck up - they only fill up with food 1,2 or max 3 out the 6,5 tons available in each truck - why dont they fill up?
The route is:
From food storage to shopping center to SC 1 to SC 2 (and back again to the medium distribution office).
I have tried to set the percentages to almost everything from 0 - 90 for both load and unload.
How do I set it up to work most efficient, meaning with only filled up trucks?

I think you can have success if you adjust your option to fill the store to a percent consistent with the size of your truck's load max. So if the store will hold 7 tons of food, and your covered haul holds 6 tons, then have your truck only deliver to that store when the store is less than 10% full. ( < 10% on 2nd option in the DO for that location/task )

Remember: Cargo Station won't work in this instance b/c you're basing the % on the store.
#2: Use 1 tiny DO from mods per store (1 truck DO)

[veyder]

Originally posted by Hebmann:

Okay Veyder, same problem - well do you use a depot then, and set a route up per vehicle? I know that works from before the update or
do you still use the distribution office just with one route per office?

I use a depot and a route, no DO.

Pretty much the only place I use DOs is for open storages/warehouses used by COs. And I found that it's much much more efficient to set up separate DOs + storage sets for different materials than to wait ages when e.g. both prefabs and steel are below the threshold, you need more steel at a construction site but all the trucks for whatever reason decide that nope, prefabs are now the new black, build everything with prefabs! Oh, we delivered them and now there's no place for steel, let's wait until all the prefabs are used... so we can get them again!

But other than that I find routes more effective. If there was the current functionality yet a way to manually dispatch a truck for a specific cargo when a need arises, I would use more DOs.

[Aieonae]

The root issue is that the volume of storage mainly food and especially meat in shopping centers and grocers are very small which do not work with the on demand nature of the DO.

The DO respond to shortage then proceed to fulfill based on the shortage amount(not your truck limits), but while travelling to fulfill the on demand filling the shopping center and grocers side drop further which was not capture.

To make the issue worse, the DO delivery only assign 1 vehicle per delivery route, and further storage would not be respond if the destinations are the same.

It could be resolve on the DO side by having a decentralized source for food and meat storage as source serving the town shopping centers and grocers.

However, Many including me do not see the benefit in doing that as having a regular frequent delivery simply feed the shopping centers and grocers without concern or demands at expense of only fuel.

[ajho]

I leave the Distribution Office settings on their defaults but alter the amounts stored by the shops to Food 63%, Clothes 18% and Electronics 18% and that seems to work okay. Hope this helps.

[Hanti Hut]

Oh my, goodness a subject there is something in, thanks all for your responses what an amazing "Comrade-team":-)
I believe when I use DO (distribution offices) food is almost the only kind of transportation I have found the trouble in. To solve it after experimenting with the delivery percentages I decided to go with a vehicle depot with trucks you which I manually set to deliver the food. Oh the same manually truck goes with things around the stone transport.

On all the other delivery alternatives the game offers the DO is absolute amazing - transporting coal to the steel mine, concrete, prefab whatsoever it works and I find the percentages works fine.

So my conclusion is, according to the way the game is handling the DO at this moment:
- Dont use DO transporting food and stone
- Do use DO transporting almost any other kind of stuff and it is a nice development by the dev.team.

Thanks all for participating on this subject, what a GREAT community out there.....:-).

[Renfield1897]

I generally use the Shopping Mall Mod which has 2 factory connections. I have a small warehouse for food, electronics and clothes, and a meat locker for meat.

Then use DO to top up the warehouse. I never deliver to the shopping mall itself. That way If there are issues, they have a back up storage until the issue is resolved. I manage 1 DO to fill all the warehouses and pubs.

[Hanti Hut]

Perfect idea, use the warehouse and not the shopping center directly:-)

[veyder]

Originally posted by Renfield1897:

I generally use the Shopping Mall Mod which has 2 factory connections. I have a small warehouse for food, electronics and clothes, and a meat locker for meat.

Then use DO to top up the warehouse. I never deliver to the shopping mall itself. That way If there are issues, they have a back up storage until the issue is resolved. I manage 1 DO to fill all the warehouses and pubs.

How do you deal with no meat in store issue? I mean when you have lots of meat in the meat locker yet nothing is transferred to the store?

[MaroonFrog]

Originally posted by veyder:

]

How do you deal with no meat in store issue? I mean when you have lots of meat in the meat locker yet nothing is transferred to the store?

It is best to use forklifts, or if that's not feasible, you can park a small refrigerated lorry at the shopping centre constantly loading and unloading meat.

[johntarmac]

Originally posted by veyder:

Originally posted by Renfield1897:

I generally use the Shopping Mall Mod which has 2 factory connections. I have a small warehouse for food, electronics and clothes, and a meat locker for meat.

Then use DO to top up the warehouse. I never deliver to the shopping mall itself. That way If there are issues, they have a back up storage until the issue is resolved. I manage 1 DO to fill all the warehouses and pubs.

How do you deal with no meat in store issue? I mean when you have lots of meat in the meat locker yet nothing is transferred to the store?

I use the same system as Renfield1897 and never encountered that problem. I check my citizens status fairly often so if there has been a shortage it is short lived and not caused an issue.