Any rationale for making specialized industry bigger or smaller plots?

[Oddible]

I was reading a thread where someone suggested NOT making your specialized industry as big as possible and to avoid a surplus. Is this the case? Why? What various rationale are there to sizing of specialized industry?

Here is that thread - which ultimately was completely inconclusive as to sizing...
https://steamcommunity.com/app/949230/discussions/0/3877096256094220127/#c3877096256094262257

[john.glossop]

Well, what they call "specialized industries" in this game, I would tend to call "Primary Produce" in most cases.
These are the materials that your other industries use. Wood, Oil, Ore, Rock, grain, vegetables, chickens and cotton are all used in manufacturing industries, and you should aim to have a surplus in these, if you want to maximize your revenue (if you don't produce enough, either the industry that needs it won't be set up, or if it is set up, it'll have to import its materials from else where, which hurts your bottom line.)
Unless you have an extraordinary map, with LOTS of fertile land, you won't be able to produce much grain, vegetables or cotton, because they all need fertile land to grow things on. Apparently, chooks don't mind if they are on fertile land or not!

[archonsod]

The thread was pre-econ v2. Under the original economy if you had too much of a surplus of a good it's price crashed, which could hit your economy like a tidal wave.
It's a bit less brutal with v2. There's still some good reasons to be careful though -

1. Bigger industries require more employees. It's important because the efficiency of the business depends on those employees. A quarry that needs 100 employees but can only find 50 will suffer a penalty to efficiency, which reduces output (and bear in mind the rent value will be higher due to more tiles covered). If on the other hand you had a half sized quarry which maxed out at 50 employees they'd be getting efficiency bonuses, which makes cheaper rocks.
2. New industry will consider the availability of resources when it sets up. If you produce a large surplus of wood your new industrial zones will skew towards the lumber industries. This can be good later in the game, particularly when you have export routes set up. The problem for smaller cities is that the skew can affect the availability, and therefore price, of other goods by forcing other industries and particularly stores to import, which increases costs for Cims. Ideally, particularly early on, you want to encourage diversified industry to keep goods costs low so Cims can build up their wealth - and houses.

Thing to note is you can always modify the specialised industry's work area, so particularly early on it can be better to restrict the size to maintain a small surplus and come back and enlarge it once more of that particular resource is needed; if nothing else it at least prevents the industry from draining your labour pool.

[MessengerOfRage]

when devmode was published I had a look into forestry, mind you tihs was a long time ago.

devmode has a feature where you can activate more info on buildings, I could see my forestries storage and vehicle usage.

they had a surprisingly low ammount of trucks, maybe 5.
and it's a fixed ammount no matter the size, every forestry has the same ammount of trucks!

a max size forestry was producing faster than the trucks could export/deliver. while being right next to maps edge. (small town at that point, most of it went into export)
I had to cut that forestry into 2 halves for it to run smoothly.

I think it is better balanced by now, but in the times of anarchy mod it's worthwhile to note that anarchy-oversized specialized industry areas probably will be hampered by a limited number of trucks per spec ind building.

[Oddible]

Is there a cost to Specialized Industry? Like... if I have the same plot space but I have 2 of the same industry on it, will it be more expensive or more profitable than the same plot space with 1 industry on it. Do two farms on the same plot result in less or more revenue than one farm on the same plot?