Early game struggles

[$Money$]

I'm struggling with a few things that maybe someone more experienced can break down for me.

Playing on full realism btw.

Problem: Massive traffic jams at the border to import resources and workers as I try to get a stabalized first town set up. So many goods are needed at once to just get things going.

Question: What should I prioritize early to limit this?

Problem: I'm having an issue with the supply of water. I'd like to plan out my water plan better, but I have no understanding about how much will be consumed by each building, how much I should supply per pump/water tower.

Question: How do you effectively plan your water needs/supply?

[DailyDoseOfStress]

Customs Traffic just sucks, until you get setup to make your own things it will be like this. At first try not to build so many projects at once with allot of trucks. Its like sucking water through a fire hose. Not going to happen. The buildings in the tooltip when you select them have a consumption / production rate. Use this to roughly plan out your city infrastructure as well as how much you will ideally need to make. Planning and playing makes for practice makes perfect. Figuring out what you can push your building limits to will also determine what you plan and what you leave out.

Good to position what assets you can before you build. Asphalt Concrete will have to be still done at the customs, but you can pre-position Steel/Bricks/Boards/Prefabs and Gravel

[Silent_Shadow]

Customs throughput is maximized by ensuring all the trucks going to it are both large and carrying full loads. Depositing material into free storages and having COs source from them helps a lot with this because trucks from a CO only take what is needed. You can also do something similar with foreign workers, buses, and free bus stops.

At some point though, you just can't squeeze more stuff through customs, so you should also try to minimize the amount of buildings in your starting designs. Smaller buildings need less material to build, which means fewer truckloads need to be driven to it. You can also postpone the construction of some buildings for later, like schools, justice buildings, and so on, and just focus on getting the initial town running. Water, sewage, and waste can be handled at the start with trucks in a free technical office too, so you don't need to get these systems up and running right away.

For water/sewage related questions, I'll refer you to my guide, but to plan out an adequate water system, you can either do some basic math, do a lot more basic math, or just build large pumps and pipes between water sources, treatment plants, and water towers, and then connect water substations to said water towers with water switches. Also try to place your wells in unpolluted and undeveloped areas to maximize their quality and minimize the amount of chemicals used to raise it.

[$Money$]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

Customs throughput is maximized by ensuring all the trucks going to it are both large and carrying full loads. Depositing material into free storages and having COs source from them helps a lot with this because trucks from a CO only take what is needed. You can also do something similar with foreign workers, buses, and free bus stops.

At some point though, you just can't squeeze more stuff through customs, so you should also try to minimize the amount of buildings in your starting designs. Smaller buildings need less material to build, which means fewer truckloads need to be driven to it. You can also postpone the construction of some buildings for later, like schools, justice buildings, and so on, and just focus on getting the initial town running. Water, sewage, and waste can be handled at the start with trucks in a free technical office too, so you don't need to get these systems up and running right away.

For water/sewage related questions, I'll refer you to my guide, but to plan out an adequate water system, you can either do some basic math, do a lot more basic math, or just build large pumps and pipes between water sources, treatment plants, and water towers, and then connect water substations to said water towers with water switches. Also try to place your wells in unpolluted and undeveloped areas to maximize their quality and minimize the amount of chemicals used to raise it.

One thing I'm really struggling with on my playthrough is troubleshooting my water system.

I have a river source> Small Pump> Big Treatment > Pump > Water Tower. 262 meters, 7 meter in height increase.

Water tower fills great. Provides my residential area fine, but it won't service buildings just down the road very well.

Town is on the first switch after tower, consuming 10.61m/day

Tower > switch > switch > switch > Substation(This area is the problem) (600m, 5m up)

I'm only reading .52m. My prison, hospital, court, and Police station are here. Court and Prison are fine, Police and Hospital get 0.

Note; I used the tooltip to ensure connectivity, blue line is drawn to these buildings.

I put three small pumps evenly spaced on this line to rule out any sort of pressure issue, no dice.

[Delle(DK)]

my advice regarding the border and traffic jams.

build a warehouse near the border, and build other open storages.
Setup a distribution office to fill up the buildings so that it is ONLY the trucks from the distribution center that go to the border.
Everyone els have to use the storage buildings and they will go there when there are avaliable resources in the buildings.

Alternative you can buy a used ship that can transport building materials.
The advantage is that you from early game pretty quick can build an harbour and then trade with both east and west.. It can be a good start to buy construction materials from the west side and use USD and save some Rubler doing so.
Also you can connect road to two different custom buldings and import from both places vs only one.

For import of stuff, you really want to advance and use trains or ships vs trucks.
They can carry so much more this also help allot with traffic jams.
You can get ships very fast, but trains take time to build the track, so ships are a good start.
Maybe even consider to place your warehouse and other buildings near the ocean and connect them to your harbour so you can use ships instead.
Remember to build a repair station that touch the harbour area so your ships will repair, and i recommend to make a small warehouse connected to your repair station with materials to do the repair.. ships are big and need more stuff to be efficient.

Els other ways to reduce the amount of trucks are to example make concrete your self, it only require gravel and imported cement. Then your cement trucks dont need to go to the border anymore.

Regarding water, well i usualy make 3 small wells and connect them to a big pipe that goes to my water cleaning building.. make sure in your city to build several 4 section pieces so you always can split or connect water outlets ect.
The same goes with your sewage system, its always good to be able to connect more pipes.

( 3x small water well - pump - water cleaning - pump - city )
Reason you want to use the small water well is it doesent require any workers to operate ;-) There are also other small buildings that is good in the start.. Example the small firestation do not require heating.
So pay attention to this it make the game more easy

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by $Money$:

Tower > switch > switch > switch > Substation(This area is the problem) (600m, 5m up)

I'm only reading .52m. My prison, hospital, court, and Police station are here. Court and Prison are fine, Police and Hospital get 0.

Note; I used the tooltip to ensure connectivity, blue line is drawn to these buildings.

I put three small pumps evenly spaced on this line to rule out any sort of pressure issue, no dice.

What is the water tower's outlet pressure reading, and what size pipe did you use to connect the switches to the tower and the substations? You can use the pipette "pick" tool to identify the pipe size.

[$Money$]

Water Tower Output: Bar 5.30, Max Pressure 76.3 m3 per day.

Everything is big water pipe, 127.23 M3 per day.

So thats my pressure drop then? use smaller pipes to fix this?

[Silent_Shadow]

Can you provide a screenshot? What you are saying doesn't make sense:
• The well's small pump shouldn't be able to provide the water tower with 76 m³/day.
• A large water tower can't output 5.3 bar of pressure with only a small elevation change.

[$Money$]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

Can you provide a screenshot? What you are saying doesn't make sense:
• The well's small pump shouldn't be able to provide the water tower with 76 m³/day.
• A large water tower can't output 5.3 bar of pressure with only a small elevation change.

Its not a well or a small pump. Its Water Treatment > (Big) Pump > Water Tower

The Water Tower is now at 3.67 Bars. Not sure what is causing it to fluctuate.

[$Money$]

Note: Police Station is showing ~3.67bars but no water

[Novu]

For the earliest part of starting on realistic mode build storage first. Stock pile bricks, boards, steel, panels, and gravel.

Then you can set your construction offices to take materials from those storages and not the custom's house. This should greatly reduce your early game construction traffic.

Another tip is the smaller custom's houses are actually faster than large one when it comes to getting materials.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by $Money$:

I have a river source> Small Pump> Big Treatment > Pump > Water Tower.

You shouldn't expect more than 50 m³/day from a small pump unless you know how to boost it, and if your source can't put out more than 50 m³/day, then stuff further down the line also shouldn't be able to sustain a higher average flow rate.

Originally posted by $Money$:

The Water Tower is now at 3.67 Bars. Not sure what is causing it to fluctuate.

Its height and a tiny amount of water should give it about 3.4 bar, and filling up all the way should take it up to 3.9 or 4 bar. You can also get more or less depending on the pipe's change in elevation and the destination's internal height, but that shouldn't matter too much here.

Are you sure the water tower is filling up and not running out of water?

[$Money$]

Water tower is full and doesn't go below 299.9 at "Faster Speed" game speed

[$Money$]

Output at the Tower is bouncing between 15-18 m3/day

[Silent_Shadow]

That makes more sense.
Have you confirmed everything after the water tower is actually connected? The pipe connection point icon shouldn't be visible if a pipe is connected to it.

[$Money$]

Everything is connected, yes.