The asphalt/concrete bottleneck

[Metropolitan Chemist]

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198877402487/screenshot/2343629042991083534/%20
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198877402487/screenshot/2343629042991083534/

Since asphalt and concrete cannot be stored, I can only assign trucks to their plants. As the storage capacity is very small, many trucks going there return with empty load (instead of waiting for full load), and return to the CO. This makes the transport of asphalt and concrete to construction sites extremely ineffective, and constructions stop twice every minute. As far as I know, there's no way to configure the order of trucks from CO.

All other construction materials are not having this problem, as they can be stored. Please note that I already have more than enough workers in the asphalt/concrete plants, and they're only complaining that 'we cannot store or export'.

How to transport asphalt and concrete effectively?

[kyonkun]

You need to supply enough gravel. 0.39 tons is not enough.

[joeball123]

More generally, the game only checks if inputs and staff are present at the asphalt and concrete plants before dispatching trucks to collect asphalt and concrete from them, not whether or not there is enough material at the plant to fill all of the trucks already en route plus the one that's getting dispatched or whether or not the plant will still be staffed when the truck arrives, so if you have a lot of jobs that need asphalt/concrete and a lot of the appropriate trucks available at your construction offices you're likely to run into situations where a lot of trucks get dispatched to the asphalt/concrete plants more or less simultaneously, the first two or three trucks to arrive get filled up, and then the plants run out of material while a lot of trucks are already en route to pick up asphalt/concrete. The game won't change their orders between dispatch and arrival at the plant, so all those 'late' arrivals show up, maybe get a very small partial load if the first couple of trucks left anything, and go on to the work sites to deliver basically nothing. Similarly if you have periods when the plants are unstaffed - the game won't change the trucks' orders once their en route to the plant and an unstaffed plant cannot fill arriving trucks (if I recall correctly, both plants actually have a small amount of output storage - 0.5 tons or something like that - so the first truck to arrive at an unstaffed plant may actually pick up a small amount of material, but anything after that will have to leave empty until more staff show up).

Also, take a look at the gravel consumption figures at the asphalt and concrete plants, take a look at the output figures, and take a look at the local storage capacities. Assuming you're using T-138-series trucks, local storage at the concrete plant only holds enough gravel for ~8.5 truckloads of concrete while local storage at the asphalt plant is enough for just ~3 truckloads of asphalt - and that's if local gravel storage is completely full. It might be a bit much to ask for an initial setup, but the vanilla concrete and especially asphalt plants benefit greatly from external gravel storage, particularly as Distribution Offices will only dispatch trucks when anything currently on-site plus anything currently en route adds up to less than the set percentage of local storage, without accounting for any demand that's already "in queue," and thus often fail to deliver gravel to the plants before the plants run out of stock. This becomes even worse if you leave the Distribution Office on default settings, as 30% of the concrete plant's on-site gravel storage is about two truckloads (again, assuming we're using T-138-series trucks) while for the asphalt plant it's less than one, so on default settings you have a maximum of one or two gravel trucks en route to either of the plants at any given time, and one truckload of gravel becomes only slightly more than one truckload of asphalt or concrete at the vanilla (or vanilla-balanced) plants.

A further issue with using the plants' local storage is that it's relatively likely that deliveries will get stuck in the queue of trucks waiting to pick up asphalt or concrete, especially if you don't have a separate unloading station, so you might have to wait for several trucks to cycle through without being able to pick anything up before your next load of gravel (or bitumen/cement) arrives at the plant, and it'll potentially take even more time for the distribution office to realize that it really needs to dispatch another truckload or two to the plant (because, again, there's really not that much local storage at either of the plants, and at least on default settings the DO will think that it's doing enough if it already has a truck or two en route), depending on where the delivery truck was in the queue and how long it takes the next truck trying to pick up asphalt/concrete to arrive at the plant.

[RyanFireball]

You need to have an aggregate storage between the Aggregate processor and the Asphalt plant. This will ensure you asphalt plant have a constant flow of gravel,
R/Tom

[gwahazar]

BTW, asphalt is ordinary aggregate and in real life it is piled in heaps.
0.5t storage limit and lack of storage possibility is a thing completly made-up by devs.

[Metropolitan Chemist]

This raises another question: how to transport workers effectively to prevent the industries from being periodically unstaffed? Even my coal power plant periodically stops production because of this. I have already placed a large house near the power plant complex.

[RyanFireball]

Originally posted by gwahazar:

BTW, asphalt is ordinary aggregate and in real life it is piled in heaps.
0.5t storage limit and lack of storage possibility is a thing completly made-up by devs.

Asphalt Concrete according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_concrete
R/Tom

[Bifakovic]

Originally posted by Metro Master:

This raises another question: how to transport workers effectively to prevent the industries from being periodically unstaffed? Even my coal power plant periodically stops production because of this. I have already placed a large house near the power plant complex.

Set your busroute properly. If you need a constant number of civs, do not drop to much at once and bring more buses ;)

[Railsplitter]

There is a mod for each one that stores 100 tons. Trucks can load even if no workers are present, if the output buffer has product in it. Problem solved (for me, anyway).

[gwahazar]

Originally posted by RyanFireball:

Asphalt Concrete according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_concrete
R/Tom

According to the highway constructed near my home, asphalt aggregate is stored in piles, and is heated in asphalt layers on-site, consecutively.

[Beast of War]

In game the small reserve that is ready is only a bottleneck if something is wrong with the facility ( machine repair ) or with the supply ( gravel, workforce, bitumen ) and of course always a problem with power shortage.

If you built a bitumen storage with pump and pipelines and an conveyor belt with gravel supply from a depot connected to the plant, and have a workforce by footpath ( coming from a bus stop or walking from their living place ) it can't be interrupted, save for machine repairs. It can be interrupted if you send a workforce by bus directly to the plant, as waiting concrete mixers can then block it.

And it is the machine repairs that bugs me. When under machine repair the entire production stops and since i usually have one in a region nothing can be built until machine repairs are concluded. And that process is often interrupted because it is in a queue that is stopped because there is no asphalt for groundwork and such. And having to redirect all CO to go to another region and collect asphalt there....OR manually reset all waiting CO vehicles and manually placing the machine repairs as 1st in the queue....troublesome at best. Am i supposed to build 2 plants in one location ?

[Strategic Sage]

I would think the question would be about how it was used in the relevant time period (1960-1980), not how it it used now. Either way, it's definitely not something that was completely made up.

[Beast of War]

I think i answered my own question thinking about it : set a (small) CO to do machine replacement only per region.

I have small CO's per region for road construction too.

[gwahazar]

Originally posted by Strategic Sage:

I would think the question would be about how it was used in the relevant time period (1960-1980), not how it it used now.

Yes, you are right, I remember that asphalt (or maybe tar) was delivered in stinky tanks with internal coal heating.
Maybe some research would unlock modern, more convenient methods of asphalt laying?

Anyway, concrete and asphalt making is somwheat annoying, it is easier to use customs as a source instead of coping with 0.5t capacity or wasting workforce to keep mixer idle.
Also people are modding mixers to have 10t capacity.